Two weeks ago, Epic Games announced at the GDC 2024 developer conference that it had paid $320 million over the year to users who created their islands in Fortnite. Naavik analyst and senior business manager of the Xbox publishing division, David Taylor, looked at how this amount was distributed among developers.
To begin with, Epic Games released a beta version of the Unreal Editor public editor for Fortnite (UEFN) in March 2023. Fortnite users could create islands in the game even before the launch of UEFN using creative mode, but their capabilities were more modest. At the same time, the company promised that it would share 40% of the revenue from sales in the Fortnite store with those developers who make islands through UEFN. The amount of payments will depend on the popularity of their islands and the level of audience retention.
- According to Taylor, a total of 23.5 thousand developers created their islands in Fortnite.
- 40% of the $320 million in payments went to just nine developers. It is noteworthy that these users created popular islands in Fortnite even before the launch of UEFN.
- 71% of the payments went to the top 100 developers. If you look at it on a larger scale, 99.7% of the payments came from the top 4,000 developers.
- 40 developers have earned more than a million dollars in a year. Of these, six received more than $ 10 million, and Epic Games transferred more than $ 20 million to one developer.
Top 50 island developers in Fortnite in terms of payouts over the past year
- 4% of the island creators in Fortnite can earn more than 20 thousand dollars annually. For comparison, Roblox has only 0.1% of such developers. On Steam — 15%.
How are payments to content creators distributed in Fortnite and Roblox