Even though no big mentions are made, everyone sees both Roblox and Fortnite and compares them. So I am making a post to bring all the knowledge I’ve gathered of UGC engines and game platforms, and pinpoint all the ways that Fortnite can grow and start catching up to Roblox.
- Stable Foundations
This one is the primary and core reason why Fortnite-verse can’t keep up with Roblox, at least in the current meta. Even after all the promises made by Epic to keep the engine stable, even after all the talks of setting up infrastructure in a way that BR seasons don’t mess up UEFN maps, it still hapens and from our side, we haven’t seen a stable period for a while now, because we create complex maps that are not BR copies or mini-games. And with scalability comes complexity, and the cracks show easier. Just this update, NPCs no longer disappear when eliminated, something that literally takes 1 minute to catch as QA, ours caught it instantly. This issue in BR wouldn’t have made it in the game at all, it would have been caught and fixed. But in UEFN, we don’t have these resources, and its clear from our point of view that if major bugs like that go live every 2 weeks, we need more manpower to do maintenance, than to actually create new content. Which then means harder to adapt to new trends and even harder to innovate. Epic needs to invest more into manpower that cares about the engine and space and keep pushing the infrastructure shift to favor stability and modularity. It’s sad to see a game you worked for 6 months break every 2 weeks after release, no developer out there has to deal with that instability and we will be forever crippled when competing with other platforms unless this issue overall is addressed.
- Friction
I ll place friction before accessibility, because friction to me is the enemy of creativity. When you are creative, you are in the zone and you keep building until you have a product/prototype. Friction on the other hand, is what prevents you from getting there. UEFN is based on UE, which is based on engine foundations created in the 90’s. Some of those principles are still there, but others have been overhauled. Friction is currently caused by major parts of the engine that have NOT been modernized, like the naming system, landscape tools, UI, level design tools, lack of 2D dev tools (Paper 2D was removed from UEFN btw and I hated it because how do you remove something before adding an alternative way to do 2D). Even Fortnite has deprecated systems, like matchmaking (no player server creation, most of the time you connect to a map, there is simply an error, no level instancing for games).
- Accessibility
This is a big one and will make player counts rise, but I placed it third because the first two are needed first (Stability so we can create, less friction so we can be creative, then accessibility to bring in people after we made something). Reducing the client and making it easier to simply play Fortnite will unlock a lot of players that want to play in a bad connection or simply dont want to wait or have space in their device to install the full game. The ability to simply press play and you only have 1-2 skins instead of 1000s available, or all the in-game content is loaded on demand rather than all together (like how PS5 lets you play before you fully install), will help entice more players into waiting and trying the game, and if the first two points are also done, they ll have a reason to install and find something they like.
- Mindset
Lots of Fortnite players, in their heads, play to grind something. They forget to say they had fun; they just want to aim at a goal and keep playing till they get it. But that’s not what games are about. Epic has trained players for years to want to complete challenges and get more cosmetics, but a game should be about fun. Roblox is about fun right now; you don’t play to grind anything, you play to see something unique and enjoy. But Fortnite creators can’t do that; it’s too risky, therefore they rely on copying trends from other platforms. This is also partly due to the ecosystem being built around FOMO and trend chasing as well. Innovation, for a good amount of 2 years, was not rewarded in Fortnite (even now it’s partly rewarded), only good analytics. Which made matters worse, and now it’s obvious that Fortnite hasn’t grown the past 6 months in their total player base, but Roblox has exploded.
- Innovation
This is a hard one, because its hard to gauge. Innovation is one of those key areas that if it works, something looks good but you don’t know why. However, after seeing many UGC platforms come and go, I can tell when a platform is letting creators innovate and when it’s not. This platform, mainly for the reasons I mentioned above, is not letting users innovate. And its not fully because of the tools, but mostly because of how little it lets players and creators to control their game. You can’t make servers and host UEFN games then invite your friends, heck if you pass 6-10 players in a single server, the whole thing comes crashing down with verse devices crashing and server TPS going under 10s. In Roblox you see every game has at least 50 player lobbies and that social interaction is key, it makes games feel more alive and popular. They also can freely innovate and make a new game genre/niche, and that still allows them to find success. I dare you to tell me one successful and innovative game that has not been a copy of another game from another platform in this space, I simply can’t think of one. And this is because Epic doesnt let us innovate, the editor limits are very strict, bugs remove full workflows every update, and deprecated developer thinking and technical quirks make it hard for new developers to adapt to how UEFN works (higher learning curve), reducing innovative teams/creators to merely a figure that can be counted in two hands. There is also around 10k creators who have been abandoned since UEFN released, with their issues and tools sometimes not being addressed (Fortnite Creative) and their tools never improving (like the ability to do more inside Creative), making them be tied to the same issues that we had in 2018, and struggling to make basic things like logos still. And there is so much room for more too. Discovery mode hooks being trained on what exists will never allow something new to come around. Players should determine the meta, not Epic. Even though discovery was made to remove bias from curation, it created bias for the entire platform instead (and irreversible damage as we see now, with half of the UEFN studios running on fumes or closed). The tools are all there to create incredible games, we just need a platform that they can live in (discovery is not it). I ll repeat it again for clarity:
- Player curation and servers
- Player map tagging and sorting
- Player reviews on maps which also affect rankings and ratings
- Player playlists for maps that can be shared with other players
Lastly, Epic needs to attract, respect and flourish innovators. They are the only thing that can make the platform rise and expand through genuine means that tie to the medium. Trend-chasers and map grinders will always create mid-content and at best a good copy of another game that is marketed well. Innovators on the other hand, when everything lines up and the platform doesn’t ignore them, can create new metas that will explode in popularity (which is what happened to Roblox with 99 days at the forest, grow a garden and italian brainrot). You will know a platform does it right when they have to do nothing and players go wild for new content all the time. Players will then want to install Fortnite to play those games specifically, because they sound fun. But you also have to allow those niches to exist somewhere indefinitely and make sure to not break them every update too so the devs can push content updates instead of maintenance fixes. Also it doesnt help that Fortnite has converted content creators to map makers, because they dont truly care about mapmaking (at least not all of them), but the fact that it pays well; its like converting the marketing department to developers, they wont do as good of a job as developers, and now you have no marketing too. To favor innovators, you have to whitelist them and give them all the tools they need to flourish their craft. The whitelisting ensures they can innovate, they are not bound by arbitrary limits meant for bad players, so literally half of the limitations in this space do not apply to them. Treat them like kings, like 2019 Creative did, and they will work their magic in return.
- Flexibility
After all the above, the last thing we need is the power to create anything we want. And anything is a hard word to put into effect. Currently, we are always locked into a single fixed humanoid character as the player, but the limits have to be broken. Let us make the player be an animal, or the entire game be based on UI alone. Give us the power of a gamedev engine and stop investing in areas that feels arbitrary for a game. A game is about sentiment, telling a story, providing fun to a person that wants to forget their everyday problems. It’s never about CCU, retention, or all these meaningless metrics that were made by non-artistic individuals to explain their presence in the scene. Epic, stop relying on FOMO/rewards and let players simply have fun. Stop thinking rationally with updates and stop asking the majority of an audience for things; instead, feel it out and trust yourselves that you can make the best platform out there. I know you can, I wouldn’t be here otherwise. And even though I did mention them above, stop relying on those ■■■■ analytics and simply open the game and see how you can improve it, rest will come. The solution matters, not the problem
Well said. Shame how many maps wake up with game breaking bugs each update or get killed off by discover while some maps have not been updated in over a year and get every discover row.