Why five prominent gaming influencers are collaborating to create the ultimate Fortnite Creative experience

Ali “SypherPK” Hassan:

My team and I have been creative for a while, posting maps and whatnot. But when they unveiled the Unreal editor for Fortnite and the new Creators Program at GDC, I got to thinking. Funny, when they did the GDC stream, Ninja was there, Tim was there, CouRage was there, and Nick was tweeting about it. That same day I started calling them and I had this question: “Let’s see if we can join forces. Let’s assemble the Avengers. We very quickly agreed to team up for such a project.

Digiday:

Right now, the writing is on the wall: Epic appears to be building Fortnite’s creative economy to compete with Roblox, the virtual experience platform that paid out more than $500 million to game creators in 2021. Roblox games, including games like “Adopt Me” and “Brookhaven,” aren’t necessarily the most custom games — they’re the ones that started early. Brookhaven was created in April 2020 due to a surge in Roblox users during the Covid-19 pandemic, and players have since visited the experience more than 30.2 billion times. Launching their company just weeks after Epic announced the changes, the creators of Project V are poised to be among the first in this new ecosystem.

Daniela Ali:

Epic loves SypherPK. He was truly the mentor that taught much of the world how to play Fortnite when it first started, and he holds a special place in their hearts for that. Ali [Hassan] has gone to its headquarters and is part of the company’s annual report. He’s the voice of the Epic community and we’ve built a really strong relationship with them – we really love everyone here.

And so when we brought this project to their attention, they immediately jumped at the chance to help us, because even they don’t know what something like this could look like. Right from the start, they are willing to offer resources to guide and train us on their new engine; they are very interested in cooperation.

Digiday:

Epic’s GDC announcements made it clear that the company is willing to share more of its Fortnite revenue with game creators if it means those creators will get the game developer’s vision for the metaverse.

Ali’s response mentions that Epic has shared training and other resources with Hasan and his team. This type of collaboration between game developers and their top influencers is fairly common. As Project V developers develop the experience over the next year, they will likely benefit from their close relationship with Epic Games through further training and perhaps even previews of upcoming tools and features.

Ali “SypherPK” Hassan:

We’re 100% looking at a lot of the UGC stuff in Roblox and what’s currently in Fortnite. We want to understand what people like to play, so a big part of our initiative, especially in the coming months, is to connect with the public on social media. Eventually, we’ll release Discord. We really want to see feedback on what people are playing right now – what the numbers on Roblox and Fortnite Creative are showing, and what people are craving that isn’t always available right now.

Digiday:

Roblox has a dynamic economy model for game creators, so it makes sense that Hasan and his partners would look to popular Roblox experiences like “Brookhaven” for inspiration. But while Roblox is currently in the lead, the advanced capabilities of the Unreal Engine mean that Fortnite Creative has a significant advantage in terms of the potential depth and aesthetic beauty of the gameplay experience. Hassan cited the sheer number of video games currently built into the popular game engine as one of the reasons he chose to build Fortnite, and when creators like Hassan start building Fortnite Creative’s virtual world, their fans will inevitably follow.

Daniela Ali:

It’s important that every creator is really on board with this project, but just as important is a well-thought-out and executed Oni Studios strategy for each creator to take advantage of all the different verticals they play in. We are very excited about the possibilities of how we can make the game more accessible to different communities. These guys have a combined reach of 120 million across all their platforms, so I think there’s a million ways for us to use it all.

Digiday:

Creating an immersive virtual space is hard enough, but getting players to actually step inside is even harder. Fortunately for the creators working on Project V, they have significant access to the distribution end of the metaverse experience—the ability of prominent creators to draw their fans’ attention to their custom-built spaces. The creators of Project V’s plan to create a virtual world with Fortnite Creative is bold, but they may actually have the power to pull it off.