Fortnite returns to revolutionize -again- the world of video games. The so-called battle royale are no longer what they used to be, they have lost popularity. Many users, after years of playing the same game, have grown tired of the routine: around 100 players fall on an island and must fight until only one is left standing. Until a few months ago, Fortnite had been the main exponent of this genre along with other great games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Apex Legends. But battle royale are no longer in fashion, or at least not as much as they were three years ago. Now what is triumphing are platforms like Roblox, videogames with which to create videogames: virtual sandboxes in which users can create their own experiences and share them with others. This is what Fortnite wants to do with the release of Creative 2.0.
On December 6, 2018, Epic Games released Fortnite’s Creative Mode. This allowed players to create their own in-game experiences and share them with other people. The focus of the experience was still the main mode, the Battle Royale, but Epic Games was already opening the door to other options following in the footsteps of Roblox. This past week, the company has launched Fortnite Creative 2.0, an application that promises to revolutionize this sector. This new mode works from the Unreal Editor and is a simplified and more amateurish version of the professional editor of Unreal Engine 5, one of the most important graphics engines at the moment.
Using the Unreal Editor, users can create their own experiences within Fortnite with a level of control and detail never seen before. It is possible to design your own maps, game modes based on Fortnite and even completely different games. Epic Games makes professional development tools available to the public combined with a friendly and gamified interface that simplifies processes and makes them more accessible.
Thanks to this new application, Fortnite goes from being a video game to being a base on which to create any type of experience. As the months go by, Battle Royale will take a backseat and, probably, islands and game modes created by users will prevail, as has already happened in Roblox. It is the definitive consolidation of Fortnite as a service in which players are now users, in general, of a platform that goes far beyond being a video game. A few months ago, in fact, we would have talked directly about how Creative 2.0 is the ultimate conversion of Fortnite into a metaverse (or a creator of).
At the end of 2022, in La Vanguardia we published an article on the decline of Fortnite, which has been steadily losing players for several months. In 2021, approximately 290 million users were playing Epic Games’ Battle Royale monthly, a figure that is currently around 70 million and pales in comparison to the more than 200 million Roblox has. So Epic Games is clear: Fortnite must become the new Roblox.
The CEO of the company, Tim Sweeney, states in an interview with The Verge that “we want to grow by welcoming creators, bringing new genres to the game and new ways to participate that go beyond the Battle Royale experience” and adds that “a lot of people come to Fortnite concerts because they love the musicians, but then they leave because they’re not shooter players.”
Epic Games wants Fortnite to stop being a shooter and a battle royale. The launch of Creative 2.0 is the first step towards the consolidation of Fortnite as a platform for the creation and consumption of all kinds of experiences, mainly designed by users.
Designing takes a lot of time and effort, so Epic Games needs to reward those users who create good experiences for the community in some way. For this reason, the company has presented the Economy of the creators 2.0, a new system of payment and monetization of content in Fortnite.
Epic Games will allocate 40% of the revenue generated by the Fortnite store to pay the creators of the best experiences. Users who want to start using Creative 2.0 in a more professional way can register as official creators and will start getting paid based on the success and popularity of their experiences. The size of the payouts will depend on how many players enter your creation and also on their retention. To access this program you must have a Fortnite account that is older than 90 days and you must be of legal age.
This payment system is also inspired by Roblox, although it aims to solve various problems and mistakes made by the Roblox Corporation. Unlike Fortnite, in Roblox it is extremely difficult to end up converting virtual money into real money and there is a complex network of conditions and impediments designed so that the money always remains circulating on the platform. This is added to the fact that most of the players and creators are minors and that the company itself officially sells the idea that you can get rich creating on Roblox. This has led to serious allegations of exploitation against the company.
In principle, in Fortnite monetization should be more direct. Registered creators will receive monthly payments directly from the 40% that Epic Games will allocate to the Creator Economy 2.0. The remuneration will depend on the popularity of the experiences and there should be no further impediments or complications. This is how it should be, although, for a few months, it will not be known if it works well or not.
The main problem in the monetization of the content could depend on the volume of creations. On Roblox, for example, there are over 20 million experiences, but users are only shown the 2,000 most popular ones. Depending on the criteria that Fortnite follows, it could privilege certain creators and discriminate against others, but it is still too early to tell.
Once you get to the top, stagnation inevitably leads to failure. Fortnite became the most popular video game in the world and in history, but everything ends up tiring. The golden age of Battle Royale is ending and it seems that the next step is to stop being just a video game and become a platform. The model is clear and it is the same one that has been maintained for years by another sector of the Internet such as social networks: the economy of creators.
YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitch are powered by the content that users constantly create and consume. This is the path that Roblox has followed and the one that Fortnite wants to start following. And, probably, far from Second Life and VRChat, this is what the much-mentioned metaverse will look like.
