Fortnite creators will be able to develop and monetize their own creations for the game with even more support soon, as Epic Games are giving them their very own editor in Unreal Engine 5. According to IGN, Epic Games have clearly recognised the strength and skill of Fortnite’s creative community, and are planning to reward creators with their very own Fortnite-specific set of creation tools.
As reported in the article, Epic Games CEO Time Sweeney revealed to Fast Company that due to the surprisingly large amount of time Fortnite players actually spend playing through the creations of others, the team at Epic Games want to give creators more power and better methods to develop Fortnite content. In addition to providing the specialised editor in Unreal Engine 5, Epic plan to allow creators to monetise the content they create for Fortnite, with a view to building a fully-fledged game economy.
Later this year, we’re going to release the Unreal Editor for Fortnite–the full capabilities that you’ve seen [in Unreal Engine] opened up so that anybody can build very high-quality game content and code . . . and deploy it into Fortnite without having to do a deal with us–it’s open to everybody.
Tim Sweeney, CEO, Epic Games
This is going to be great news for the existing pool of Fortnite creators but it will also make Fortnite creation more accessible to everyone else too. What with Sweeney’s plan to turn Fortnite into a viable source of income for its creators, we may start to see increasing numbers of people downloading Unreal Engine 5 in order to create and monetise their own custom content.
Along with that, we’re building an economy, and it will support creators actually building businesses around their work and making increasing amounts of profit from the commerce that arises from people playing their content.
Tim Sweeney, CEO, Epic Games
