Epic Games‘ payouts to creators haven’t been quite as plentiful as Roblox‘s, but the Fortnite publisher is nevertheless making millionaires out of map developers. At the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Epic revealed that its community of creators has earned a collective $320 million over the past 12 months.
Those payouts have come through Unreal Editor for Fortnite, a monetization program for developers that launched last March. For context, the $320 million figure is about 40% as big as the $741 million Roblox paid to creators during the 2023 calendar year.
The Fortnite and Roblox developer communities are similar in the sense that the most popular games take in the lion’s share of earnings. On the roster of Unreal Editor partners, there are 40 creators who earned at least $1 million over 12 months. Pandvil (pictured above), who has built numerous minigames within Fortnite, topped the ranking with a take of $20 million.
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Another familiar name in the top 40 is TypicalGamer. The streamer and high-stakes Fortnite player, whose real name is Andre Rebelo, ranked 15th on Epic Games’ list with earnings of more than $3 million.
At GDC this week Epic announced they paid $320 million out in creator earnings over the past 12-months. Here is how those earnings were distributed across the @FortniteGame developer base: pic.twitter.com/Lmmb6MaiSN
— David Taylor (@DavidinGaming) March 24, 2024
At GDC, Fortnite Ecosystem EVP Saxs Persson indicated that Epic Games’ attempt to monetize its custom creations — or “islands,” as they’re known in Fortnite parlance — is going according to plan. “In many ways, this was the thesis,” Persson told GamesIndustry.biz. “If we give great tools to creators and make the economy really simple – make a game, players play the game, creators get paid – we can really inject a whole lot of energy into the system, which is really what we’re seeing with those 80,000 islands.”
Epic Games has made the Fortnite ecosystem more appealing by providing creators with favorable payout rates and flexible tools. The path to creator monetization hasn’t always been straightforward — Epic Games laid off about 830 employees last September — but the first-year results speak for themselves.
