Creator-made islands accounted for 1/3 of ‘Fortnite’ game time in 2024–and earned their developers $352 million

Last year, Roblox revealed it paid out a whopping $741 million to creators who made games and cosmetic items on its platform in 2023. Now, Fortnite has decided to similarly highlight just how much dough it forks over to creators–and how much game time their content gets from its user base of over 400 million registered players.

According to Epic Games‘ first-ever Fortnite Ecosystem Year in Review, it paid out $352 million to creators in 2024. Those creators–around 70,000 of them, tripled from the 24,000 Epic says it paid in 2023–made a total of 198,000 “islands” within the game that often contain fully customized settings, minigames, plotlines, and more.

Take Lumberjack Heroes, for example, which is an RPG where players (as you may have guessed) roam a map chopping wood to level up their axe-wielding characters, unlock new areas, and hatch pets. It’s an “island,” and its creators built it on the Unreal Editor for Fortnite game engine. Though it’s a third-party game built entirely by outside developers, players still have to be logged in to Fortnite to play it–and it earned a portion of that $352 million.

And, speaking of players being logged in, they’re spending a lot of logged-in time playing creators’ games. Epic said that in 2024, players spent 5.23 billion hours playing third-party games—”a number that represents 36.5% of total Fortnite playtime and continues to rise.”

On average, it added, 60,000 creator-made islands were played each day, and 70% of all Fortnite players played both creator- and Epic-made games throughout the year. They also played an increasing variety of games, with more than 30% of time spent on creator-made islands with genres that don’t strictly involved typical Fortnite-esque combat, like RPGs, party games, and horror sims.

“While engagement varies monthly due to seasonality, the average number of players engaging with creator islands on a daily, monthly, and annual basis has increased across the board this year, with average daily players up 15% in 2024,” Epic said.

All this playtime is paying off big for some creators. In 2024, 37 creators earned over $1 million by developing custom islands. 14 of those creators earned over $3 million, and 7 earned over $10 million.

But while that’s only a very small portion of Fortnite‘s creator population, there is a somewhat broader segment making good salary money, too. A total of 1,728 creators made at least $10K in 2024, with 418 crossing the $100K threshold and 154 making at least $300K.

For comparison, Roblox‘s breakdown for 2023 had it paying out at least $10K to 3,500 developers; $100K to 750 developers; over $1 million to 100; and over $10 million to 9 creators. We also know that in 2022, Roblox‘s top 10 creators earned an average of $23 million apiece and “nearly every creator in our top 500 earned at least $140,000,” it said.

We’re not sure yet if Fortnite can catch up to Roblox, which is its closest competitor in making game development accessible and (relatively) easy for creators. However, it certainly plans to make an effort: Epic said that in 2025, it will move set dressing suite Scene Graph into beta, introduce the ability to create custom items, and launch “additional tools to help you build deeper, more complex games with [Unreal Editor for Fortnite] in new and popular genres.”