Unreal Editor for Fortnite

Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) is a specialized version of Unreal Engine released in 2023 tailored for creating and editing user-generated content within Fortnite, a video game developed by Epic Games. It integrates the functionalities of Unreal Engine with aspects of Fortnite, allowing for a more comprehensive experience than its predecessor Fortnite Creative.

With a GUI almost identical to that of Unreal Engine, UEFN gives developers a familiar interface and tooling. It differs from Unreal Engine by allowing users to enter a live edit session, where other collaborators can load into the project via Fortnite and participate in development via the Fortnite Creative toolset. Changes made in the edit session by collaborators are automatically updated in UEFN, although changes made in UEFN must be pushed through the content service- a process that takes anywhere from thirty seconds, to several minutes depending on server availability and the hardware of the host. The most prominent feature is implementation of the Verse programming language to interact and interface with players, objects, game logic, and the spatial environment. The addition of Verse is the first time developers have had scripting ability, and has allowed for far more robust and unique experiences to be created than the Fortnite Creative toolset allowed. To the surprise of many, Epic chose not to include its visual scripting platform 'Blueprints' that is widely used in Unreal Engine. Amongst the Fortnite community, projects made with UEFN are referred to as 'Creative 2.0' while projects created in the former are considered 'Creative 1.0'.^[1] With the release of UEFN, Epic also launched its Island Creator program in addition to the previous Support-A-Creator program, both creator programs allow developers to benefit financially from their creations through different methods- most of which, are not publicly disclosed as a precaution for abuse. Dubbed by Epic as the Creator Economy, the Island Creator program follows a similar model of its sandbox competitors Roblox, and Minecraft. The Island Creator program has been financially successful due to the success of their projects on paying developers to create successful games in UEFN. In the first year of UEFN's beta phase, the Island Creator program has paid an estimated $320 million to over 20,000 developers with published experiences.^[2] The ecosystem has caught the attention of prominent AAA game developers.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]}

Many features in UEFN added capabilities for developers that were not possible or properly functional in Fortnite Creative. The ability to create games with complex systems and gameplay mechanics were not possible in Creative 1.0, due to incomplete systems such as it lacking any scripting language, inability to undo actions, and every other tool required to create complex working games or experiences. Creative 2.0 is the successor of Creative 1.0 that brings those tools to life, as well as additional Unreal Engine tools that increase the functionality and development standards of Fortnite Creative.

^[14][2]

In Fortnite, the Discovery is an in-game browser that allows players to search up published creator made games and play them. Each game in a Discover row consists of a thumbnail, title, and the current amount of players playing the experience. The algorithm works based on a mix of total clicks per view, player engagement, player retention, and the amount of V-Bucks users have spent after visiting a UGC experience. The addition of the public facing player count metric for each game was met with backlash from less popular developers, alleging that it makes it harder to build a player base when potential users browsing Discover see no players in an experience and thus negatively compounding algorithmic bias against them. Epic does this to allow better and high quality games to become more successful, however much exploiting from creators that make addictive and low-effort copied games that abuse the algorithm have ironically allowed low quality games to thrive and good games to be less or not successful at all, which is one of the major criticisms and drawbacks of the algorithm. In hopes of allowing better quality games to thrive, Epic Games is continuously updating and making changes to the Discovery algorithm. These efforts have been somewhat unsuccessful so far, with countless numbers of UEFN developers still constantly complaining about the low player counts their published games get, and how their high-effort games are always being outplaced by other simpler and more low-effort games. ^[15]

With the release of UEFN, and its new feature of importing custom content, Discovery was met with a wave of intellectual property infringement in its curated rows of creations, ranging from the public facing thumbnail, to in-game assets. These experiences were able to thrive in the Fortnite community due to poor internal content review policies and procedures at Epic. In a tweet posted February 23, 2023 the official Fortnite Creative account addressed the issue for the first time and although this content may sometimes still appear, it has been drastically reduced.

Another controversy that has troubled the beta stage of UEFN and the creator community is the use of requesting DMCA takedowns or action from Epic for experiences containing UGC created in Fortnite that is the same, or similar to other UGC created in Fortnite. Stemming from top creator TeamGeerzy filing an application to trademark "The Pit",^[16] and subsequently requesting Epic to takedown experiences with 'pit' terminology in the title (a common practice in many UGC ecosystems). Multiple experiences were then taken down by Epic which lead to major community backlash ultimately resulting in the official Fortnite Creative X account to respond to a tweet where they addressed the issue and reinstating the offending maps.^[17][18][19]

"Understanding User-Generated Content in Gaming". Pubnub. March 12, 2024.