Lego, dog-fooding, and physics: Epic's plan's for UEFN | GDC 2024
It's been almost a year since Epic Games launched Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), and the company seems quite pleased with how it's gone.
Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz in a briefing ahead of Epic's State of Unreal event at the Game Developers Conference this week, Fortnite ecosystem executive VP Saxs Persson shares some of the numbers.
UEFN has seen a base of around 15,000 creators publish some 80,000 "islands" so far.
130 million players have tried out those islands, resulting in engagement-based payouts of $320 million to creators to date.
"In many ways, this was the thesis," Persson says. "If we give great tools to creators and make the economy really simple – make a game, players play the game, creators get paid – we can really inject a whole lot of energy into the system, which is really what we're seeing with those 80,000 islands."
When UEFN launched, Epic was seeing perhaps 50 new islands published each day. These days, Persson says that number is closer to 600 a day.
"Every day you show up and you never quite know what you'll get because as we extend more functionality, people are making deeper and deeper experiences," Persson says.
One of the biggest additions Epic announced today was the integration of its MetaHuman Creator and Animator offering to assist in making NPCs in UEFN. It's also adding support for cloth creation tools Marvelous Designer and CLO into UEFN, and laid out a roadmap of upcoming features it is looking to have in place by the end of 2024.
A few new pieces of functionality on the way include a first-person camera view and the addition of Fall Guys assets to UEFN so creators can effectively make their own Fall Guys levels with Fortnite. Epic will also release Rocket Racing track design tools and logic to creators so they can make their own racing games remixed with all the existing functionality of UEFN.
And Persson is particularly excited about incorporating the the extension of UEFN to Lego Fortnite, where players will be allowed to publish
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