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Fortnite Ecosystem 2024 Year in Review: Celebrating Creators and Looking Ahead
The Fortnite Team
What a year it has been for Fortnite Creative and Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) creators! Let's take a moment to look back at what you accomplished in 2024 and share a preview of the new features coming to UEFN and Creative in 2025 that will take creative possibilities to the next level.
The creator community continues to grow at a great pace, with the number of creators nearly tripling from 24,000 in 2023 to 70,000 creators in 2024. The number of islands published also doubled to a total of 198,000 in 2024, including 137,000 islands created in UEFN. On average, nearly 60,000 creator-made islands were played each day in Fortnite, and more than 70% of all Fortnite players continue to play both Epic and creator-made games in 2024. 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.
It’s been inspiring to see more creators succeeding in the Fortnite ecosystem. A total of $352M was paid to creators in 2024, up 11% when measuring March-December time periods of 2023 to 2024.
In 2024, players spent 5.23 billion hours playing games made by creators—a number that represents 36.5% of total Fortnite playtime and continues to rise. This marks a 5% increase from the 4.98 billion hours in 2023. These numbers are buoyed by meaningful growth in game genres that don’t feature combat, like social roleplay, party games, deathruns, and horror. So far in January 2025, this type of variety content has made up more than 30% of time spent in creator-made experiences, an increase of nearly 50% from the same time period last year.
In the Creator Portal, we rolled out new ways to understand your audience, with improvements to analytics and metrics about your payouts, your player base and the introduction of island satisfaction data. We also launched Creator Profiles to help players find all of your islands in one place, and Favorite a Creator to help you build audiences inside Fortnite.
Beloved IPs came to UEFN and Fortnite Creative in 2024, enabling you to create innovative games and experiences with official The LEGO Group, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Fall Guys assets and gameplay devices. This initiative enables you to develop authentic commercial games using world class IP without getting lost in contracts or negotiations, and is enabled with a single agreement.
This year, we saw an array of islands that pushed the boundaries of what’s possible with UEFN. Highlights include:
We know we have more improvements to make to UEFN and the creator experience. We’re committed to increasing stability, improving interaction times during development, giving creators insights and tools to sustain and grow a player base after launch, and making Discover the best representation of the wide variety of games available for players.
Later this month we’ll update the public Fortnite creator roadmap to let you know what other features and updates you can expect throughout the year. We’re excited to discuss the roadmap in detail, along with deeper conversations in all of these areas, at Unreal Fest in Orlando, happening June 2-5.
We’re amazed by the creative and unexpected ways you use these tools to craft experiences that players love, and can’t wait to see what you’ll achieve in the year ahead!
By the Numbers: Creator Success and Growth
The creator community continues to grow at a great pace, with the number of creators nearly tripling from 24,000 in 2023 to 70,000 creators in 2024. The number of islands published also doubled to a total of 198,000 in 2024, including 137,000 islands created in UEFN. On average, nearly 60,000 creator-made islands were played each day in Fortnite, and more than 70% of all Fortnite players continue to play both Epic and creator-made games in 2024. 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.
It’s been inspiring to see more creators succeeding in the Fortnite ecosystem. A total of $352M was paid to creators in 2024, up 11% when measuring March-December time periods of 2023 to 2024.
This graph illustrates the number of creators by their annual payout threshold for 2024.
In 2024, players spent 5.23 billion hours playing games made by creators—a number that represents 36.5% of total Fortnite playtime and continues to rise. This marks a 5% increase from the 4.98 billion hours in 2023. These numbers are buoyed by meaningful growth in game genres that don’t feature combat, like social roleplay, party games, deathruns, and horror. So far in January 2025, this type of variety content has made up more than 30% of time spent in creator-made experiences, an increase of nearly 50% from the same time period last year.
New Features and Devices
In 2024, we improved the capabilities of what you can build with UEFN with the launches of the First Person Camera device, new UI tools and HUD controls, Input Triggers, Proximity chat, Persistence, Custom NPCs, and many more impactful features.In the Creator Portal, we rolled out new ways to understand your audience, with improvements to analytics and metrics about your payouts, your player base and the introduction of island satisfaction data. We also launched Creator Profiles to help players find all of your islands in one place, and Favorite a Creator to help you build audiences inside Fortnite.
Beloved IPs came to UEFN and Fortnite Creative in 2024, enabling you to create innovative games and experiences with official The LEGO Group, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Fall Guys assets and gameplay devices. This initiative enables you to develop authentic commercial games using world class IP without getting lost in contracts or negotiations, and is enabled with a single agreement.
This year, we saw an array of islands that pushed the boundaries of what’s possible with UEFN. Highlights include:
- [ARPG] Fort Knight Legend by Love-is-Real, pushed the boundaries of Verse UI, Verse Persistence, and RPG elements to deliver a large and thrilling experience. https://t.co/N4NivOnxg3
- Havoc Hotel 2 [Roguelike] by TeraCreators, set the standard for roguelike PVE in Fortnite, blending Custom UI, RPG elements, and retention mechanics to engage players beyond roleplay and tycoon genres.
- Lumberjack Heroes by ItsJacky, showcased the power of UEFN with its custom UI and engaging gameloop. The island’s depth of play inspired other creators to push the limits of Tycoon-style content.
- Pizza Shop Tycoon Boss Fight Update! by TomJank, used TMNT templates, prefab, and devices to create an authentic and engaging Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles experience.
- The Kraken: Bossfight by Gauntlet, is a polished role-playing game (RPG) that took the community by storm. With engaging quests, exploration, dungeons, and an advanced boss fight, it sets a new standard for immersive gameplay.
Looking Ahead
As we look ahead to 2025, we’re excited to unlock even more possibilities for creators. Including moving Scene Graph into Beta, introducing custom items, and launching additional tools to help you build deeper, more complex games with UEFN in new and popular genres.We know we have more improvements to make to UEFN and the creator experience. We’re committed to increasing stability, improving interaction times during development, giving creators insights and tools to sustain and grow a player base after launch, and making Discover the best representation of the wide variety of games available for players.
Later this month we’ll update the public Fortnite creator roadmap to let you know what other features and updates you can expect throughout the year. We’re excited to discuss the roadmap in detail, along with deeper conversations in all of these areas, at Unreal Fest in Orlando, happening June 2-5.
We’re amazed by the creative and unexpected ways you use these tools to craft experiences that players love, and can’t wait to see what you’ll achieve in the year ahead!