Epic will soon allow Fortnite developers to sell in-game items from their Fortnite islands, allowing creators to make more money.
This will begin in December 2025, and for the first year developers will earn 100 percent of the V-Bucks value from sales – usually this is at 50 percent.
The news comes as Fortnite’s Creative Mode of fan-made content is proving exceptionally popular – recently, the Fortnite version of Roblox meme game Steal A Brainrot had more concurrent players than Epic’s official maps.
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Fortnite’s Creative Mode first launched back in 2018, and allows players to create their own maps and modes. Epic then offers a payout based on engagement – last year it paid out $325m to creators, with seven receiving over $10m.
Since Creative Mode’s release, Epic has revealed, players have spent over 11.2bn hours across 260,000 creator-made islands, resulting in $722,000,000 paid to creators.
The amount of money creators will make in Fortnite is only going to increase when they’re able to sell in-game items directly from their islands, in addition to receiving an engagement payout from Fortnite’s item shop sales.
Epic has a formula for calculating the V-Bucks value in US dollars each month, which takes all real-money spending towards V-Bucks (in dollars), subtracting platform and store fees, and dividing by total V-Bucks spent. With creators usually earning 50 percent of V-Bucks value from sales, this equates to 37 percent of retail spending. Roblox offers 25 percent, by way of comparison.
In addition, Epic will add a Sponsored Row to Fortnite’s Discover, meaning creators can pay for increased visibility by bidding for placement in the row. That’s a further investment in generating more in-game sales.
Epic has also announced Fortnite Creator Communities, to allow creators to share updates directly with players on the web and within Fortnite. Creator posts will be text and image-based and allow for sharing information and gathering feedback – much like on Steam.
Image credit: Epic
But despite the huge success of creator islands, is this really what Fortnite players want?
Take Steal A Brainrot. It’s proven to be a phenomenal success – as Dexerto reported, it had 24 million players in a single day across both Roblox and Fortnite versions. While the Roblox version peaked at 23.4 million players in a day, Fortnite’s version contributed 542,000. That vastly outweighs Fortnite’s primary Battle Royale modes that generate around 100,000 players during peak weekend play.
“They are promoting AI slop, copy and paste creative maps more than their own BR season,” wrote one player on reddit. “This is going to prove to be extremely unhealthy for the game in general I believe, and with the already low player counts this season Epic needs to do something to steer back to the basics, this metaverse stuff has RUINED Fortnite. This game has become a corporate shell of what it once was and I believe the remainder of this year will very much so make or break Fortnite as a whole.”
“Stuff like this cluttering the overview makes me disinterested in random creative maps. Those who put genuine effort into their maps often get hardly any attention,” wrote a user on a separate reddit post. Others point to the casual nature of user-made maps, as well as the high XP offered, as reasons for players to flock over.
Still, this new update for Fortnite creators is further shifting the game away from its Battle Royale roots into a Roblox-rivalling metaverse.
