Fortnite’s Marriott Bonvoy Land is a ghost town of video game sadness

polygon.com:

While browsing my friends list on Bluesky, I came across a post about the “Marriott Bonvoy Land’’ in Fortnite. Curious as to what that would even look like, I went down the rabbit hole, expecting to suffer through a strange nightmare world of inescapable hotel rooms, or maybe knocking through the walls of a luxury suite with a giant sparkly hammer for a sniper rifle and Slurp Juice.

For a lot of people my age, even ones who actively participate in gaming culture, I suspect Fortnite is probably enshrined in their minds as the mega-popular battle royale that features fast-paced construction and goofy costumes, with a sprinkling of virtual pop culture shenanigans like quasi-live concerts, civil rights memoranda, and movie nights. What I was surprised to find was how much Epic Games has staked Fortnite out as being a platform. When I logged in to find my way to this strange hotel world, I was assaulted by the sheer volume of things you can do within the launcher, many of which are branded custom games made within Fortnite Creative mode. It’s not an accident that scrolling through Epic’s own or creator-built game modes feels like surfing Netflix.

Like many of the brands that have content inside of Fortnite, Marriott Bonvoy’s “land” was farmed out to Zen Creative Studios, which works with companies to “push digital marketing beyond the limits and create engaging experiences and integrations” within the game. This speaks to the company’s ubiquity, when it can support a secondary industry of developers, modelers, and texture artists who grew up working with Epic’s Fortnite engine and continued on collaboration projects with companies that want in on the whole thing. It is less of a cottage industry so much as it is a virtual