CHAPTER 5
Battle Royale for the Fortnite Metaverse
Years after the avatar known as AM Radio had moved and inspired the user community of Second Life, the avatar's real-life owner, Jeff Berg, received an intriguing invitation to see a new art installation in another virtual world.
By then, nearly all of AM Radio's works had gone away from Second Life, largely dematerialized due to the high cost of virtual land.
In the interim, Berg had lost another essential, more tangible part of himself: his marriage. And as he and his wife grew apart, they also moved across the country. Their teen son Cary went to live with his mother on the East Coast, while Berg himself remained in the Midwest.
So when Cary reached out to his father, it was through an Xbox that Berg had bought for them to play together online.
One night, Cary casually IMed him: “Hey check this out.”
And so Berg did.
Cary had re-created some of AM Radio's most beloved Second Life works in Fortnite Creative.
There they were on a Fortnite island on an expansive desert lined by soaring mountains, beneath a gold and purple sky. A radar array pointed out into nothingness; an ancient farm house stood alone in the wasteland, where rocking chairs were tossed and frozen in midair. A rusty but soulful train lay abandoned in a wheat field.
A decade or so after they'd dematerialized, Berg's son had diligently worked to re-create many of AM Radio's most famous Second Life creations, including “The Faraway,” in Fortnite Creative.
“I knew they were deleted and I thought that was a shame, so I wanted to have them in Fortnite,” Cary simply explained.
Since most of AM Radio's works no longer exist in Second Life, Cary had to delve through ancient YouTube videos to find reference images.
FIGURE 5.1 “The Faraway” of Second Life re-created in Fortnite Creative by AM Radio's son
“He stayed up all night and surprised me with this Fortnite island build,” Berg told me, amazed, moved—and also impressed by the power of the Fortnite creation tools.
Cary later moved to the Midwest to attend school there, and to live with his father. Virtual worlds continue to keep them connected, even when they share the same couch.
“He and I are gaming together right now,” Berg told me one evening. “GTA and Fortnite.”
AM Radio laughed. “It's good to have him here. But here we are, playing games tonight.”
Besides being a bridge between father and son, Fortnite and Second Life share strands of the same DNA. An early prototype of Second Life, dubbed Linden World, had a heavy focus on combat alongside in-game creation.
Cory Ondrejka and his developers at Linden Lab showed Tim Sweeney, CEO of Fortnite creator Epic, a demo of Second Life at the Game Developers Convention in 2004.
FIGURE 5.2 Jeff “AM Radio” Berg with his son Cary (ion right)
As Ondrejka remembers the presentation, Sweeney was impressed by how Second Life users could dynamically create together and told Cory and the team that he wanted to make an Epic game with that kind of functionality, which would expose more of the Unreal Engine's tools to players.
“Of course you want collaboration, of course you want people to be able to work together and create things,” Cory tells me. “So Tim got it right away.”
About a decade later, Epic Games’ Mark Rein showed Ondrejka a prototype of Fortnite that blended ideas from various Epic Games, Second Life, and Minecraft into a unique new experience.
Fortnite originally started out as a very different experience from what it is today, and no one would have described its first version as a metaverse platform. It was originally a multiplayer tower defense game, with players working together to build a fortress that could fend off oncoming beasties.
As discussed in the Introduction, PUBG: Battlegrounds (a user-made modification of another game) had popularized the “last fighter standing” multiplayer gameplay mode of battle royale. Rapidly rejiggering, Epic's devs added a new play mode, Fortnite Battle Royale, as a competitor. Launched in 2017, it quickly became epochly popular.
Not only did it incorporate building into gameplay (you could instantiate barricades and other strategic elements into existence during a match), but unlike PUBG, it was aggressively charming and whimsical, with stylized cartoon avatars, a lack of blood, and an immediate zaniness. (To start a Battle Royale match, you are airdropped onto the island in a colorful party bus.)
While the Battle Royale gameplay is frenetic and fun, the players pretty early on expressed their desire for an experience that was more of an open-ended virtual world, where combat was only one of the activities. Very soon after launch, players began organizing temporary truces so that they could party and dance together in the war zone.
As that happened, Fortnite drove another breakthrough in the realm of hardcore games demarcated by 3D action and fast reflexes. While typically the province of young males, Fortnite began attracting a significant percentage of female gamers. In 2018, CNBC reported that the mobile version of Epic's game was more popular with girls and women than males. This was partly due to Fortnite's emphasis on socialization and customizable, non-sexualized avatars, but also because the combat gameplay is not simply shoot-'em-up, encouraging creativity instead.
“It's not that women don't like shooting people in the face,” as Nick Yee of QuanticFoundry once told me, citing his firm's extensive gamer surveys, “it's that they feel typical shooter presentation is drab and boring and use guns in the most dull way possible.” And while Fortnite does come with guns, there are also booby traps and the ability to create new structures to assist in combat.
The game's overall wacky tenor also contributed to its appeal among all genders and beyond hardcore gamers; it's not uncommon to charge into battle against a humanoid banana, a blue llama, and official versions of various movie/videogame characters. Even before any talk of the Metaverse cropped up, Fortnite was already satisfying Stephenson's prerequisite for highly customizable avatars.
Jumping off from Battle Royale's popularity, Fortnite gradually took on still more metaverse qualities with the late 2018 launch of Fortnite Creative, giving players not only the power to create structures during combat but to completely customize their own game island, and then share it with other players.
Unlike Second Life, where the early closed beta combat game aspect gave way to a fully open sandbox virtual world with very few game mechanics, Epic focused first on making Fortnite fun and massively popular—and then gradually introduced creativity features that enabled players to create their own game models.
“[W]hat they've done, and it's super interesting, is this notion of overlaying these very non-game-like things and just plopping them into the game,” Ondrejka observes. “They spent years ramping the storytelling up in Fortnite. It started very slowly and very gently and then it expanded and expanded and expanded to the point where then you can do a concert and have it work.”
My strong sense overall, talking with members of the Fortnite Creative community, is that Epic hadn't originally anticipated outside brands considering the platform as a real-world marketing space, and assumed it would be more akin to a standard modding mode for gamers. And also, as a publisher from the traditional AAA game industry, that Epic is still holding a tight rein on the platform to protect its brand, even if that means falling short of the Stephenson ideal.
“It's insane,” as one creator put it to me. “They want to be a part of this Metaverse, but they are limiting what can actually be done. If you're really wanting a true Metaverse, then more brands should be able to be in a space, whether [Epic] wants to support it or not.”
But that was my sense in 2022. By the following year, everything changed.
During the 2023 Game Developers Conference, Epic announced the direct integration of Unreal with Fortnite, enabling multi-user, multiplatform live editing, and Fab, the Epic equivalent of the Unity Asset Store. And where once it was difficult for Fortnite community creators to earn substantial revenue from their custom-made islands, Epic announced it would pay out 40 percent of net revenue from the platform's Item Shop to community creators, based on the popularity of their experiences. Fortnite's evolution as a full-fledged metaverse platform was now nearly complete.
“We can set aside the crazy hype cycle around NFTs and VR goggles,” Epic's Tim Sweeney explained then. “These technologies may play a role in the future but they are not required. This revolution is happening right now.”
Inside the Alliance
In 2020, Joseph Robinette Biden became the first winning presidential candidate to enter the Metaverse by way of Fortnite Creative. In the Build Back Better with Biden map, players got a chance to help clean up his island or go on a Kamala Harris-themed speed run, where players would race through the map, trying to collect Kamala's errant Chucks lying about.
Unlike traditional Fortnite, Biden's map had a notable lack of guns or traditional video game–type gameplay. On the plus side, it did have an ice cream shop.
Biden's Fortnite experience garnered quite a lot of social coverage (both enthusiastic and mocking) and was directly funded by his campaign. To build it, the Biden team reached out to Simon Bell and Mackenzie Jackson, cofounders of Alliance Studios, one of the very first small businesses to emerge around creating content for real life brands in Fortnite Creative.
As with many of their other major clients, the Biden campaign contractually swore them to silence about the project, so Alliance is not allowed to mention how successful it actually was (or was not) as a campaign promotion.
“We're legally not even allowed to bring it up in conversations,” as Mackenzie told me in a video call. “Because you brought it up, I can then confirm that, ‘Yes, we created that.’”
I'm actually not surprised by the enforced silence; while some politicians may show interest in the Metaverse, we're still at a point where the general public (let alone the opposition party) would consider Fortnite to be a mere game, and a fairly violent one at that.
Launching Alliance among a Community of Creators
Simon and Mackenzie started tinkering with Fortnite Creative shortly after launch, when it was basically still a simple level editor.
They met via a third-party site that featured user-made Fortnite Creative maps (www.fortnitecreativehq.com). They were both uploading their own maps there at the time and wound up joining a creative team to create new ones.
“We became friends and hung out every night, working and making our maps and testing each other's work, and so that's how we met.” Nine months later they met in real life, which was no mean feat; Simon is based in Australia, and Mackenzie, the American Midwest.
They describe Alliance Studios, founded in 2019, as the pioneers of brand experiences in Fortnite Creative—but acknowledge that it's a role that fell in their laps from the maps they were at first making for fun.
FIGURE 5.3 Mackenzie Jackson's Fortnite avatar “MackJack” and Alliance's Doritos map
“It was demand that got us into the brand space, with brands approaching us. We've never had to go out and look for work in that space,” Simon tells me. When I speak with them, they are completing the launch of a branded experience for rapper The Kid LAROI, an immersive experience wrapped around a game, an interactive story, and prerecorded videos of the pop stars streaming on the virtual walls.
They are hardly the only grassroots creators who've wound up creating content for major brands. The Alliance team estimates that about 1,000 Fortnite creators make some kind of income from their virtual world, and then about 100 who are like them: making an entire, full-time income from their Fortnite creativity.
The Limits of Fortnite Creative as a Metaverse Platform
Alliance's first client map, for the e-sports team 100 Thieves, was sponsored and branded by Uber Eats and Rocket Mortgage.
The idea with that campaign is that players could claim a $5 discount code by participating. But how would they actually redeem it from within a virtual world?
Simon's idea was pretty ingenious: build the QR code inside Fortnite like it was a massive sculpture or ancient ruins.
“You know, using black and white blocks, placing them together into a QR code and then generating that and giving it to a brand…. [Players] can point their phone at the screen and scan the QR code that I created.”
Despite this being an impressive breakthrough, Epic's legal team quickly nixed it as a potential security danger. (It is easy, to be sure, for this same technique to be abused by others for phishing scams and various shenanigans.)
There's a lesson in this.
“Epic didn't really have any policies in place for brand and experience in the beginning,” says Mackenzie. In the early days, it seems as if Epic was racing to keep ahead of the creators.
That also means that there's still no direct way of connecting Fortnite activity with the external 2D web—a necessary feature for a full-fledged metaverse platform. Not to mention a pretty essential feature for outside brands.
“My hope,” Mackenzie tells me, “is that Epic is going to understand that if they really want this whole Metaverse to exist, there need to be a lot less rules. There needs to be more in the player creator's hands as to what we're allowed to do and how to really truly bring the spaces to life and connect them [to the wider Internet].”
Simon is sympathetic to Epic's position and how tightly it controls what brands show up in Fortnite.
“They want to protect their platform as well. There's particular brands they don't want in the space … we've got other brands that are coming in third party that creators are working with; we've got the freedom to put that onto the platform and then we're seeing some really off-kilter brands coming into the space.
“We want to nurture an ecosystem. We want to make sure that the player doesn't have a spoiled experience. If it still goes with this rat race mentality, it's going to leave a bad taste for the players [where they] just get brands slapped in their face.”
(We spoke, by the way, in late 2022, before the announcement of Fortnite Creative 2.0, which greatly expanded the platform's creative capabilities; still, as of press time, web and mixed reality integration options seem to remain lacking.)
The other danger is limiting Fortnite only to brands (and pop stars, and movies, and so on) that appeal to a narrow demographic of teens and early 20s. For Fortnite as a metaverse platform, the Age Cliff looms. (But more on that in Chapter 11.)
Advice for Brands
Having met and worked with dozens of major real-life brands, Mackenzie and Simon of Alliance have advice for creating a successful experience.
Simon notes that many brands come to them with a very specific creative campaign in mind, even if it doesn't fully leverage the potential of the platform.
“Partner up with teams similar to us or with us,” Mackenzie advises, “and trust our experience to let us create a game that players are going to enjoy that's also going to represent their brands.”
The Fortnite activation can't be a stand-alone experience, however, which would only limit its reach and impact:
“[Brands] need to be looking at it as a piece of a larger puzzle … how can we tie it to any kind of IRL event, or tournaments, or elevated beyond just what we made?”
A fan of creating adventure game experiences in Fortnite Creative, Simon acknowledges that that genre is not actually the best genre for brand experiences, because once played, a player never returns. Better to create a full-fledged multiplayer game experience where players are competing against each other or themselves, so there's a reason for them to keep returning:
“So to get into that space, you need players to be consistently playing your map, and not just one or two. You need thousands and thousands to be consistently playing your map, meaning that a game that starts and finishes and has no reason to return to isn't going to do so well.”
Advice for Creators—Especially Women
The Alliance founders (alliancestudios.gg) are bullish on job growth for developers in Fortnite Creative. The trick for newcomers is not only mastering the creative tools, but self-promotion.
“We're gonna need to be hiring more people,” as Mackenzie puts it. “So if you're a creative individual and this is a field that you're interested in, get in and start creating and get yourself seen, you know, get community events that are happening, post on social media, post on Discord—we should be able to see your work to see if you're somebody we might even be interested in picking up.”
Fortnite Creative Discords to get started in:
- Fortnite Creators
- FCHQ Creative Community
On Twitter, the main hashtag to show off your creativity to teams like Alliance is #CreatedinFortnite.
Mackenzie is one of the few women professionally working in Fortnite Creative (by her estimate, there are fewer than 10 women among thousands of community developers), so I asked her what advice she would give other women interested in pursuing a profession like hers.
“If you are passionate about being creative, then jump in and get a feel for what the possibilities are. Most importantly, focus on the supporters. As a female in this industry, there can be a lot of toxicity and discrimination. It's not always easy, but set aside the emotions surrounding the negative and just focus on the positive.”
Another guideline might be to find the right team members who'll support you. In Mackenzie's case, her Alliance comrades rallied to support her after a surgery with serious complications confined her to the hospital for over two months. They spoke with her every day over Fortnite voice chat.
“This all happened during COVID-19, so I was unable to have any visitors.” Her business partner, Simon, bought her the Fortnite edition of the Nintendo Switch, she tells me, “which I used in the hospital until I purchased a laptop to continue working while in the hospital. I worked [in Fortnite] every single day, and I would, hands down, say that they were a massive part of helping me heal.”