Updated Engagement Payout Formula with User Acquisition Rewards

General Announcements
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We’re now using the updated engagement payout formula announced in September https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-be-able-to-sell-in-game-items to calculate your payouts. The new formula is effective today and will be reflected in your November engagement payout (paid starting December 30).

Engagement from paying players is now measured in the following metrics, which make up the engagement payout formula:

  • Active Playtime
  • Playtime Surrounding Item Shop V-Bucks Spend
  • Island Retention
  • User Acquisition Rewards: New Players
  • User Acquisition Rewards: Returning Players

User Acquisition Rewards
The updated formula better rewards developers for bringing new players to Fortnite and reengaging lapsed players. For each new or returning player you bring in, you’ll receive 75% of their contributions to the engagement pool for the next six months. These contributions are based on the value of that player’s V-Bucks spending in the Item Shop.

Attribution for new and lapsed players is determined as follows:

  • In-game search and direct links: Players who reach their first island by searching for it or via direct link [ Links in Fortnite Creative | Fortnite Documentation | Epic Developer Community ] are fully attributed to that island.
  • First-day playtime: Players who reach their first island via Discover (not search or direct links) will have their engagement pool contributions divided among the islands they play on their first day, based on the percentage of time played per island.

Island-Specific Retention
We’re also updating the retention component of the formula to be island-specific rather than ecosystem-wide, giving you more ways to influence the retention portion of your payouts.

Combating Fraudulent Engagement
To help combat fraudulent engagement, payouts will now only count engagement from players who’ve made purchases. This doesn’t reduce the total pool; it simply removes non-payer engagement from the calculation.

Changes to Creator Portal
We’re also adding User Acquisition Rewards metrics to the Creator Portal. Starting today, payout estimates in the Estimated Daily Payouts chart will be based on the updated formula, and you’ll find Plays and Active Players metrics for your direct links in a new Links tab, helping you understand and optimize their performance.

Once your November payout data is available (when payouts are processed on December 30), you’ll be able to see how User Acquisition Rewards contributed to your total engagement payout in the Monetization tab.

For more details on how engagement payouts work, including how the pool and your payout are calculated, and the monetization data available in the Creator Portal, head to the Engagement Payout documentation Engagement Payout in Fortnite Creative | Fortnite Documentation | Epic Developer Community .

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This is way too much and too long. How long a player has to be inactive to count again as returning? 6 months?

So imagine following scenario:

  1. BR update and heavy marketing from Epic brought a player to Fortnite.
  2. Player plays BR for 60 mins.
  3. Player plays random map from the top of the discover for 30 mins.
  4. In next 6 months player doesn’t play the map from 3. anymore as they didn’t like it.

And what? This map from 3. gets huge benefit just because they were at the top of discover when BR update got released? Makes no sense, change my mind.

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Hello @Flak What the Island-specific Retention means exactly. That the algorithm now looks on the specific game category retention and based on that promotes your game to Discovery or the browsing categories ( meaning that we are now competing with games of our game category/genre and not with all games )? Or it means that now the better retention you have you will get paid more? Cause this one we dont understand well.

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YES! :clap: :tada: :grin: If I’m understanding this correctly, this means we are no longer sharing revenue with bad actors and all good-faith creators will see a bump in engagement payout. This is a really smart way to kill botting.

Edit: Do you think the same ideas could be applied to discover algorithms?

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@Flak I’m really trying to understand how this new formula is supposed to be fair.

The idea sounds good on paper, but in reality only maps with big visibility or constant Discover placement will see any real benefit. Smaller or newer creators can’t realistically compete for “new” or “returning” players when most traffic goes to the same islands.

Also, 75% of a player’s contributions for six months feels way too much. Why six months? And how long does someone have to be inactive to count as a returning player?

Another question — if a player joins Fortnite because of a BR update, plays BR for an hour, and then opens a random map from Discover for 20 minutes, does that map seriously get rewarded for half a year for that one session? That just doesn’t make sense.

Would really appreciate some clarity on how this actually helps creator diversity instead of just amplifying the same few maps.

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You guys measure “Playtime Surrounding Item Shop V-Bucks Spend”

But I cant make or brand a map inspired in any skin…

So, how creative maps is supposed to influence the willing of purchase?

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They are going to allow you to sell items in your map soon

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What means witch this Playtime Surrounding Item Shop V-Bucks Spend