At this past week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Epic Games took to the stage to present their “State of Unreal” keynote, revealing not only new capabilities of their Unreal Engine 5, but also more insight into their long-term vision of content creation, distribution, and monetization for creators. The biggest reveal of the day was “Unreal Editor for Fortnite” or UEFN for short. UEFN is a version of Unreal Editor tailored to Fortnite that will allow creators to create and publish hand-made experiences directly in Fortnite to its giant playerbase of more than 500 million players, a true game changer for creators and aspiring game designers.
Alongside UEFN, Epic is also launching “Creator Economy 2.0”, a new way for Fortnite island creators to receive a cut of money based on the engagement their published content pulls in. Around 40% of the net revenue from Fortnite’s Item Shop will be distributed as engagement payouts to creators.
But wait…there’s more! Epic Games also announced the creation of a unified marketplace “Fab” that is set to launch later this year and bring Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab, Quixel Bridge, and the ArtStation Marketplace all under one roof. Fab will offer creators an 88% revenue share on their creations which will vary from 3D models and materials to sound and VFX to MetaHumans and beyond.
Unreal Engine is already one of the most popularly used engines in the videogame industry and Fortnite is already one of the most popular games worldwide, yet Epic has found another way to further entice creators over to their platform and I daresay it’s a very attractive one at that.
Image from: Epic Games
