We are racing towards a world where Fortnite And Roblox It can compete with Steam and the App Store in terms of the size of their game libraries. Both have growing ecosystems of millions of players who build and spend time in custom battle royales, chat rooms, and all sorts of other games. We’re looking at the battle for what could be the next YouTube.
While the two giants may be the largest in the space, they are far from the only companies building a catalog of tools that make the transition from play to game much simpler than traditional Unity or Unreal game engines. All kinds of platforms, including browser-based Dot Big Bang Focus from top to bottom eat eatthey are looking for a market segment that already has the interest of hundreds of millions of players.
“(UGC) is critical, right?” says Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games the edge About how user-generated content and vision of the metaverse mix. “The future is primarily about everyone’s work in the world, and we are a very small part of that.”
Epic confirmed this Fortnite It currently holds an average of 70 million monthly users, while Roblox It stated that 250 million players jump from one game to another every month on its platform. That’s a far cry from the more than two billion people who use YouTube every month, but it’s not hard to imagine one or more of these platforms gaining this kind of audience in the next 20 years. We will likely see the tools and economics of these systems evolve exponentially over that time.
As simple as the tools players use to build experiences are, so are many of the games they create. I found the bones of many games in either of them Roblox or Fortnite Similar to the games they came from. Other platforms are not much different in their complexity either. Tools still have a long way to go before the quality and variety of games becomes even greater.
Epic has taken a big step in this direction with Unreal Editor for Fortnite. It brings some Unreal Engine functionality, including a proprietary coding language in Verse, to Fortnite creative. The tool has only been available for a couple of weeks, and gamers have already built it portalsmade games of custom checkers, and designed maps with visuals that look so amazing you hardly know they are Fortnite.
The presentation at the Game Developers Conference failed to show how Unreal Editor can help Fortnite Developers offer different types of experiences. This is a major focus for Epic going forward.
“We need to add a lot of features in the development kit.”
“We need to add more features in the development toolkit. Right now, there’s a bunch of APIs, there’s a diverse programming language, and there’s a bunch of APIs that can use interfaces to enable the creation of games in a range of genres,” Sweeney said. about what it can be made into Fortnite creative. But they don’t expose everything we want to reveal. We’ve got a lot of work, two years’ worth of work, that will result in improvements and new releases until (we have) basically everything one needs to represent every game genre in the game. Fortnite. “
Developers are already doing interesting things with the limited tools available on these platforms. They have remodeled it Roblox Maps to something that looks identical to Call of duty And turned Fortnite Lobby room in frivolous party. They have imported and recreated the terrain from the whole The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild map on a Fortnite Creativity Island. A few developers have even developed their own web-slinging mechanics in Spider-Man Roblox. These are just a few out of hundreds, and the things players can accomplish with these tools are getting more and more complex with each update. However, the impulse to embrace this complexity is not as deep.
People looking to make a living on one of these platforms, just like those doing it on YouTube, find themselves on a platform freak. These game designers have learned that they need to cater their creations to the audience that is already there to enjoy Fortnite And Roblox. Making something very different may not work.
“If you’re grinding guys too hard roblox, They will go to play something else. Joe Ferencz, CEO and Founder of Gamefam, said about how players log into Roblox for a specific type of content. “Roblox He will tell you that they have an average 2.5 hour session per player (…) and the highest session per game, is 25 minutes. You have to realize that they are jumping into multiple games, and you have to treat them that way.”
Ferencz, who runs Roblox studio Gamefam, is one of many game makers who have built a studio that operates exclusively within Boundaries Roblox. Roadblocks like unequal revenue split numbers and lack of discoverability on a platform like Roblox Make it difficult to bring in funds without looking outside the funding platform. Some of the most successful developers—many of whom have come together to form entire studios like Gamefam—in the space rely on branded deals with companies like Coca-Cola, Sega, and the NFL.
This kind of arrangement isn’t sustainable for the majority of creators, and platforms may not be successful in the long run if developers can’t find a way to support themselves within it.
“If you think about YouTube and what it has done for video creators, you know, it allows people to start on a small scale with no barrier to entry. It allows them to have a kind of modest income, you just have to Doing it as a side thing, creating a channel, and then becoming a full-time creator with a fair wage.” “I think that’s really the future, but from my point of view, the thing we’re focused on is building something that really pays people fairly.”
“The thing we’re focused on is building something that really pays people fairly.”
Anderberg, whose company currently operates the browser-based UGC platform Dot Big Bang, he was adamant that platforms should give developers a fair share of the revenue. He and many others in the space believe that the more platforms people try to make a living on, the more successful they will be.
This is the main driver behind one of Epic’s big announcements at the Game Developers Conference. the Fortnite Creator Now gives creators 40 percent of the earnings from all content Fortniteincluding the incredibly popular battle royale mode. Roblox Developers earn approximately 25 percent of the money from their creations. Roblox i can see FortniteChange the division of revenue as a direct challenge.
One of the things Sweeney and Epic SVP Sax Persson have made clear several times is that they believe in an open ecosystem. They believed it Fortnite It can become a high-end game creation tool that players can take their games out of and sell on Steam or elsewhere. The key, they hope, is to make the creative people in them happy Fortnite They don’t want to go anywhere else.
“It’s not a contradiction to believe in an open (eco)system and still want people to stay in your ecosystem because you’re better than other ecosystems,” Pearson said. “I don’t think that’s a contrarian view of having the principle of being open while offering creators the best opportunity. We think that’s a way forward. I don’t think it’s helpful for us to make the transition to another ecosystem really difficult. We want people to be here because they want to be. They are here, not because they are stuck there.”
User generated content has been a staple of the gaming industry for decades. titles like pubgAnd counter strikeAnd Dota 2 They started out as mods for other games and eventually became global sensations in their own right. The creative energy that drives designers and game makers at the hobby level is even more prevalent today – and we’re now seeing some of the biggest companies in the space trying to harness and regulate it within their own ecosystem.