Fortnite Creative Origins

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welcome to the Nova gaming podcast I'm your host David Taylor and today we'll be exploring the second largest ugc games platform in the world fortnite creative epic games paid $320 million to over 25,000 creators in the last 12 months and during that time saw ugc content capture a whopping 35% of total fortnite engagement for perspective there are over 1 million players engaging in ugc content on fortnite during peak hours with other top franchises like GTA and The Sims currently working to build out their own ugc Platforms in time for Planned launches in the next couple of years it's a perfect time to look back at how and why the biggest video game franchises of our time decide to go all in on ugc today we'll be covering the origin story of fortnite creative the early days of building a leading ugc platform and what it's like building on foret Creative five years into its existence I'm excited to be joined by Zach Phelps the former senior director of product design on foret Creative along with Michael HW AKA Berto the creator of miname box PVP the top 10

fortnite creative experience this is going to be a super interesting episode for entrepreneurs and general managers alike as we dive into how to build a successful ugc game platform and how to be successful as a Creator on said platform so we have one of the original Visionaries of for creative and one of the top beneficiaries of that Vision uh with us today let's kick it off with a bit of intros starting with Zach Zach what was your path to fortnite creatives yeah no thanks David so um yeah so I I been in the games industry 25 years um nine of those you know just just under nine of those years were at epic games uh where I initially joined um kind of in a more production role as executive producer on what ended up becoming fortnite uh save the world uh and so so in that role I spent two to three years working working with the team and and building outside of the world and launching that um at the same time right as we were getting ready for launch you know basically Battle Royale was kind of taking over the world and so we just decided uh epic decided at that point to

spin up a battle royale team and so um that team built an amazing game and launched uh it took over the world and at that point the thing that we just spent seven years kind of putting getting out into the world I knew was going to be a little bit of a subnote in history um so took a step back and uh put together a initial pitch for what do we do next like what's the next big thing that we could do with fortnite um and working with uh L Von uh we put a pretty cool pitch together for what ended up becoming fortnite creative um and then I spent basically four and a half to five years working working on that and uh I most recently left epic about a year a year and a few months ago um to pursue my own CH my own opportunities within that space awesome I mean it's pretty pretty amazing that you were sort of yeah you know at the early you know Visionary of what would become this massive platform today um

and super excited to be chatting with you Berto on your side you know take us through sort of your your journey to fortnite creative yeah um I've been a fortnite Content creater for five years but that was like my side hustle my real job was uh being a software engineer I worked for Kaiser permanent day then Microsoft and um I I actually really liked my jobs not many people like say that but I I love my 9o5 and then um you know it all uh ufn came out and I didn't start making Maps right away but um I saw it and then um actually I got in because like one of my friends that has no coding experience made a map and it kind of blew up and then he showed me his paycheck I was like oh my gosh and then I started learning verse and um it was so simple and um really simple apis and I I started like liking it started making Maps they did okay and then yeah um I made another map with my friend dagwam um and it just kind of blew up and then I kind of had to quit my job

and that's where we're at now that's amazing I mean I'm sure epic loves to hear that in terms of you know yeah seeing seeing the incentives and getting people to come over and invest in making content and then you know said content ending up being a uh Big Driver of engagement on the platform yeah exactly what you said at GDC there was three epic employees that came up to me and said you know they saw my Twitter post of be leaving Microsoft and they just love it because that's what they do for that's like why they're working like that is to give the like like you said a prime example of like what they want for people yep and that's not a dig on Microsoft uh my current employer just for the record uh but it's hard to turn down the type of numbers that I think Berto is seeing um no I I love my I got a free gym free 247 gym free basketball courts free lunch free breakfast I I'd love my job like I can't stress that enough so if you're not going to get into ufn go work at Microsoft like me um exactly

awesome so thanks for that background super cool to to hear your story I'd love to sort of learn more about the the details but for now let's sort of take a step back in time pass it back over to Zach and Zach can you just remind the audience like what did fortnite creative 1.0 look like because we we have entrepreneurs who are building ugc game platforms uh we have franchises who are uh interested in potentially dipping a toe into ugc into the ugc world so I think there's a lot of interest in understanding like what is that road map to What U and is today and and so could you sort of take us back in time into what was foret creative and and what did it look like yeah so initially initially when we put the pitch together um we take we taken a hard look at Minecraft create you know the creative with of Minecraft we're taking a look at ROBLOX we took a look at a lot of different spaces um and so the initial version was how do we get to Market as fast as possible we knew we knew fortnite was

blowing up we had a huge audience um and we knew some portion of a creative product in the market space was going to increase engagement uh you know we wanted to keep people engaged inside fortnite and give them new tools and things to play with and so the initial version actually um the the LTM team at the time um put together a basically what was called playground and playgrounds was just it was just the Battle Royale map and you could go onto it and spend as much time as you wanted there uh and that actually spawned a lot of the initial thoughts for what ended up becoming creative which is hey what's an MVP look like where you can just come onto the Battle Royale map you can build a couple things you could save it and then you could reload it later so that way you know players could players at that time were coming in with their friends they're building kind of One V one little spaces but they'd have to go they'd say hey we're going to go meia tilted we're g to do this they would actually have to destroy everything in that space build a little 1V one space and then and then take off and it's like we can do way better we can build

something relatively quickly um that allowed people to save and reload reload their content um we got a prototype of that done relatively fast um we then decided that we wanted something a lot more robust uh so as we came into December of 2018 so let's see Battle Royale launched 2017 end of 2017 so um pitched came together sort of March April May time frame uh we got the green light and so then December 2018 is when we released the first version of creative which was literally you could load in on your own little custom Island where you could build stuff it would save it would persist um and you could invite your friends to come play with you and we had a minimal set of game rules like like essentially you could you could start and stop a game so that way you could reset the island uh and that that was it there was no at that point we didn't have publishing yet we didn't have any way to really be able to share those experiences um everything was built in gain through the game tools uh so it was

very it was very minimal and then and then the goal was just iterate very very fast you know it's like hey going from there it's like how do we iterate to the next set of capacity next set of capacity with the with a goal being it's like opening up as much as possible for for players uh and creators to be able to do got it and and so it sounds like you guys were prioritizing maybe speed to Market uh in terms of like what features to push out um I've talked a bit about the trilemma for for every ugc game platform they're sort of balancing between accessibility you know ease of ease of creation creation speed and uh and depth of gameplay like how the variety of choices that you can make and and the uh how far you can go in terms of like game progression I'm curious when designing fortnite creative like was there a lens that you looked at in terms of thinking about your your target audience and what type of tools they would be willing to engage with yeah I think for the most part yes

absolutely and so and so the the key phrase in my mind is that like it wasn't really it's really more about capabilities providing as many capabilities as we could as fast as possible and not worrying as much about the overall accessibility of of of those tools or how they need to be used um kind of relying on the fact that social media um other creators the the fact that that we had a really big audience that have an infinite amount of time on their hands and so people will experiment and figure things out that we never expected from the tools but they'll also figure out what we intended from the tools either through documentation that we could provide or just through them experimenting then sharing it with with their friends and so we knew from the from the start that's kind of like that the the most important thing was making sure that people could do as much as possible as fast as possible um even if it made it more difficult to to kind of figure out so so targeting depth the game play

first um now at the same time there's a balance to that because as you get into more complex things you get there's more challenges at making those things available to the users to use in a robust Dependable reliable way and so we all we also we also may just made sure that's like everything could be as robust and dependable as possible so like that's a lot of the trade-offs that we had in the early days were because we're more training off for for consistency uh not necessarily accessibility that's really interesting because you know as someone who's been studying the space for a couple years now and who was looking at it before ufn launched I would have thought that accessibility was a top priority right because you know you've got a primary primarily console user base so you've got to design tools that can be used by a controller um and you know just dragging drop Tools in inherently are pretty easy so you know as much as you weren't sort of focused on accessibility I think you guys did did a pretty good job of of

making it accessible I mean uh a lot of creators that I've spoken to over the years said that they got into fortnite creative just because they wanted to make new maps to play with their friends they were not thinking about these things blowing up they were just like yeah this will be fun for me to you know create a new experience for me and my friends yeah and I I do want like I think that point David's really good like I think that that experience is more because like there was there's early on there was basically basally two paths that we had planned to go down and we knew that we had both paths one was going to be in game being able to create things in game and then that experience we wanted to make sure it felt game like so accessibility wasn't important but making sure it felt like a game was important and so and that making sure that felt like a game led to some accessibility choices that we made um the the other side though was was sort of ufn which was we knew we wanted to provide a path into Unreal Engine um and some of the ex more uh kind of the more

broad tools that that would then Encompass to be able to allow people people to make deeper and more robust games got it so can you give us some examples on sort of the key features that you guys prioritized early on uh and and what are some also some features that you sort of were like we would love to do this but it's not the right time yeah um like like early on features was basically we just kind of we just made a list of Game types that we were like we know people will want to play these and we know people will want to make these and so like one V one uh Deathmatch uh Capture the Flag like we just made big list we talked to a bunch of YouTubers at the time a lot of people that were in the space we were like hey what games you guys Prop Hunt what games do you guys want to play and then what we did is we just broke those games down made a list of like okay what are the ingredients necessary that we need to provide to to creators to allow them to make these game types and we just basically started seeing where the commonalities were and they just start prioritize that list and just kind of

moved down through like a team settings device was a pretty early device that that we worked on um something that would Grant you an inventory item or create a spawner in the game so you could so you could grab an item and use it someplace that spawn you know you could choose where the player spawn like really basic things um but things that are necessary uh to allow people to kind of create in game experiences um some of the things that we prioritized low um still I to this day creative still doesn't support uh I believe um unless they've added it recently but is undo like like it's the most it's like the most commonly asked for thing that's like just give me the ability to undo the thing I just did and it just doesn't exist in Creative at the moment and that really just ended up coming down to the amount of complexity to make a good complete solution to that problem versus the 60 75% it like making it work 70% of the time like it's a really easy 70% of the time solution it's a really hard 99%

of the time solution and so um and so we just we just continually knock that knock that down the road um partly because we've seen really good success from graders Berto how badly would you like a command Z function for you well in cre well in ufn it's all good it's for sure in Creative 1.0 yeah I know exactly what you're talking about like when you're replacing a device like you're kind of stuck with it so y yeah no I do I avoid 1.0 as much as possible like as much as possible actually never use it we're going to get back more into into that actually I have some questions about that but um before we get onto that I'm curious like back at 1.0 like once it launched were the early challenges your team faced and and and then also I'm curious you know what were the signals that you were really on to something like yeah uh you know early challenges are mostly sort of dealing with a creative like anytime you put that initial product out there that

initial game and you start getting a community built around it um we were fortunate because Battle Royale and fortnite was so big there was a in there was a community that came in and used all the tools right away and and from the from the usage of those tools we got a really solid community that was very interested in what we were doing um and they immediate you know it's like as soon as you have a community you now have people you need to serve um and provide them with with amazing tools and good experiences and you want to keep that momentum and so like that was probably probably the biggest challenge is is was was just sort of listening to the community understanding what the motivations were internally for what we wanted to accomplish longer term and and trying to balance balance all those factors uh to make to make sure that we could keep the community engaged while we were building for for that longer term Vision um and so so some of the some of the key signals were forums you know we we spent a lot of

time with Reddit Discord um um a lot of interviews that we had with creators like like like if if Berto had been there at the beginning like like I would have talked to him within probably 24 hours of his map launching um you know like like I talked with creators like as soon as we launched I was talking with creators on a weekly basis um and tracking down people doing cool stuff and seeing how we could support them and what we could do better for them um so that was a huge signal then there was Data signals as far as the number of hours people were creating um the types of games that that people were creating uh that we looked pretty closely at um and then just just internally it's like how did we feel about the product and what were the things that we were excited to enable and the different game different types of games that we thought would would kind of resonate within fortnite um and allow people to do cool stuff that's super interesting I I I sort of I'm curious about the sort of in the engagement side because you know I I

took a look at Fall Guys creative construction when that came out and it seemed like there wasn't a ton of Engagement in ugc content from a player perspective but they've continued to invest in it and it did make me wonder like well I wonder how much of this is just you know for that small segment of players who are creatively inclined does it radically increase their engagement because now they can do more than just play they can also be creative uh and is that engagement worthwhile just in and of itself I look I think so I think the so one like like like anytime part of part of fortnite creative in some ways and a lot of these games in my mind is like you have a game that somebody loves they love deeply and they're playing it a lot and giving them some way to engage deeper with that product whether it's to whether it's monetization opportunities things to spend money on that allow them to to show their love of that product or

a new way for them to spend time with that with with that game I think is incredibly important and creative ends up being a unlimited it's like an infinite amount of time like you can spend as long and as deep as you want in crafting and manipulating something to to your 's desire and so um anytime that that you can provide a depth of space in that way I think it it really deepens it really deepens the opportunity for someone for someone that wants to be creative to then spend a lot of time with your game um from from a lot of the things I've seen within the communities whether you look at like Gary's mod um portions of roadblocks but I think Gary's Mod's actually probably a better example but U Minecraft um like like people spend large amounts of times in those modes we saw the same thing within within fornite creative like once once that was accessible there were people that were very dedicated to that mode and they' spent more time in that mode than they would necessarily playing

Battle Royale um it's not necessarily a large percentage of the audience but I think it's a big enough percentage that if you if if a developer can provide a creative experience I think it's worth doing um especially if they can find ways to facilitate those experiences then getting reintroduced back to back to the communities I I think I mean like the the classic Warcraft 3 uh you know sort of sort of mod mod tools or you know game experiences are are a perfect example even Starcraft like if you talk to people that play Starcraft arcade like they're they they love Starcraft arcade like they're so deeply invested in that tool and that space and and but it's a small community it's it's niche it's like you have to find somebody but then once you start talking to them they will go on for hours about how that either they've created something or the games that they played within within that uh within that ecosystem yeah it's super interesting I mean I know you're probably not a liberty to say sort of the numbers but just as a rule of thumb you know it

seems to be that like 1% of total of your total player base ends up being your your creator base on a on a ugc platform I would say that it's probably I think I I think from the things I've seen it's a little different like I think 1% ends up being kind of like the tip of the spear like like those are the people that other people end up seeing and end up getting creating content that a lot of people consume I think that one % is a is a generally a a good number but when you've created tools that allow people to express play with each other and so it's more like a Sandbox environment where people can go play with their friends without a goal of creating something that somebody else consumes the numbers are are sign are significantly bigger interesting I wonder if since it's gone from fortnite creative 1.0 to usn if the number of casual creators has decreased because

the barrier to entry has has grown with all of the capabilities that have introduced going back to sort of that trilemma problem yeah I think anytime you anytime you deepen the the amount of skill that's necessary to use the tools you're going to get a smaller and smaller audience that that ends up using those tools to be able to do something interesting like it's just that's just it's it's just going to happen and so um the the I think the key with forite is that it's such a massive audience that even if it's one out of 10 million does a phenomenal thing like Berto right it's like it's going to make a huge difference to the overall experience of all those other players inside of fortnite and so so that's where it's like it's like the Berto example is exactly what everything everything was everything from the start was counting on Berto like pretty much is like that's where we were it's like we we knew a Berto existed in the world we weren't sure who they were where they were at what they were doing but we knew if we built the tools and allowed enough expression that eventually the you know Berto would would appear he would make

something really interesting develop put a ton of time into it love it to death and his love and passion would show through those tools into gameplay that then like would engage that bigger audience I think this is a perfect time to sort of transition over to Berto and and ask him a bit about his experience on on ufn um I'm curious you know just to to level set you know we've been talking about the difference between ufn editor for fortnite and fortnite creative 1.0 Berto can you just sort of give us uh a quick breakdown of of what this introd so this came into being last year in March epic made a big announcement at GDC that they were unlocking uh a ton of creative potential for creators on their platform through tools that integrated Unreal Engine and fortnite creative what did that actually look like in terms of the tools available and what was now possible um with with that introduction yeah no when they U introduced ufn um it

definitely like looking at Unreal Engine when when people use that it seems so daunting but ufn this is a good thing it felt like a dumb down version of Unreal Engine which kind of it it's like a simplified version so anyone could use and it was like so easy like what there's a control Z there's an undo there's lots of tool you can use coding um but in your first point too like in the last point you said that like I also saw a lot of creators playe like they couldn't adapt from creative 1.0 to this like I still see creators like they don't they aren't like me instead of using ufn they'll use creative 1.0 as much and then end as little as possible because they are struggling to adapt also they don't like using Code um but um that's that's how I see it I don't know if that answer for for for you as a technical uh Creator was it difficult for you to sort of onboard to to the first scripting language no no not at all uh it's really simple apis um you

know everything's there all the documentation but I uh for me with the coding background I think it's really simple and I think anyone with a coding background could pick that up I think the real learning curve like my friends are like oh can we get into ufn can we do this like the real learning curve is like playing fortnite and I played fortnite every day for five years so like how you use these devices how you use the item granter how you use these mutator zones like that's something that you like have to be playing fortnite and be in the creative space to kind of understand like what these devices can actually do to their most potential because other but other than that it's like very simple apis in theory yeah we we've talked about on on this podcast before just the importance of having people who are native to the platform building you see a lot of you know non-native either professionalized game developers or agencies trying to come onto the platform thinking that they can compete with with kids and make better games but ultimately like I think being the target audience yourself is really

helpful in making sure you're designing things that people actually want to play I'd say that's like one of the biggest success factors for me in my in my partner dag is like we literally just play every day so it's like when we think something's fun it it's probably fun for everyone else like it's and like you said there's so many big studios I came in thought they were going to like make a big scene and like their trailers everything looks amazing like I've never seen that wow you like look up like this is super cool okay I'm leaving right when you go in their game like this isn't fun um yeah it's it's happened many many times like yeah um so I think you know given that you have that that perspective would love for you to just sort of take us through your creative process from the seat of an idea all the way to live operations of a successful game like what did that look like for you yeah um so for I guess I'll just go with our miname example um we were making some maps and then there's a big

trend on box pvps and superpowers and um at the same time like they also took away ltms which is kind of like to buildup creative so people wouldn't play the ltms like creative and then we're like we want kind of bring ltms back and then so we were like all right let's do ltms on a round system like so what fortnite had one shot uh I'm sorry Blitz uh where some more catch like some really popular l M and then we realized like there's only like 12 like really fun ones in theory we're like all right let's make our own ltms and that's where the mini game ideas you know and then at the same time when we thought of that we're like wait this is kind of Genius because we're not limited to like a set of anything we can literally just make a new mini game every week and I'm like why hasn't anyone done this and then right when I thought that I like all right I gota work on this and I spent like two all nighters like or three and just like I need to push this out and um it turned out well both videos blew up and that that's another important thing is like

me and my partner's channels we got like five million followers total or something so that's another key success is just showing it to an audience um and that's uh that's how he came with that idea I guess yeah and I I having an established audience I mean you can see in the way that epic incentivizes their payouts or structures the their their um calculation for how payouts are distributed bringing new players to the platform is one of their their key bits of the formula I think a big part of that is incentivizing creators like yourself to show their fortnite maps to audiences who may not already be playing fortnite or have laps and um so I'm sure you know you're probably benefiting from not just having a large audience but also having a large audience that is re-engaging in fortnite um I'm curious like you know it's possible to be a solo developer but

who are some of the people or the the roles that you rely on most in order to you know keep your game updated on a day-to-day basis um I work with another developer from France so a lot of pair program with him so um it's it's there's a I guess this is a negative thing but there's a lot of like weird bugs in ufn that like you would never ever figure out like there'd probably be almost like some they have to go like through like so many weird solutions to figure like to fix stuff that like are buggy and um that you kind of need to like be in the group of like developers that literally make games to figure out these bugs so that's actually the key thing so because like the other day I'm like hey I keep getting a black screen like every time I like turn on this camera they're like oh you have to do these four steps I was like how would you figure this out so like that's been the one of the best things as a developer was like having a network of other developers that go

through the same problem as you and I vice versa like I was like oh you fix this by the and it's not like it's not intuitive it doesn't make any sense but like that's really helped me and like keep my game kind of like up when there's like lots of random like um I can give one good example one one time fortnite updated them updated and then it broke uh broke round systems and so when a game ended on a round it would go like three two one and then it would just it wouldn't end it would just stay there I was like hey has anyone deal at this and then like Dilly um one of the most popular creators just mess me like hey just take away the 321 it and it was a bad it was like it was a weird solution but it worked and it was like uh stuff like that that that's helped me the most and then for other teams I guess they would have a graphic designer that's something I'm not um using too much my map no custom assets something like that um or 3D modeler and and yeah someone that's usually good with UI

that's usually what they specialize in but maybe someone can be good at programming and UI but I think those are the main roles so you're kind of self-sufficient it sounds like you're you're developing your own games with your partner and you're uh you know promoting those games through your own channels and you don't have a high Reliance on on custom assets so you're sort of it is really just you to at this point yeah yeah at at this point but we do for the custom as that's like where we want to expand on and making it a full-fledged thing like things I'm not good at is UI and those custom assets so we're looking on to bring people to do that part but it's definitely the it's not like the top important it's like we want to make the most fun mini games at the end of the day that's what's going to draw the most people like keeping that um system right now we're like every week or two weeks we make a new mini game and that's like the most important thing is to like make something fun um but that that'd be nice at the end of the day to have those cosmetics and stuff but it's on the back burner right now to find someone to do

that got it um and I think you know one of the the other we we talked about sort of accessibility if you're a new if you're new to ufn if you're new to even coding and you're getting these errors and you're not really sure did I do something wrong or is this issue with a platform that can that can sort of add to the the frustration I think I think you you know brto you have the benefit of sort of knowing like okay I did everything right here like my code is is is is working properly but there's I'm still getting this error there must be you know an error with the system and I need to go find a workaround uh going back to that sort of accessibility conversation I can see that being a real roadblock for for folks who are new to the the platform uh yeah 100 per. you know how important is Community Management to to your success in terms of getting players to come back to your game at this moment we're actually seeing it less but at the beginning it was crucial like to get your MTH like the first two weeks on Discover are like very key and having

promotion having a channel is probably 50% of it like some people make really cool games that don't even go past 10 players so for us for miname like we I think in the first hour of our videos being posted we were at like 3,000 players so it's like very very very crucial um at the beginning but not now so now that our Maps established as much it's not as important like we still have a Discord we still are doing updates we're still making videos but the value definitely like I think we could actually sustain without making video if we delete our Discord like at this point um it would still like maintain for a for a while I'm not saying forever but for a pretty long time um so I'd say after the first month it's like integral like in crucial so you've got Discord you've got YouTube uh I think you mentioned you're also on Tik Tok and when you look at sort of those as your sort of levers which are the most

critical which are driving most players to your games today uh Tik Tok and shorts I'd say Tik Tok is better at the beginning because you can get a spike in views on Tik Tok um which is like you know you can get a million view video in like less than three hours realistically if it's the right video and um what we look at as a good measurement of how engaging the videoos is bookmarks like um they bookmark it they're probably going to go back so the first video I made got like 120,000 bookmarks in like a day and the second video another 100,000 and the third another so it's like people like we're coming back to that and then shorts is also really good it's not as like a powerful of like instant velocity but shorts is really really strong and constantly bringing people in because shorts if your YouTube channel is good like dags mine is not as good as dags but his will constantly get views so it's constantly bringing in people my Tik Tok has a like at a certain point

maybe after like two days zero more views which is fine like it gave but that crazy velocity so like those are the pros and cons and I I guess if I were to say what's better for most people would be like having a viral Tik Tok so viral short um in that sense because that velocity is so key into like breaking through at the beginning and getting on trending and then putting into the Discover algorithm oh Discord we mainly use it uh as a key to talk to our community um and Bug fixes and maybe suggestions on mini games but um it's been very helpful the most thing is forg 99% of bugs like get videos of it um stuff that we've never seen so that's where we use Discord it's been really helpful in that sense got it so Discord isn't so much of acquisition or retention lever uh but it is good for you know just having a line into your community and hearing any problems that come up yeah feedback exactly that's super interesting and um I'm curious just on you know you said

that you don't have you don't feel like uh you need to do as much marketing at this point through Tik Tok and YouTube what are you seeing in the data that's sort of telling you that it's not as necessary as it used to be yeah um well one is our Tik toks and shorts aren't as popular they weren't like getting they're not getting millions of views beforehand so they're less interest like maybe they just know the map or they know what's coming they're already playing it so our Tik toks haven't gone as viral as our first like four or five so we're seeing that but we're not seeing like our players dipping down or anything and then we've also like a there was a li of just like not like we didn't we did a huge update so we didn't update the map and we didn't make any videos for two weeks and you know nothing really changed anything it still went had highs too and like it we just don't see any like we're seeing a very consistent pattern of following the player count so that's that's pretty much why one other thing we've heard is that the thumbnail is critical to the success of a game um and it's something that we've seen both on fortnite and

Roblox and I'm curious you know do ay is that the been your experience Berto and be like sag and Berto do you guys have a perspective on why thumbnail is so important like why why this would be prioritized yeah definitely I think it's just like YouTube it's just your first instinct um is what you see colors is also extremely important like your eye will catch onto something that's like you know more colorful or saturated like the colors so uh definitely key like because they have so there's so many things on your screen I think there's like 20 icons so like to be a differentiator is crucial um and also not to make it like too complicated not make sure the text is readable so yeah no I think it's just like YouTube where it's it's it's like 50% of getting the player in and that's what you need but yeah yeah I think that's that's my that's the same experience I've I've I've had like it's it's very much it

it's it's basically the door it's the conversion it's the it's the it's the first it's the first funnel step which is which is can you convert them from somebody that's looking through Discovery to choosing to play your game um currently we we don't get metrics on on that you know through through Epic Systems so we don't know how well a thumbnail performs but it's very easy to look at the games overall and see see where certain games are like it's a good game but just poorly marketed and just doesn't do well versus a game that's really well marketed but really not a good gain actually can do really well and so um and so you see you see all those examples and then you get the example of good thumbnail and good game that that's where you know that's where the magic starts starts to uh really happen the part that a bit puzzling to me is like if if I were designing a ugc game platform I would want to make sure that I elevated the ones that were the

best games based off of Engagement and retention and not the thing that was the most you know clickable thumbnail so I'm I'm just trying to process like you know clearly the algorithm is favoring and not in on on all platforms right on YouTube on on like the algorithm is favoring things with a high click-through rate so but if it has totally poor engagement it still might do really well and that to me seems counterintuitive to what a platform's goals are in terms of you know getting people into content they enjoy um yeah I think Mr Beast brought this up one time is like the thumbnail is so important because like once they're clicked they're they're almost invested so I'd say for me if like I go into a map I'm going to give it my my five minutes and that's more than five minutes on any other map at the bad thumbnail so that's that's how they view it and I mean actually I forgot about these points that are like uh that just even prove how important a thumbnail is

like there used to be maps that literally put like fake items like that weren't going to be in the game and they just shot straight to the top they don't even have the they don't even have that item in the game like it's literally just a fake item in the start like zapatron you cannot put that in creative and like maybe they had a fake zapatron on the map or like a picture of it that wasn't actually there but like they would still play that map and it got I guess probably good play time because they probably just like they're in the map and then there's fighting so they don't even think about they're just going to start going shooting so that's uh yeah it's just another example of how thumbnails are just so powerful yeah I think that I think the challenge I think part of the challenge too is like like you like like epic smart and they're they're trying to figure out how to do this really well YouTube you know YouTube's smart like like all all these companies are employing really smart talented people trying to figure out that exact question that you just asked David and know that you just said it's like which which is like hey don't we want people in engaging content not

content that's necessarily well marketed and I think the I think the challenge is that most of these systems have some feedback loop on on number of people that have engaged with that piece of content So within fortnite we have CCU and that's a really prominent number um with pretty much no other gauge of of of quality from from a visual perspective inside of discover and so and so really good marketing can inflate your CCU which then creates a Snowball Effect within within that discover algorithm to further push that for more people to see they see a high CCU plus good marketing they'll be like oh there must be something good in this map and then and then once once there's some time spent there it's it's kind of hard to discern just from a backend perspective of is that engagement because of good marketing or is that engagement because of good gameplay either way it ends up being in it ends up being quote unquote engagement um what what I will say is that over probably over the the course

of the last nine months though as as as epic and and fortnite have evolved this I think we've seen more and more good games kind of rise to the top and as those good games kind of Rise they'll they'll take a little bit more of that space it'll be harder for some of this stuff that's just marketing to be able to kind of break into it I think it'll require good marketing from a thumbnail perspective it'll require Tik Tok it'll require external promotion and and then it'll require a good game and and so we'll see that competition increase the overall quality of the experiences along with changes that that I think fornite will continue to make in relationship to to that algorithm um trying to choose better content awesome well I think this is a good time to sort of transition to talking about ufn tooling a bit um one of the things that you know Zach you just sort of said is like you the the quality of content the type of content is going to change over time Berto I'm curious on your end like do you view all the like every time there's a new tooling update that unlocks a new

capability do you view this as a Potential Threat of there's new content that could be made to to displace you or or do you get excited about it in terms of how you can incorporate that into a miname box PV um more the latter like I don't um I guess so far I don't want to like jinx it but there have been like lots of people that have copied the map like literal like copies in like a different form and I mean we've sustained a lot of Cofe so I I'm less scared of that like um as long as we stay ahead and like I I get excited because like when there's a new tool it's like okay how can we use that and make it in a fun minute game which is even better because like a lot of maps can't do that they can't use like the camera tool like that would makes no sense in their map um but for us because we can condense it to like one like two minute game like if it fails it fails but if it's fine like it if it works it's great so I I get excited personally for my

map that's great I mean you know you see a lot in in USC people taking what already exists and making one slight Innovation and sort of taking taking Market from you know the the original Creator but I'm curious when you think about pushing these updates as new tools come out is it like how fast do you have to move in order to stay ahead and and make sure that your map continues to be the best miname box PvP map uh I guess from that perspective it's just if we can use the tool to make a fun gaming game we will if we don't like just keep focusing on making the best games like that's how we're going to stay ahead is like we're just going to constantly make fun games we're not going to look at other people's maps we're going to try to be the driver in the space like I have seen I've Never Been In Like A lot of people do go on other people's maps to learn but I don't want to learn about their stuff like I don't want I just want to make stuff that's my idea what I think is fun so like I want I want to be the driver I

don't really want to copy anyone so that's how I think about it like I can use a tool if not great but I'm just G make next week I'm gonna make a super fun mini game like that's that's my goal constantly like yeah um some people do do go on others map and learn and iterate off that but I I don't like to do that what um do are there features on the horizon that you're excited about uh the biggest feature from GDC that they were talking about I guess the the biggest trouble for a lot of fortnite devs and a lot of the map creators is like each update something breaks no matter what something's going to break and there's three instances that it completely broke our map like set us straight to zero pretty much so like um at GC they were talking about AV versioning so when they release a new update your map won't be on that version it'll be on a previous version and then you have to migrate eventually to the new one but you don't have to do it immediately on that update so it'll just

be in a previous state which sounds amazing you know like that' solve all those problems so like when we are ready to move to that update or we know that mutator zones are bug like then we can like adapt and then go to the new one and add the new features whatever they add so that's what I'm that's from GDC what I was like oh my gosh yes our map won't ever go straight to zero on update day and I don't have to be up at 2 am like panicking um I actually heard from a couple creators of their Maps breaking with updates and in some cases them not being able to get their audience back which I can't imagine the frustration that that that one would feel if that that happened yeah no that's uh definitely like a mental thing too like it goes straight to zero in like in our both those instances where our map broke other top Maps weren't breaking because they're not a round system like you know the top Maps pit Crazy R they're on a round system so it wasn't n't messing up theirs or they didn't use as many mutator zones where it wasn't crucial to

their game so like it could sustain like in where the maps that were they got super punished and like they didn't go back to their exact spot but like I can imagine if your map isn't in one of the top 20 like it might it would be even harder to bring back that audience like you just lost like the person that wanted to go to your map and it's like oh it's yeah so it's even harder so I yeah what you said a lot of people probably couldn't even bring back momentum after that it's pretty disastrous Zach when you take a look at this space are there any features that you think are particularly critical um you know the things I'm like like the things I'm excited about are things that start facilitating making your own weapons uh doing your own Collision um things that that really facilitate more gameplay aspects um and being able to create create more gameplay elements you sort of sort of w with the systems that that exist interact with them so like on the

road map I know there's like like the scene graph the scene graph work that epic is currently working on I think it's going to be huge um you know as well as the scene graph D I've seen a lot of excitement about it but I I don't quite follow out yeah I think it's more just a probably the best way to think about it's more just kind of a facilitating way to get to fundamental building blocks and to create you know sort of prefab new prefab elements that that include different comp different components like a collision system and so so you so it's kind of comes back down to it's like like fortnite's kind of like like fortnite creative and ufn are kind of working their way from the top down which is like oh what a battle royale could we open up to people to be able to modify and and use and and so so that's it's kind of going top down and so sing graph is like one of the first things kind of getting enabled that's kind of like in this middle kind of lower middle area where it's like a kind

of like a it's almost like it's almost like the equivalent of coding in some way it's like ver script only for data and so and so now it's like oh now I can really author data in a way that the engine understands and really facilitates um uh the kind of like the way that fortnite operates and so now those components work together so you get like itemization will come out like will come part of part of probably will come out of some of the scene graph work because those things kind of have to go together to be able to package how an item appears in the world like what happens when you drop it out of your inventory and and so a a lot of those pieces that are just really difficult to allow creators to use until you've done something really fundamental like that cool um and so I'd love to zoom out and sort of look at it look at the platform perspective you know we we talked about sort of the need to build something that the audience wants and right now the audience wants things that are sort of Battle Royale adjacent but Lego did launch Lego

fortnite I think one of the reasons they did that was not just to re-engage the community but also to try and draw in a new audience and that new audience had the potential to Spur demand for things that were outside of the shooter genre however we saw even today you know it's still 90% shooter content even when you exclude epics games themselves so people are still primarily engaging in in shooter content I'm curious you know for either of you you know what do you think epic needs to do in order to change what's popular on fortnite in order to grow that audience um I guess I can take a t stab at it first um for me I guess I am in that demographic I have no interest in playing tycoons personally um some of them are really fun though like I could see they're really good qualities like I I actually avoid it because they're too addicting like YouTuber Tycoon like I was like I want to see what happens when you get 100 million Subs but I was like playing it for an hour and I was like and it's they

got like the nice popping noise when you get a sub and it's like really really like it just makes you want to keep playing but like um for me as a fortnite player like no ufn like I just want to play Combat games that's what I get on fortnite for at the other the days to do build fights to play box fights um BR like that's what I get on so I think it's more like an overtime kind of thing you have to like grow a new audience and I think it's slowly it's in my eyes it it won't be there for like another year or two till you till we get like those growing audiences cu the only like real game I play that isn't a fighting game and sometimes I'll play Guess Who Um with a friend but like realistically I I am that demographic so I understand like I'm I'm probably never going to be playing those Maps so it's like you have to like what you said earlier is generate this new audience from videos and stuff and that I think it'll be a slow process but I think in two or three years we'll see like Tower Defense games being really popular um and traditional things that have not like that people have made right now but we'll probably

do better in like two or three years down the road that's how I view it I I think this is like the quandry of of of kind of all instantiated audiences like an audience creates momentum that wants certain things um your Discovery and your your your feedback systems tend to facilitate that audience finding the things that they're interested in which then doubles down into those things being popular which then doubles down into bringing more people into that same audience um and and I think I think the the there's you know there's multi-prong challenge it's everything from how do you reward things that are not Shooters and how do you ensure that they have space within with within the platform um it's making sure that they have all the tools that are necessary to make the things are not Shooters feel good I mean part of the reason the shooters are so popular within fortnite is because fortnite is functionally a shooter and and so shooting feels really good building feels awesome those are those

are really ingrain things the way your character moves in relationship to those activities works really well um your character navigating up you know through W up walls and through other things has been something really recent that fortnite has done to try to to try to kind of broaden the types of experiences that could be played and they just even the mantling elements have made platforming a much more accessible thing within within the space so what will need to happen over time is is that that the tools will need to get more robust the there'll need to be spaces for those audiences to exist and find the content that they want to play and then there's going to need to be incentives of some type uh for for developers to want to build those experiences inside of fortnite to be able to to to try to engender creating and allowing those audiences to grow I think what Berto said those was also spot on which is once you put those ingredients together it's still going to take time you're you're relying on some amount of friend-to-friend growth that'll that'll take time to grow and the other

realization is there's a lot of people in the world that have made a kind of a an arbitrary decision about whether or not fortnite is something that's right for them or not and so there's some number of people that don't even know what fortnite is about other than they don't want to play a free-to-play game and so have just opted out just independently and trying to figure out how do you so that last piece of this is like how does Epic or or even Crea like Berto how do we create more opportunities reconsideration events that allow people to kind of look at and go oh I didn't know fortnite was about that I will go give that a try and I I think Lego is a great example that that showed a lot of Promise um and continues to show a lot of Promise in allowing people to have those re reconsideration events about re rethinking their mind oh fortnite's more than just a battle royale yeah exactly what Zach said is like my brother and my f or brother and his friends like they're like oh so you just play the BR a day I was like no cuz I I knew back in the day they love

Guitar Hero so I was like no fortnite is like it's everything so I showed them Festival they're like wait this is amazing like we're playing as like Peter Griffin on you know playing Festival like isn't this and they were like uh they downloaded they they had no idea a festival was a thing because in their mind that preconceived notion fortnite is the BR like that's all it is they don't even know creative they don't even know anything about ufn that's probably the majority of everyone outside of the fortnite space they lit that's what they pictures like that VR like shooting experience so I think over time yeah hopefully building up that knowledge but that that that's what it is at right now that's super interesting I mean I think a couple points that that stand out to me are you know Zach one you know the point that the game sort of Prior or you know epic has prioritized making certain things feel really good and that is sort of what content you see doing the best so shooter man like you know obies was sort of the second the next most popular

type of of game genre that we saw after Shooters um and and that's because in part it sounds like uh fortnite does such a good job of movement mechanics uh and animation so those all feel really good to play I think that's something I hadn't considered it's not it's not just about you know growing the audience it's also about growing the tool set and allowing for these new types of games to feel really good just from a gameplay perspective um so we'll be really interesting to see you know we saw I think Lego didn't didn't have as much of an impact as I had hoped it would but maybe these things take time and and you know repeated instances of it's more than just battle royale will finally drive home to to you know non shooter players that this is a place for them as well um one of the things that was sort of big news was fortnite returning to Mobile in Europe I think this is you know mobile is obviously a massive potential audience I'm curious what you guys think

will happen when fortnite you know returns to mobile will we see will we see you know something similar to Roblox where you have 80% of Engagement happening on mobile or what type of numbers are we expecting to see there um well I don't know about the data but I I do know the most at least like two years ago the most like it was like significant is the most played uh por on fortnite it's on Console PS4 and Xbox so that's actually a lot of our games is like we kind of cater like we don't want it to be feel too good on mouse and keyboard like no advantage on mouse and keyboard like we do try to make it good for controller like there is one game that you could like aim crazy with the mouse and keyboard and be easier and we scrapped that because it was like it doesn't feel good on controller so we actually for our games we we actually Target it towards console um and I don't know if that's still the case but I think it's mainly going to always be like that cuz I remember when they did the numbers it was like significant like console was the uh was

the biggest audience but that could that could have changed I think the um I think as we get into Mobile like Mobile's a big I mean just having accessibility to be able to play any point you want I mean even if you're a console player or PC player there may be times where you're at a friend's house or you're you're doing something where you know playing on mobile is the way that you can play so think there's like I think the I think the key things for fortnite is that that they've really prioritized crossplay you know and the ability for you to be able to easily just jump in and play with your friends regardless of what device you're on and not having mobile um specifically iOS not having that as a as as a space where you can play fortnite um is really limited is really limited some of the advantages of that crossplay system uh specifically over s networks right it's like it's just just the overall accessibility of that um so I think it's

huge I I I like you know like like there's a big audience there and like I think we will see a lift in players how big that lift is I I don't I don't know I think it probably depends upon where you know it's like is it on iOS how easy is it for people to get into that Marketplace how easy is it for people to download uh currently fortnite's available on Android phones which is you know huge in Europe but but the accessibility the ease of which you get the epic games launcher download it to your Android device install fortnite there just a lot of there's just a lot of warnings between you and and playing that game on your on your mobile device at the moment um which really prevents the audience from converting I makes sense so it sounds like we're we're bullish on it increasing engagement with the existing audience but maybe not unlocking you know uh a ton of new users who don't have consoles and only have access via a tablet yeah I hope I'm wrong and I hope it becomes like Roo where like a huge huge Surplus audience

comes in but um I I don't yeah that's how I be it what you said I I think there may be a lot of people that play Roblox right now that would play fortnite if it was available on mobile and so I I think that audience I think we could see that audience show up um most likely because they have friends that are playing fortnite but just don't have a way to play it otherwise all right so we might see some more competition between Ro BLS and fortnite as a result of uh of mobile accessibility uh speak on that note I'm curious will do you guys think that there will be another ugc game platform as significant as fortnite in Roblox or is it always just going to become be these two ugc game behemoths competing I I guess I I don't know too much about like other spaces and stuff I just know fortnite is such a huge game that like I can't imagine another game could build a ugc experience like the like with the audience pre-made audience so like that's this big like I can't imagine game like even if Call of Duty had

something with like a huge like it's not even going come close to fortnite so like I I can't imagine it and but I don't know too much about the space because like I'm I've just been playing fortnite like I only play fortnite so like I'm just it's like a kind of outside in perspective like I don't I don't think I have the best knowledge but for me I I don't think it's GNA happen for a long time I think it's tough like I think so I I think there's two different questions that you have in there David which is like I think one question is is like do we think that there will be another game that's as big as fortnite and or you know or as big as you know as big as Roblox um I think the answer is yes I I I think there will be some game at some point the next 10 10 to 10 years that that ends up being as big that captures sort of the cultural moment uh in a unique way and and gets a lot of people to come in um now will that game have a ugc space I don't I I think it's really hard to build a ugc game and to build a really

good game that also captures this cultural moment it's just like building building a hit game is just hard period you know putting ugc on top of it is really really difficult um fortnite was kind of like a kind of like a best case scenario the the the way fortnite was built really enabled it allowed it to be enabled by ugc um like like the destruction and the way the pieces existed in the engine the basically the whole way the game was architected really facilitated this creative space um roadblox on the other hand has had you know you know 18 17 18 years of growth right and and they really hit it during the pandemic and and um but that's it's taken a long time for them to get as big as they are now um I don't see I don't see anyone on the horizon right now like in any space I mean even even with huge audiences you know Facebook you know with um with metal world was it metal worlds anyways but like like like even like I don't see

anybody that has a big enough audience that also is interested in playing the game that's built by them um to be able to convert in um I do think I do think something will supplant it um will supplant both of these um within within the next 10 years but it's hard to predict what it will look like um my my guess is it will most likely be strongly AI enabled in some way like it's it's it's and it's not there's an accessibility piece there but it's also but in my mind it's more about facilitating the speed of development between the idea and getting something to play and so I think something like that will pop up but I think it'll be I think it'll it'll I think it's going to surprise us when it does so it'll be something that just that just comes out of nowhere awesome well I W to I want to sort of move towards wrapup but before we do that just curious what what what

is in store for for you guys let's say you hopped into a real life Rift and emerg three years from now with a bunker Jonesy beard how it developing for fortnite have changed and how would your roles as leaders in this space have a ball uh well for me um I did start uh like an escort business with dag so we want to expand make more maps have under our name so in three years ideally we'd have this one and we'd have like couple more I I can't imagine it doing better than this one but like that'd be great but like you know like four or five that has like we have our solid audience and um I guess that's how I Vision me in like three years and also I wouldn't be a developer I'd more be like a a senior engineer where I don't actually have to do the code I just review people's code oh you don't want to be CEO you just want to be senior engineer of your company uh honestly I don't I I've been in like so many meetings the past months that like I don't think like that just I

I don't think I want to do that me all right yeah yeah so many but there's like so many marketing meetings like going back and forth and it's like I just want to make cool things like I really don't care about this like these like um some of these I do care obviously I do care it's just it's not what I'm passionate about like going through these meetings and like talking about uh like designing like let's say like we're we're making a new uh uh pregame Lobby like I like I could I just want to make some fun mini gamess like test like touch my brain like but it's obviously a very crucial part of our map but like that's the stuff I'm not interested I just want to make cool stuff so like I don't think I'm like that marketing the brand stuff all that those meetings like they don't interest me I can't imagine myself wanting to do that in three years unless I have to I think that the this is a this is a struggle that many entrepreneurs have is you know when their as their company

grows they find themselves doing things that weren't why they got started in the first place so I'm hopeful that you'll be able to to figure it out and make sure you keep doing what you love and um I'm curious Zach on your side what's uh what does three years from now look like for you besides the long beard yeah I I think uh I think at the moment it's it's probably some combination of either having having in hand this uh this ugc platform that disrupts everybody else I would love to find a way to find someone to work on that with and and figure that out because I I think there's a lot of opportunity to facilitate human imagination in interactive experiences and I don't I don't even think we've seen we've even seen the start of what that even looks like yet um you know it's it's it's really early days for you know I feel like feel like we're using these really old weird cameras that you see from the you know the 1800s or

whatever you know it's like like that it's not you know we're very early on in in this stateof the-art when it when it comes to to building experiences and on the other side of that coin I think it's you know for for me at the moment I I'm spending a lot of time with creators and really helping to see if I can facilitate their vision and what they want to do within fortnite or Roblox or any of these other other spaces and spinning more time trying to understand the social media space you know stuff where where Berto is coming from I think uh I think a huge part of this is building huge part of being successful with anything is building audiences I'm excited about like the combination of all those spaces and so three years from now I'm hoping to have a whole lot of tools under my tool belt uh and and experience and all those things and for listeners who want to follow you guys going forward what's the best way for them to do that uh for me either my Tik Tok is where you can like watch the videos that I use so that's Berto TV and then more for like the miname updates and like personal stuff

I'd say the better one is Twitter which is Berto bro yeah yeah is debating on whether or not you're gonna say experto or you're gonna say Twitter um uh so uh and then yeah and then for uh for me it's probably it's actually probably my LinkedIn which is you know just under Zack Phelps and and then um and then also uh on on Twitter uh sueper Zack awesome well Zack and thank you guys so much for joining this has been an awesome conversation I think the audience learned a lot about building ugc game platforms or or being successful on them thanks so much for joining thank you for having me it's pleasure if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a fstar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to check out our website

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