Fans of the Fortnite Creative mode are about to get the full Unreal Engine editor later this year, as revealed by Epic Games founder and major shareholder Tim Sweeney in an interview with Fast Company.
Needless to say, having access to the complete toolset should greatly expand what community creators can build in Fortnite. Additionally, Sweeney announced plans to allow them to monetize creations in a way akin to Roblox.
Fortnite Creative is a set of tools that anybody can use to build their own Fortnite island. About half of Fortnite play time by users is now in content created by others, and half is in Epic content. And that’s just the very beginning. Later this year, we’re going to release the Unreal Editor for Fortnite–the full capabilities that you’ve seen in Unreal Engine opened up so that anybody can build very high-quality game content and code . . . and deploy it into Fortnite without having to do a deal with us–it’s open to everybody.
Our aim is to make it a first-class outlet for reaching the consumers, just like you might look at the mobile app stores and consoles and Steam as ways to reach users. Now people are also looking at Fortnite, and at Roblox, as ways of reaching users. Along with that, we’re building an economy, and it will support creators actually building businesses around their work and making increasing amounts of profit from the commerce that arises from people playing their content.
It’s worth noting that Fortnite was the first game to be upgraded to Unreal Engine 5, which begs the question of whether the editor will include support for new UE5 features such as Lumen and Nanite.
Fortnite, currently busy with Chapter 3 Season 2 which introduced a no-building mode, recently became available via Xbox Cloud Gaming (no subscription required) on iOS, iPadOS, Android phones and tablets, and Windows PC as part of the Xbox Everywhere program.
