We all know that discover still needs a lot of improving, but in general it works great. It’s not Epic’s fault that players really enjoy tycoons and combat maps, since Creative’s playerbase is almost the same as the Battle Royale one.
The main issue we’ve seen is that the algorithm favors too much Average Playtime. The “Most Popular Maps/Best of UEFN” tabs are full of tycoons because the player spends 40+ minutes playing the map and in most cases, leave it and never play it again. In the current system, It looks like that it’s a lot better for a map if the player plays it ONCE for 40 minutes rather than having someone playing the same map 20min everyday.
No one knows the exact formula of the creative algorithm, but my team has a pretty strong feeling that it’s almost impossible to a minigame map pop-off in discover like a tycoon map. Amongst other maps, we created 3 maps that makes us feel this way.
First map is Bomb Wars. This was our very first UEFN and we published it on May 5th. It got a few players on the first weekend, but after that it was pretty much dead. It’s a hot-potato minigame, but to be honest it will hardly be played for 40+ min. During May the map had an average of 56 ccu players. 18 ccu players during June and 84 during July. In July, we updated it with some achievements, afterlife activities, faster gameplay and the result was good: we got an average of 100 ccu players/day.
The problem is that these numbers didn’t place the map in almost any row in discover during all these months. Most plays came from streamers playing it live or a few hundreds of fans that played the map regularly. Around that time the map had a Retention of 30% (players that played the day before that came back to play the next day)
Luckily, we applied to Epic Picks submission in May and got accepted to a feature in August! As you can see by the graph’s curve below, it got the attention of the players and achieved some really high numbers like 5,101 peak with 3000 average ccu players! During that time, the map entered Popular UEFN Experiences and Combat rows of discover, but it only lasted during the week feature. It’s really hard for a minigame map to hold a player for 40minutes+, but players are more likely to come back and play it later. The issue is that the “Retention” (playing daily) seems to be useless for discover rows, making it completely unfair to compete with playing a tycoon map that will be played only one time.
Bomb Wars was featured in August during 1 week and it maintained 862 average ccu/day players during the whole month. With 3 weeks of not being in any discover rows. And during september the same thing: it didn’t enter ANY row in discover and got an average ccu/day of 317 players. The map still has a retention rate of 24% and there are 840 players playing it and it’s been completely left out of any discover row since 24th August (1 day after the Epic Picks feature ended)
If you can’t beat them, join them! In September we decided to make a Tycoon map! MONSTER TYCOON RPG. It’s a pretty cool map that you have to build your house, hunt custom enemies, upgrade weapons, gather pets and lvl up. The map had an average playtime of ~40 minutes and in the second day it was already in a lot of Discover tabs (Fan Favorites/Up and Coming/Tycoon/New in UEFN). Basically, over the last 3 weeks, the map was shown in 12 different discover rows because the average playtime was so high that the algorithm simply put it everywhere. Since there’s no save device, the map is slowly dying as it’s replayability is very low, but it made huge numbers.
And the last map we made was Blade Ball Fortnite. It’s another minigame map, built with our baggage from other minigame maps and this time we created a game similar to a famous Roblox/Overwatch 2 gamemode, making it easier for the player to understand the map. The map had a pretty low start, entering only a few rows of New Experiences in discover. We posted a few clips of the map in social media and got lucky that a pretty big streamer made a tiktok that got 6million views on it, so it suddenly pop-off.
The map hit an average of 6.000 ccu players during the weekend and was amongst the most 20 played maps of the game, but it never entered Best of UEFN row probably because it’s average playtime is around 25min and not 40min. It appeared in a new row called “People Love” and “Popular UEFN Experiences” but after a few days left both of them. Even maintaining 2.5k ccu average players and a 24% Retention, it’s only in ONE row (Combat) of discover, which is crazy comparing to our tycoon map that was in almost 10 of them.
We’re not complaining about promoting Tycoon games since they are really fun and maintain a high average playtime, but in my opinion, Epic should consider showing more love to maps that doesn’t focus on making a 40+minutes average playtime, but instead focus on making players coming back to play it more often. (or maybe a minigame row in discover, after all what’s even the point of the tag?)
That’s all, thanks everyone for reading it and let’s keep building 
Once save is added tycoon-like games will have much higher retention than minigames.
it’s really scammy