Fortnite Creative Finally Has A Genre People Want To Play

While Fortnite's bread and butter remains its battle royale modes, something surprising has been going on in the Fortnite charts recently. There have been three user-created tycoon games sitting in the Top 10 for weeks, including the recent Star Wars Droid Tycoon. It's an unprecedented situation for Epic Games' fledgling metaverse, and could be a sign of things to come. 

It's not all that unusual for user-made modes to draw decent numbers, as there have been a few maps that managed to consistently pull tens of thousands of players at a time. But in the past, nearly all of those modes were shooters--they weren't exactly carving out a new niche. These popular tycoon maps (Droid Tycoon, Steal the Brainrot, and Go Up for Brainrots), on the other hand, could represent a real breakthrough for Epic's attempts to replicate the success of Roblox. But the situation also highlights what may be the biggest obstacle on that quest: the 70 gigabyte base game install size makes it tough to beat Roblox at its own game. 

So what's a Fortnite tycoon anyway?

A tycoon, in Fortnite parlance, typically refers to a "make the number go up" mode in the vein of Cookie Clicker or Farmville, in which players obtain a machine or device that generates money, which they spend on more such devices to make more money, and they're doing it in a shared social space where they may or may not be competing for a high score. 

An example of Fortnite's brainrot creations.

Fortnite's three most popular tycoons are all derived at least somewhat from a Roblox mode called Steal A Brainrot--in fact, Fortnite's Steal the Brainrot is basically a straight-up port of that Roblox mode. In Steal the Brainrot, a conveyer belt carries a neverending parade of "Italian brainrot" meme characters, which cost various amounts of in-game currency to buy. The more expensive the brainrot, the more money it produces (for the most part). But each player can only have a certain number of brainrots at once, and competing players can steal each other's brainrots.

This mode was a genuine blockbuster, with its weekly events typically making it Fortnite's most popular mode for an hour every weekend. It looks like Epic is trying to take a page from its success where it can, since those massive spikes in player numbers were clearly the inspiration for the Power Hours that Epic has recently been running in Battle Royale each weekend.

Once Epic Games allowed creators to add V-Buck microtransactions to their modes, the developer behind Steal the Brainrot made a new Brainrot map, Go Up for Brainrots, that's far more aggressively monetized. The new map siphoned a significant number of players from Steal the Brainrot, but they were both still more popular than any other maps made in Fortnite Creative or Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). 

Until Star Wars Droid Tycoon came along, that is. Droid Tycoon is a more typical Fortnite tycoon mode that takes some significant cues from Steal the Brainrot, like the way it reinterprets the brainrot conveyer as Jawas selling droid blueprints out of their sandcrawler. Players build droids from those blueprints, and then put those droids to work in an ever expanding facility. And while folks can shoot each other in the town square, they can't steal each other's droids, so it's not really competitive like Steal the Brainrot is. And unlike the Brainrot maps, there's no V-Buck monetization in Droid Tycoon at all.

Droid Tycoon has regularly had better concurrent player numbers than either of the previously discussed Brainrot maps since it launched on May 1, though it's not really a blowout--all three maps are typically pulling between 15,000 and 35,000 players at a time, with massive weekly spikes. Those are better numbers than official Epic-produced Fortnite modes like Lego Fortnite Odyssey or Blitz Royale, so these tycoons could be here for the long haul. And there's certainly room for growth with this kind of thing, given that Roblox's Steal a Brainrot typically has hundreds of thousands of players at any given moment--that's more than the three Fortnite tycoon modes combined. But Fortnite has a major logistical problem that Roblox doesn't.

Key art for Fortnite's Star Wars Droid Tycoon.

Fortnite's big obstacle: the install size

One major reason why Roblox's ecosystem of user-created games and experiences has flourished to the degree that it has is its low overhead. Roblox may not have modern graphics, but it also only requires a gigabyte of data--you can go from making a Roblox account, to installing the game, to playing Steal a Brainrot, in less than five minutes with a decent internet connection. But Fortnite requires a massive base game installation on PC and console before you can boot it up, and, realistically, it's not going to be worth it to most folks to install 70 gigabytes of Fortnite just to play one of these tycoons. 

So even though they're popular, it could be tough to use these tycoon maps as the basis for a metaverse while the obstacle that is the base game remains in play. Epic has a solution for this problem, but so far it's only implemented it on mobile, where Fortnite's quick initial downloads only include enough data to get to the lobby and browse the shop and locker. All cosmetics stream from the cloud instead of being stored locally, and any mode you want to play will download the first time you try to play it. It's not quite as light as Roblox's installation, but it's way better than downloading the whole base game up front.

The long-term dream for UEFN, hypothetically, is for developers to be able to build a full-sized gaming experience inside Fortnite--something robust enough to be worth committing to a big download, or paying money for if it were sold on a more traditional platform. But it doesn't seem like we're close to getting anything like that yet, and that puts a big limit on how much the audience can expand on the backs of UEFN modes like Steal the Brainrot and Droid Tycoon. 

However, this is supposedly something Epic has been working on for a while--rumors of a "slim" install for PC and console have been circulating for years, though that feature is still nowhere to be seen on those platforms. Meanwhile, whenever Unreal Engine 6 eventually launches, it'll expand Epic's metaverse beyond Fortnite, allowing stuff like this to hypothetically exist both inside of Fortnite and as a standalone thing at the same time--but we still don't really know how much that would help with the situation we're discussing here. 

Fortnite remains a work in progress.