In-game purchases are helping Fortnite creators shift focus from virality to retention

Fortnite creators are embracing in-game purchases as a way to draw more consistent revenue from their experiences on the platform.

Epic Games launched in-game purchases for Unreal Editor for Fortnite creators on January 9. Five months into the launch, creators are going all-in on the new feature, viewing it as a way to generate meaningful revenue from smaller experiences that wouldn’t have been profitable under Fortnite’s pre-existing engagement payout system.

“It will dramatically increase the life of maps, especially for smaller creators, because you can make money with a small, committed audience for longer, and you can keep supporting the map,” said Fortnite creator Austin “Tom Jank” Rodriguez in an interview with GamesBeat. “Before in-app purchases, if I had a map that did okay and only had 100 players a day, there’s no way I could keep that going — I’d just have to make a new map and hope that map does better. With purchases, it keeps maps alive for longer, even if it’s not making super crazy numbers.”

Under Fortnite’s engagement payout system, creators felt pressured to chase viral trends to keep their concurrent player counts (CCUs) high and ensure consistent revenue. Implementing in-game purchases has allowed Fortnite creators to extract more V-bucks out of the core players who keep coming back to their experiences day after day, even after the hype cycle has moved on.

“It’s allowed the floor to be a lot higher,” said Fortnite creator Snownymous, a developer working with the Fortnite creator studio Minigame Maps, in an interview with GamesBeat. “If you don’t have a large player base — let’s say you have 100 CCUs or whatever — that allows you to fully sustain yourself as a creator. With in-game transactions, you could definitely make this your full-time job.”

Four percent of players inside Minigame Maps’ Fortnite experience Minigame Box PvP make an in-game purchase daily, according to Snownymous. Inside JOGO Studios’ Fortnite island Knockout, five percent of players have made a purchase, according to JOGO lead game designer Jeremy Pedron in an interview with GamesBeat earlier this year. JOGO releases new weapons on a weekly basis to encourage players to spend inside the experience, although the studio ensures that there is always a way for players to unlock the new weapon for free as well.

“In Super Red Vs Blue, we already had fun secret weapons that you could get before, and we didn’t want to make it pay-to-win or anything like that,” said JOGO Studios co-founder Andre “Typcal Gamer” Rebelo in an interview with GamesBeat. “So, the way we landed was that we released them, and we have a way to get them for free — but if you don’t want to do that, you can buy them.”

Although Fortnite creator studios are intentionally adjusting their experiences to encourage purchasing behavior among their core players, all five of the creators who spoke to GamesBeat for this article said that they are taking deliberate steps not to give any players an unfair advantage for spending money in-game, viewing pay-to-win mechanics as a harbinger of doom for good gameplay.

“We’re releasing our next original IP later this year and are thinking about monetization as an important part of that to fund further development, but we won’t build certain types of games just because they may be easier to monetize or allow for more aggressive monetization,” said Beyond Creative chief executive officer Kasper Weber in an interview with GamesBeat.

Earlier this year, Epic’s senior director of ecosystem growth Andre Balta, whose role was focused on Fortnite’s creator ecosystem, shifted his focus to a role as senior director of game development for Fortnite. This left Fortnite without a dedicated executive focused on its creator economy, causing some concern among creators that Epic was deprioritizing the growth of Fortnite’s creator ecosystem. The platform’s successful rollout of in-game purchases — and its immediate positive effect on creators’ revenue — has assuaged some of these concerns.

Epic Games is still navigating some growing pains as the company builds out Fortnite’s in-game item and purchase functionality. On May 1, Epic moved custom items — another product Fortnite creators have requested for years — from experimentation to beta testing as a full feature. However, Fortnite creators have not yet embraced custom items the way they have embraced in-game purchases thus far.

Three creators told GamesBeat that custom items are not particularly useful for the ways they currently implement in-game purchases in their experiences, pointing to limitations around their ability to create custom weapons and similarly impactful in-game items. Fortnite creators are excited about the future of custom items on the platform — but for now, many of them are holding off from using the feature until they believe it is fully baked.

“‘Custom Items and Inventories’ is Beta and is not feature complete. The version available today sets the foundation for creating custom items in Fortnite, and managing inventory in Scene Graph,” said Epic Games senior communications manager Brian Sharon in a statement emailed to GamesBeat. “We’re committed to adding features, including the ability to create a more diverse range of custom items and additional Fortnite templates in Q2.”

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