Anyone who knows me at all knows that I consider Tim Sweeney to be one of my heroes. His crusade against the tyranny of the thirty percent tax is one of the most important battles that need to be won. I implore you all to become customers of the Epic Game Store and their sweet sweet twelve percent tax. Be the change you want to see in the world—or at least the change I want to see in it.
Epic recently announced some changes to Fortnite’s creative mode. I do not often link people’s stuff but you can find it here. They have launched a mode for creators to make money from their efforts based on some subset of revenues generated by Fortnite item sales. I got a satisfying text from my oldest son when this was announced because I predicted this was going to happen years ago when he was busy earning umbrellas at a disconcerting pace in Fortnite’s less-friendly game modes.
Their program to pay creators is a very good first step for Epic.
It is also a really small first step considering the five-alarm fire this creates for Minecraft and Roblox.
If you work at Roblox or Minecraft, you should be readying yourself for war. Epic has spotted your lunch, and Epic is hongry.
On the bright side, I did point out this is a very small step. You still have some time. While it is nice that Fortnite is setting aside a pile of moneys to pay creators, it is not enough to tear away large chunks of developers from other revenue-generating creator platforms.
It is such a small step that I almost wonder if it was a tactical mistake on the part of Epic.
The number of people who wish to get paid to make games is legion. There are millions of people who hate working in the real world enough and believe that making games is probably as fun as playing them. Certainly, that is true for some subset of people who make games, but most people do not realize just how much work it is to make a game.
There are a number of platforms that have slowly started to reduce the technology barriers that exist to game development. Every day we are getting closer and closer to the day that a substantive number of people can make a living just cranking out games. Mobile games were a nice stepping stone in that direction, but we won’t get into why it has turned into a vicious red ocean. Not today, anyway.
I will tip my hat to Roblox for how well they have built out a developer ecosystem and have driven the barrier to creators so low. I have my own reasons not to love Roblox as a platform and I am not going to get into them here. I will at least state “revenue share” as one of my primary issues. I do think that if they were a bit more aggressive in putting more dollars into developers’ pockets that they would collect a larger share of development talent.
And that revenue share is precisely why everyone in the content creation platform business should be terrified.
Epic Games is on a mission to get that platform revenue share down.
They are continuing to make steps towards democratizing their tools and harmonizing them together.
While they have taken the small step of funding creators on the Fortnite Creative platform, it is a percentage of other product revenues.
The opacity of the total pool and the way to pay that out will limit the size of the stampede to the platform.
They do need to take it to the next level and let Fortnite creators monetize their content directly through V-bucks.
When that day arrives, I expect that there will be a tsunami of interest.
This is why I think that the current small step is perhaps a tactical mistake. While there is some value in starting to prove out the funnel and iterate on the tools, they have made their bigger competitors officially aware that they are headed in this direction.
A keen product manager at Roblox or Minecraft may have predicted this day is coming, but it was probably not taken as seriously as a threat until now. The burden of work to do the actual payment integration to creators is big enough that this feels like a very premature reveal to me.
I am proud of myself for getting this far without proclaiming this will catapult Fortnite to the top of the leaderboard for “metaverse something something”. I know there are a lot of people out there who immediately went there when this was all being marketed at the Game Developer Conference.
Whatever. I maintain that everyone who is claiming to be King of the Metaverse Hill fundamentally does not understand what that means. The point of Metaverse Hill is that it has no King. Now that I have made you all angery I will wrap up this post by linking you to a copy of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash—You know, the book that invented the metaverse. Yes, this is an Amazon-Affiliate link. I am somewhat smug because I know none of you will buy it. As much as people are excited about the metaverse and that it was apparently first talked about in this book, I actually did not like the book. If you work in technology and feel like you need to read this book in order to understand the future—please don’t. That would be like trying to figure out how to design iPad apps by watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I wish I could link you to some of those. It is a pretty good TV show. I am probably going to watch some soon after I dump Netflix for Paramount+ on general principles.
See you next week!
