Epic Games rewards Fortnite creators with payouts based on time played

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Epic Games announced that it will change its payouts for Fortnite creators by rewarding them with money based on the amount of time their games are played.

This “time played” payout should result in more money for Fortnite creators in the upcoming April payout, said Sax Persson, executive vice president of Epic Games, in an interview with GamesBeat.

In the past, creators of Fortnite islands (which include both individuals and teams of developers) were rewarded if players visited their islands. But now Epic is making changes to the engagement payout metrics based on rewards for time played on the creators’ islands.

Back in March at the Game Developers Conference, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced that Epic would give 40% of the net revenue of Fortnite to all creators who publish islands in Fortnite, including both independent creators and Epic’s own Fortnite development team.

When Epic Games announced Creator Academy 2.0, the company was focused on rewarding creators based on the value they brought to Fortnite, Persson said. And the company became more transparent about how it calculated its payments.

After the first month, the company realized that it should also reward creators based on the time spent in the game metric, he said. And to help grow the pie, Epic wants to provide tools for creators to improve acquisition of users. But more important is the notion that players like the creations enough to spend a lot of time playing with them, Persson said.

“We used monthly active users, returning users and new users,” Persson said. “We didn’t use time before. This is the most easy to understand way to drive