Epic now rewards Fortnite creators for how long people play their experiences

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Fortnite developer Epic Games is adding a new “time played” metric to the calculations that determine how much creators are paid for the Fortnite experiences (called “islands”) that they make. Time played will be measured alongside the player popularity and player retention metrics Epic introduced when it rolled out its updated creator payouts system in March.

This is the first major adjustment to the updated payouts system that Epic introduced alongside its Unreal Editor for Fortnite. Those tools offer a lot of new ways to make games and virtual worlds, and the new payouts system gives 40 percent of the game’s net revenues back to creators (though Epic is competing for that money as well). Epic’s hope is that the tools and the revised payouts structure could entice more creators to make Fortnite islands — which could keep them from building for rival platforms like Roblox.

With the changes to the metrics, time played in Fortnite islands will be boosted in how the metrics are weighed, according to an Epic blog post. Part of the reason Epic is adjusting these metrics is that creators just don’t have a lot of tools to easily bring new players to Fortnite, Saxs Persson, Epic’s EVP of the Fortnite ecosystem, says in an interview with The Verge. If Epic can’t currently offer those sorts of acquisition tools, “we should dial down the importance of acquisition and dial up ‘fun in ecosystem,’” Persson says.

For example, Fortnite doesn’t support deep linking right now, so to visit an island, you have to manually type in an island code. Creators can easily share