How is Fortnite's Attempt to Become the YouTube of Gaming Going?

What are creator made islands competing for players' attention if nothing but decentralized channels in a centralized ecosystem?

Playgrounds aren’t often associated with labor, but that doesn’t negate the reality that the leisure of some comes from the labor of others. Here’s one scenario: maybe a couple of kids design a new game. They draw out rules and act as referees during each match. They tweak the boundaries of the game as they learn from what people like and don’t like. At best, they’re credited with its creation and go down as schoolyard legends. At worst, the game fizzles out within the same 20-minute recess and no one listens to them again. Reset. 

Digital playgrounds altered the relationship between labor and leisure in games. Not only was there a bread crumb trail leading new players of stumbled upon games to the creator, and not only was there an opportunity for that creator to build a following using different platforms to connect them to a worldwide player base, but there was also an entire modding community being built. Creators were making new games inside already established worlds like Grand Theft Auto. Players loved them — they sought out as many as they could.

An experience like Fishing Mod, for example, lets players inside Grand Theft Auto V do exactly as the name suggests: kick back and fish. A game like Grand Theft Auto is hardly restrictive in its own capacity, but mods allow creators to enhance an already elaborate world by giving players something else to do outside of the expected norm. Although mods remain contentious for many game developers and publishers, no one is denying the ultimate benefit: time spent on platform increases. 

Those five words guide the goals of every major app and game. Quantifying your attention, and what a company needs to do to have it for longer, is everything to a game publisher like Rockstar as well as a souped up slideshow service like Instagram. If individual creators are enticing more players to stay within a game longer, or prevent them from drifting to another game, then that free labor (sometimes offset by donations and subscriptions from other players) jumps from a small community pastime to a major reflection on a company’s bottom line. Everything changes from dissuading those creators to stop building on copyrighted material to opening up the very foundation of the game to encourage all kinds of digital construction. 

Traditional entertainment is fundamentally different. The equivalent of “mods” are fan edits or fan takes on protected work and, while they are available, those videos are not within the actual content. YouTube plays host to most of these videos. Vimeo, TikTok, and Instagram host the rest. Time spent with the IP therefore grows, but actual time spent with a controlled app does not.

Before the DTC revolution, separatist strategies worked because there is a finite amount of time that audiences will spend with the actual product and a finite amount of time they might spend with fan projects. Put another way, someone was only going to watch The Lord of the Rings so many times in a day. If they wanted to spend more time with ancillary  Lord of the Rings content, it didn’t hurt Warner Bros. bottom line. That was before “time spent on platform,” however, became a metric for traditional entertainment companies, too. 

Fortnite is the perfect example of where these worlds meld. And Epic’s creators program is a perfect example of where the games industry may be going. Epic Games announced last week that the number of creators working within Epic’s Unreal Engine for Fortnite program nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, jumping from 24,000 contributors to more than 70,000. This resulted in nearly 200,000 in-game islands for players to experience, with an approximate 60,000 creator-made islands being played each day, according to the company. Clearly more creators are looking to construct within the world they spend the vast amount of time in, and players are willing to experiment. 

It’s the monetization part of the equation that is particularly interesting, though. More than $350 million was paid to creators in 2024, up 11% compared to the same period measured in 2023. More than 37 creators made more than $1 million; 14 creators made north of $3 million, and seven creators or developer collectives collected more than $10 million in revenue from the program. As Epic noted, “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.”

Naturally, these numbers are designed to make Epic Games and Fortnite look good. They are designed to entice more creators to help develop more experiences to keep more attention inside the game. Epic didn’t acknowledge that players have reported problems with these games, including glitches and bugs, and power laws dictate that a small number of creators are going to see the vast majority of success. 

Building within and building for are two different acts. Building within Fortnite is an opportunity to showcase creative prowess to an incredibly large player base. There are reportedly more than 30 million daily Fortnite players. Building for Fortnite, however, is recognizing that the ultimate benefit is to Epic games, to a centralized environment for a company focused on keeping players on its servers. That doesn’t make Epic Games bad, nor does it make building within or for Fortnite a problem. It merely makes Fortnite look more like YouTube. 

The real question then is whether Fortnite can capture the magic of what makes YouTube work without falling into the company’s same traps. 

Fortnite’s YouTube Makeup 

What makes YouTube as powerful as it is boils down to a couple of unquestioned dominances: 

1. A creator contribution cycle that…

2. Prevents substantial competition from forming…

3. In a hyper specific format of product…

4. Growing in popularity globally…

5. While seeing value in new technologies and incorporating them before competitors…

6. To capture more time spent than other mediums 

YouTube’s rise to its mega monopolist status was built on the philosophy of attention merchant 101. If a product is free, then you’re the product. We call this advertising. And if the goal is to increase the number of products to serve advertisers, then you need an unprecedented amount of content. The only way to get that quantity — keeping in mind that actual quality turned out to be less of a concern than anticipated by traditional content magnates — was to incentivize a group of creatives and wannabe celebrities by eliminating the barriers of entry to finding an audience and a promise of payment upon finding said viewers. 

Ignore Hollywood, YouTube executives all but declared early on. Why should anyone in the age of the internet erect red tape around publishing? YouTube didn’t become an overnight threat to traditional, centralized entertainment players in the sense that we think of YouTube today. Sure, copyright concerns and piracy issues led to lawsuit battles pretty much right off the bat, but traditional entertainment couldn’t see the rise of the creator ecosystem rising out of those same copyright restrictions it placed on YouTube early on.

Understandable. Few saw the filmmaking potential of the iPhone, the mobile revolution spurred by Instagram, or the addiction to attention spurred from the depths of social media. Neither did YouTube, really. Google saw the potential for YouTube, as seen by the $1.65 billion acquisition that has so far paid off by 242x the original investment. But no one really predicted that 15 years after being bought people would choose to spend all their leisure time on one or two platforms. YouTube became the structure; its creators the destinations. 

Perhaps ironically traditional entertainment should have seen this coming. Cable was the structure that housed islands in the form of networks people could choose to purchase and access. The main difference, however, was affordability and availability of those networks to an audience growing up with a new determined level of value in their entertainment. For teenagers in the early 2010s, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg or Grace Helbig were just as entertaining, if not more entertaining, than a hit TV show. They were more relatable. And because they felt like a radical new entrant into an established system, they were unapologetically cooler than anything those same teens’ parents were watching.

Gone was the era of families sitting down to watch Leave it to Beaver or Three’s Company together. Gone was the era of every single person watching Friends and talking about it the next day. It was the era of hyper personalized content for hyper online audiences who used creators instead of brands to connect with people on forums like Reddit or through social platforms like Twitter and Instagram. 

Executives at YouTube started to recognize that virtually nothing could stand in-between its continued growth — as defined by time spent on platform and coalescing advertising revenue — other than itself. There were two main tasks to master: directing users toward the islands, and ensuring the islands could stay afloat. The former resulted in one of the most powerful recommendation algorithms in use today; the latter was a simple exchange of cash for labor. Although those two ideas seem downright pedantic in 2025, they were revolutionary in 2010, a period where few were paying digital influencers to create for the internet, and forming partnerships to bring as many islands that existed outside of YouTube into its ecosystem.

We stopped browsing the internet as a result, and started directing every query, firing off any desire, into YouTube directly. 

The Fortnite of it all

Fortnite is trying to do the exact same thing with its creator program. Theoretically, the game is sitting at the perfect technological, sociological, and economic point in time to define the next system. Similar to YouTube, Fortnite now has a creator contribution network, continues to grow in popularity globally, and captures more attention than time spent on many other platforms and other mediums. 

But unlike YouTube, Fortnite has strong competition. Its Unreal Creator program came to fruition to take on Roblox’s creator system. As the inimitable Matthew Ball pointed out in a recently published report on the state of the gaming industry, tens of millions of children are more likely to spend money on and time in Roblox games made by creators for the platform than a console title. That system looks a little bit like the graph (from Roblox) below. Whereas YouTube had limited competition and the audience size to build, Fortnite has strong competition in games like Roblox and Minecraft. 

YouTube wasn’t the first major video sharing site. Share Your World launched in 1997, the Digital Entertainment Network followed in 1998, and Daily Motion launched less than a month before YouTube. Not to mention other, more “targeted” video platforms like Newgrounds were up and running. As online video continued to grow, other websites cornered smaller markets; Amazon’s Twitch became the go-to place for livestreaming while Vimeo found its home amongst more traditional filmmakers, but when it came to pure video on demand content, YouTube wasn’t simply the best option. It was the only option. 

What was it about YouTube that gave it the ability to succeed where others failed? A few billion dollars and leverage from Google is a significant part of that success story, of course. YouTube’s simplified uploading process was another crucial differentiator. But what really made YouTube take off was its ability to take risks where others — like Vimeo or CollegeHumor — couldn’t.

Silly to think of this as radical today when it’s quite literally NBCUniversal’s strategy, but Saturday Night Live clips appearing on YouTube next day were a liability, and one that only a company like YouTube with its insane growth and backing from Google could risk taking on. More eyeballs converted to more power. By the time that YouTube introduced ContentID after years of fighting with the NBCUniversals of the world, there was an active, young, and ambitious creator base willing to step in to entertain an audience who had built YouTube into their daily habit, but were about to lose access to SNL or other protected works they were used to finding on YouTube. 

One of the clearest ways that YouTube ultimately became the only option for a booming creator industry was boasting the largest audience in order to produce the best advertising rates that incentivized the most popular creators and the most ambitious influencers to build on YouTube. Knowing that YouTube needed to find new ways to appeal to modern audiences, the company bet a significant portion of its own revenue — splitting advertising dollars with creators at a 55/45 split that is still unparalleled today — to build.

This created a tree effect. Each creator brought with them a hundred or a hundred thousand or a million viewers. Those viewers became the true product for YouTube, and the investment in one creator to maintain those million eyeballs paid off handsomely. Multiple that strategy across tens of millions of creators and divide the amount of time people have in the day to watch things — voila. Monopoly. 

Ironically, with monopolistic power, the very players that forced YouTube to become what it did, those traditional studios who rightfully fought for protection of their own IP, came back to YouTube as partners. 

Epic Games and Fortnite teams are almost playing in reverse. They have relationships with major IP holders. They have the eyeballs for ambitious game developers and new age creators. Despite those qualities being what eventually helped YouTube, it was the lack of those credits that spurred the creator revolution that exists as the heart of YouTube today. Does that imply Fortnite needs to create a wild west for its developers? No, but Fortnite has entered an age of maturity as an IP — something that feels crazy to say considering how young its success is — so the Fortnite teams do need to create a space for creators to build their own unique islands, or empires, that aren’t tied to the mechanics of Fortnite itself. 

The Cold Start Problem 

Compare Fortnite’s attempts to build a playground for creators to others. Roblox paid out nearly $800 million to creators in 2024 – or more than double what Epic Games did, according to Bloomberg. And as Bloomberg notes, since Epic Games still develops Fortnite content itself, there is a competition between time spent with creator-made games and the actual main game itself. I really like the way that Naavik, a video game analytics company, worded it in Bloomberg’s report: 

“Epic suffers from a ‘cold-start problem,’ in which it wants creators to build experiences for new players, but the creators won’t build experiences for audiences that don’t already exist on the platform.”

Ironically, this is what we saw happen with YouTube at its later stage. By the time that YouTube went from an amateur hobby and video hosting site to an actual monetization platform for creators, those new age entrepreneurs discovered how to work within and for YouTube’s algorithm. They learned to become search engine optimization experts. They learned how to spot trends to stay away from and ones to join. The noisier that YouTube got because of its increased size, the more groupthink you started to see in the way creators approached trends. For example, the MrBeast Effect. 

Fortnite has the same issue. Partners within the game developer program understand that Fortnite’s player base is coming for a specific experience and, instead of trying to build for an unseen desire that Fortnite players might have, creators are looking to capitalize on an attention they’re already given. But the fact that this is effectively just different versions of Fortnite drastically reduces the runway that creators have to find their audience niche or to build something truly different. Roblox thrives here because its player base doesn’t have a set format in mind — more similar to Minecraft than Fortnite. 

Escaping from a cold start problem is difficult. One answer lies in incentive. Developers are currently incentivized to find audiences through their islands and receive payouts from Epic Games based on the level of activity. Therefore, following trends and building for a current audience rather than in lieu of the current audience is the best strategy. If, however, there was an additional financial incentive for developers looking to build something completely different for a playerbase of tomorrow, new innovation may occur. Think of Substack trying to build its readership base by approaching hot newsletter writers with a $50,000 upfront payment to help soften the risk of making a giant leap into independent territory. 

Incentivizing developers only works as much as incentivizing players to try new experiences — and in the case of Fortnite, that may mean disincentivizing some of the core features within the game. This, too, is risky. Trying to convert time spent on platform, especially when it’s habitual, into other forms of non-guaranteed gaming can have an adverse effect on total time spent overall.

That said, finding ways to promote islands that aren’t just building PvP Fortnite emulators (for lack of a better term) within the core game or through collaborations with other developers’ islands may help to organically grow interest in new formats and gameplay styles that expands the audience or increases time spent on platform. Collaborations are, after all, the heart of YouTube’s creator base. 

The magical thing about YouTube was that it became a platform developed by individuals. Each creator acts as their own independent channel within a larger ecosystem, but YouTube isn’t the brand people love; YouTubers are what they care about. As it stands right now, Fortnite is the brand players love, and the islands are an additional offering but not what they really care about. I’d argue that right now is the quintessential time for a successful game like Fortnite to find ways to change Fortnite from the sole destination to the connector of ecosystems that players want to spend time in. Islands become their own channels housed within one mighty engine. 

One of the most astute points Ball makes in his analysis is that time spent with certain games continues to increase, but time spent with overall games has decreased steadily over the last few years. This is true for YouTube and passive entertainment, too. More and more time is spent with YouTube as, seemingly, more direct-to-consumer offerings appear.

When analysts talk about the creator revolution, it is not necessarily that 50 million new creators will take center stage in the next decade, but that as power laws continue to rule our media landscape, fewer platforms will generate significant time spent, and those planets that house individual creator networks that speak to niche interests as well as mainstream culture will reap the ultimate reward. Gaming falls into this bucket, too. 

For Epic Games and Fortnite, which is in a position to become the YouTube of gaming in this way, that means leaning into what Fortnite currently isn’t to become what Fortnite must be — a galaxy of interweaving planets, not the sun everything revolves around.