Some Fortnite players are actually making over $10m per year

Epic Games revealed how much money players made in 2024 for their Fortnite Creative experiences, and the total payout is staggering.

Unreal Editor allows players to create new assets and maps that can be published in Fortnite. For example, players utilized the technology to develop a CoD-inspired game mode and Monopoly.

Fortnite Creative’s success inspired Epic Games to introduce an engagement payout program to reward users for their creations.

As a result, it’s possible to earn a percentage of net revenue from Fortnite’s item shop and other real-money purchases based on the popularity of your island. And for some, that success as an amateur developer earned them a massive payday.

Fortnite players made over $300 for their Unreal Editor creations

Dexerto | Epic Games

HYPEX reported that Epic Games paid out $352 million to Fortnite Creative creators in correspondence with the engagement payout program. Seven creators made over $10 million, 14 brought in $3 million plus, and 37 collected more than $1 million.

Even on the low end, 154 creators made around $300k, 7,000 made between $1k and $10k, and 13,000 player made at least $100.

As to how Epic calculates these payouts the devs explained, “Your Engagement Payout Award reflects the engagement attributable to your Content as a portion of User engagement across all content in Fortnite.”

To give you a better idea of how popular Fortnite creative is, HYPEX revealed that 36.5% Of Fortnite’s Total Playtime in 2024 came from Creative Maps, which is a 5% increase from 2023, and creative maps generated 5.23 billion hours played in 2024.

Epic Games makes plenty of money off cosmetic items to fund the payout program, and Ninja explained just how much.

Ninja referenced a time when his creator code alone brought in $5 million in a month, meaning Epic pocketed roughly $50 million, and he argued that it would been hundreds of millions if the skin was released earlier.