Why five prominent gaming influencers are teaming up to build the top Fortnite Creative experience

Five prominent gaming influencers are pooling their influence — and money — in an effort to build the first and largest creator-led experience inside Epic Games’ growing Fortnite Creative ecosystem.

At last month’s Game Developers Conference, Epic Games announced a raft of significant changes to its creator strategy in Unreal Engine and Fortnite Creative, including Creator Economy 2.0, a promise to dole out 40 percent of revenue from “Fortnite’s” Creative and Battle Royale modes to in-game creators.

Today, April 28, a group of five leading gaming influencers — SypherPK, Ninja, Nickmercs, TimTheTatman and CouRageJD — has announced the development of “Project V,” a custom Fortnite Creative game featuring unique game mechanics and quests connected to each creator’s brand and fandom. With their collective following of over 120 million, these creators are hoping to turn “Project V” into the No. 1 Fortnite Creative experience after its planned release in Q2 2024.

To learn more about the strategy behind “Project V,” Digiday spoke to Ali “SypherPK” Hassan and his wife and business partner Daniela Ali, the CEO of SypherPK’s Fortnite Creative development company Oni Studios, for an annotated Q&A.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

On the role of Epic’s Creator Economy 2.0 in sparking the venture

Ali “SypherPK” Hassan:

Myself and my team have been in the creative scene for a while, putting out maps and whatnot. But once they unveiled Unreal Editor for Fortnite and the new creator program at GDC, I started thinking. Funnily enough, when they did the GDC stream, Ninja was there, Tim was there, CouRage was there and Nick was tweeting about it. That same day, I started calling them up, and I was like, “let’s see if we can join forces. Let’s assemble the Avengers.” We agreed very quickly about coming together on a project like this.

Digiday:

At this point, the writing is on the wall: Epic appears to be building out a creator economy in Fortnite Creative to rival that of Roblox, the virtual experience platform that paid out over $500 million to in-game creators in 2021. The most successful experiences inside Roblox, including games like “Adopt Me” and “Brookhaven,” are not necessarily the most finely tuned games — they’re the ones that got in early. “Brookhaven” was created in April 2020, as Roblox user numbers skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and players have visited the experience over 30.2 billion times in the years since. By kicking off their venture only a few weeks after Epic’s announced changes, the creators of “Project V” are gearing up to be the first movers in this new ecosystem.