Many have predicted the Internet’s growth as a convergence between physical reality and virtual space. So it’s no surprise that the concept of the Metaverse has been held onto dearly by many gamers and futurists alike. While Sci-Fi writers often depict the Metaverse as being accessed through virtual reality technology, media analysts have recently pointed at another potential candidate for its arrival, Fortnite.

But why Fortnite? It may seem surprising that the Battle Royale game best known for its dance memes has been caught in the spotlight in this way.

However, in its development over the years, Fortnite has proved that there’s more to it than meets the eye. In-game partnerships have brought the worlds of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, John Wick, and even Stranger Things into the fold of the Fortnite universe. Large-scale concert experiences like Marshmello’s Showtime and Travis Scott’s Astronomical have made headlines. Other musical appearances from the likes of Diplo, Young Thug, and BTS have showcased the breadth of Fortnite’s capabilities as an entertainment venue.

And it looks like these capabilities will only continue to evolve. Over the course of its existence, Fortnite has transformed from a team-based defense game to a 1 versus 99 Battle Royale to a wider range of team and squad-based game modes. And Epic has only added more ways to get in the game with player-made levels and creative mode and the events-centric Party Royale. The evolution of Fortnite beyond a singular game type makes sense considering the goals of its studio, Epic Games. Epic is also the developer of Unreal Engine, a 3D engine that while often used for game production has a wide range of uses for architecture, CGI, engineering, and more. Fortnite’s continued expansion provides an excellent demonstration of Unreal Engines’ production capabilities. And the in-game partnerships extend outward as evidenced by its usage in movies like John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and TV shows like The Mandalorian.

This episode, CEO Jamin Warren speaks with content strategist Paolo Yumol, and junior audience strategist Lyn Rafil to discuss the Metaverse, the extent to which Fortnite‘s brand partnerships build it, and how brands can participate in its development.

You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.

Jamin Warren:
So thank you all for joining me today. We’re going to be talking about Fortnite. At this point, it’s like what isn’t Fortnite? It’s interesting, but we wanted to take a step back and look at Fortnite. Just because it’s become so expansive at this point, we thought we’d do a little bit of a deep dive to take a look at some of the things that have been happening there. I think maybe to start do we have a quick top-down overview of how Fortnite has developed over the last couple of years? Because what it is now is not what it set out to be originally.

Lyn Rafil:
Yeah. That’s honestly such a good question. For one thing, it didn’t start out as a Battle Royale game, but that was the most popular mode that people really fixated on. It definitely had a lot of novelty of being in a match with 100 people simultaneously. And it has developed a lot more features that has pushed that hyper-social aspect to it, where I think they found that what makes it particularly sticky is creating a really wide social space of interactions and really making people confront the fact that you’re in a match with so many other people.

Lyn Rafil:
The experience of Fortnite extends beyond just what you’re playing in a match, and then with its popularity among streamers and YouTubers, etc., that it has created a very timely experiential system where it’s not just the same game over and over. It evolves. There’s lore to some degree, and the partnerships and marketing partnerships that happen within the game have developed as well, rather than just like a little one-off event here and there. The entire past season was Marvel oriented. Previously, I think like what, 2018, there was a Nike partnership that just included some skins and a very limited-time game mode. And since then it’s evolved where their partnerships can extend to a much longer period of time and really impact the gameplay a lot more than, here’s a simple skin. It actually changes what you can do in-game and what you can do with each other in-game.

Jamin Warren:
Remember also that the Battle Royale format that kind of 1v99 Fortnite was something that had already been popularized outside initially in Minecraft and then with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. So I think it says a lot that Fortnite was always very flexible. Fortnite had a very flexible relationship to its content and its approach from the jump. And it was always able to incorporate a lot of different things and ideas very, very quickly, but it makes a lot of sense given what Epic’s interest and involvement in Fortnite actually is. So yeah, it’s been interesting to watch that development over time over the last couple of years.

Jamin Warren:
The primary reason that we wanted to talk about it is like one of the things that we’ve been seeing is this idea of the Metaverse, which was certainly a popular idea amongst science fiction fans and technologists and futurists. And now we’re seeing this kind of enter the mainstream conversation, films like Ready Player One. I think Fortnite in a lot of ways, that’s a lot of the conversations you see about it as like, Oh, Fortnite is the future of the internet. Fortnite is the future of the Metaverse. What do you all think of … what is your understanding of the Metaverse? And do you think that that is actually attainable? Is this even a useful conversation that we’re having?

Paolo Yumol:
Something that I’ve sort of realized with Fortnite, because when I think of what constitutes a Metaverse or what would help facilitate the conditions that people could say are a Metaverse lake, they think about player or user input, generativity, the ability to participate in collective world-building, or like storytelling project that is easily accessible to everyone on whatever platform they choose. I think the reason why people use Fortnite as a primary example of what a Metaverse could look like in 2020 is because it’s sort of this amalgamation of really huge IPS, brand collaborations, very recognizable characters. It makes sense as a strategy for them to cherry-pick the largest media properties, but these media properties being like the stories that most people are accustomed to and larger narrative universes that people are more comfortable role-playing with them because they already know a lot of the characters and limitations around them.

Paolo Yumol:
When we look at the Marvel stuff from 2018, like the Infinity War mode, they just announced the creatives collaboration, they announced The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian is incredibly smart. I feel like that was so fast. Yeah. Both of those collaborations in particular, they came out right at the apex of those franchises, making a strong impression on the mainstream consciousness. And I feel like their ability to rope in all of these different brand stories and franchises as they’re becoming popular and ebbing and flowing within the sort of general mainstream cultural milieu, it’s allowed them to play to their strengths. But I think whether or not that actually constitutes what we could call an actual Metaverse, I think is something that’s up for debate and something that I certainly think that different people at our company feel different ways about.

Jamin Warren:
I mean, the pathway for a lot of folks for what Fortnite was is interesting was definitely through dances. Fortnite was a conduit for a media that was generated in other places. So YouTube, Tik Tok. So it makes sense by natural extension now they’re moving into just being a conduit for these other narrative universes from Disney, from Marvel, from all of these other universes. And so yeah, it is an interesting distinction when you ask what is Fortnite. It is so open-ended. It’s sort of a place where you can do some things. It’s a digital universe. It’s sort of at this point-

Lyn Rafil:
It’s also a Battle Royale.

Jamin Warren:
Right. It’s also ostensibly– like there is a game in there somewhere too, but that’s almost overshadowed by all of these partnerships. So I mean, I think it’s interesting. It has become this weird melting pot of all possible narrative universes, and fandoms kind of all fit inside of Fortnite at this point.

Lyn Rafil:
Paolo, you and I have talked very much at length in these conversations of how do all of these IP, especially extremely large IP franchises, all fit together in this space. For a lot of people, that’s kind of the signal of a Metaverse. I agree that it’s definitely arguable about whether or not it is the Metaverse, but it is kind of the signal of the Metaverse when talking like of Ready Player One and Neuromancer and Snow Crash and all of these things, kind of the idea behind it is that what makes a Metaverse the Metaverse is that it’s this conflation, and there’s almost no barrier between real life and the digital space.

Lyn Rafil:
You go in and out of it so freely. And there might be certain physical limitations or technological limitations to either one because that’s reality, but it’s so seamless. And I think that part of the reason why having these really large franchises show up in these spaces seems to be the signifier of the Metaverse is that, that is our easiest connection of the seamlessness between digital and real life. It’s recognizable. We don’t have to jump through mental hurdles to understand how this fits into this space. It just is.

Lyn Rafil:
I think that’s also where Fortnite in particular really succeeds, is that the suspension of disbelief, for whatever reason, we don’t question why these things exist in this space. It just is. And it happens. And we’re like, Oh, that’s cool. You might say like, “Oh, that’s unexpected.” But the surprise isn’t because this doesn’t fit in my head. The transition to be able to accept that Galaxy’s Edge and The Mandalorian sets can show up in Fortnite or that the BTS dance videos can show up. You don’t necessarily think that the puzzle pieces connect, but it’s almost as if they’re not viewing them as puzzle pieces.

Lyn Rafil:
What I think is also interesting with that dynamic is that the ways that other games and platforms haven’t fully been able to achieve that, Paolo, what you were saying on that generativity, like I’m thinking Roblox and Minecraft, spaces that do a lot of similar things, a lot of similar crossovers and events and stuff that Fortnite does, but those are so heavily reliant on the user and the player base that it maybe leaves too much freedom of almost like a pioneer frontiersman ship, where it’s hard to conceive of that as an actual Metaverse because it still feels under construction. Whereas to me, Fortnite feels fluid and organic, but it doesn’t feel under construction. I don’t necessarily know whether or not that means it’s more or less Metaverse, but I think that might be why, especially a lot of people who are really into games thinking about the philosophies in the Metaverse haven’t really attached that idea to Fortnite more so than Roblox or Minecraft in that same way.

Paolo Yumol:
So it’s sort of difficult for me to parse why Fortnite, in particular, is being upheld as an example of this over other games, because of that element that you’re talking about then, like a game or platforms, ease of accommodating user-generated content. I think if we’re using that as a metric for how to measure whether or not something is a Metaverse, I think actually our closest equivalent is probably VRChat or Second Life. There’s an openness and freedom of expression and communication on those kinds of platforms that isn’t afforded by something like Fortnite. There’s this moment in which it was like the Infinity War x Fortnite collaboration came out, Ready Player One had just come out or it was coming out. Super Smash Bros Ultimate was also coming out. Platforms like Tik Tok were taking off. Also just the same ballooning of streaming services.

Paolo Yumol:
We’re no longer starving for more content, we’re starving for ways of curating them or making sense of the infinite content stream to which we’re all subjected every day against our will. Or maybe not against our will. I definitely willfully submit myself to the scroll medications throughout my day. I think there is this sense of like maximalism, everything all at once and all the time that pervaded a lot of popular media and seemed to be shaping the course of what digital media would look like for people. As a result, there’s this idea that the Metaverse should be this thing where if I check into the Metaverse, I should be greeted by Sonic the Hedgehog, the Kool-Aid man, and I don’t know, the McBurglar or whatever, as soon as I load up. You know what I mean? There’s just like this-

Lyn Rafil:
I’m very intrigued by the selection, but I see what you mean.

Paolo Yumol:
Yeah. That was my free association with mascots.

Lyn Rafil:
I think 2018 was also just like a very weird year in terms of media and what was going on in games. In many ways, it’s like the inverse fever dream of 2020. I think 2018 in terms of media was like a weird time.

Paolo Yumol:
Yeah. There was a sense of like, that’s what the Metaverse should look like because those are the major cultural references that we have for it. I feel like it’s rare for us to conceive of a Metaverse that actually feels a little bit more open, but that isn’t the Ready Player One thing of everyone is an avatar from something that already exists. That there’s an actual, totally open and free ability to represent yourself in the way that you want and communicate with people in exactly the way that you want. We just don’t really have that. Fortnite’s main mode of communicating, at least that side of the Creative Mode, is shooting at people still. If your creative is in it or whatever, you’re still beating up a bunch of people, killing people. It’s either that or you’re in the nonviolent mode and you’re emoting with people or you’re making environments for other people. There still isn’t something that allows for an actual, complete ease of communication.

Lyn Rafil:
I do think what’s really interesting with what you’re saying, Paolo, is there’s so much media happening at once that the best way to consume it is if you can consume multiple forms at once. That you have some familiarity with all of it already. I think Fortnite is, I don’t know if it’s just like emblematic or symptomatic or actually utilizes and leverages this. I think it’s all of the above, honestly, of this intersection of remix and reboot culture as well, like remix, reboot, mashup what you were saying, but also really thrives off of mimesis and replication.

Lyn Rafil:
What is often very impressive and creative mode with Fortnite is, oh, you have taken honestly a fairly limited set of tools and a fairly limited set of mechanics. And you’re creating something that is wholly new within it. People can still be extremely creative and imaginative given a limited amount of tools and capabilities, but it feels more exceptional. People view it as more exceptional within Fortnite for the reason that it feels like it’s built more off of replication and reboot more so than sheer square one creativity and imagination, which I think also makes it more accessible for certain people to be able to feel like there’s imagination creativity within it because it’s the ease of access and the barrier of entry to do something or experience something that has that novelty is that it takes a little bit less a cerebral hurdle to understand it.

Jamin Warren:
It’s worth noting that these themes of creativity and imagination in terms of how Fortnite is presented to the world as being this open platform for narrative media to find a home, there’s nothing that doesn’t work in Fortnite. It has a great reason, right? At the core of Epic Games’ business is selling Unreal Engine. It’s a game engine that’s used to make a lot of different things, some of which are video games, but some of which is used in contemporary architecture, used in CG as CGI pipelines, used in virtual reality. You mentioned The Mandalorian. It’s weird to think about Fortnite as a destination. It in and of itself serves as an advertisement for Unreal Engine for people to use, and then they get a cut. So the way it works is people use Unreal Engine. They develop something with it, and then if they sell above, I believe it’s like a million dollars, then Epic gets a cut of it.

Jamin Warren:
And so it is very interesting, the extent to which Fortnite players are unwittingly themselves part of this larger brand campaign for what is functionally just a generative software. It’s like a creative application software. You don’t see that. It’s not like Adobe prints a magazine. It’s a very unusual, but very obviously potent way of advertising what is functionally a B2B product, which is a game engine being sold to creative technical professionals.

Shift gears here a little bit. What are some of the brand collaborations and activations of Fortnite that have been notable to you all anything that you’ve seen that works really well and really impressed by in terms of the good use of Fortnite as a marketing platform?

Paolo Yumol:
I feel like it’s unfortunate that the collaborations that they clearly invested more time and money into just turned out to be the better ones, at least in my opinion. I feel like the Infinity War one was good. And then obviously the Marshmello and Travis Scott events were particularly successful both from an engagement standpoint on their end and from a creative standpoint. And I feel like, in all of those cases, the common denominator is that they’re meaningfully interactive or they engage the player in a way that they couldn’t be in any other media.

Paolo Yumol:
As Epic continues to develop Fortnite into a platform for more experiences other than the core Battle Royale game, I think it makes more sense for them to lean heavily on the forms of media and performances that engage the player in a way that only games can. And I think the Travis Scott thing is just exemplary of that. It’s really viscerally engaging even just to watch as a video. Even if you just happen to watch the video on YouTube and didn’t get to participate in it as a timed event, I think you can tell that this would probably be more fun if I were one of the people on screen jumping around and experiencing this.

Paolo Yumol:
And I don’t know if you could necessarily claim that of some of the other Fortnite collaborations like the Christopher Nolan’s screenings or whenever they show a clip or something like that or conversely, it’s something that’s just a skin. There’s a way to replicate maybe with some of those partnerships and collaborations or attempting to provide players through other means, but you can’t necessarily replicate the experience of logging in and participating in the Travis Scott Astronomical event or something like that.

Jamin Warren:
Yeah. And it’s a key differentiator when we look at Fortnite compared to other platforms, Facebook, Google, Tik Tok, right. Forbes just published a story this week about Travis Scott. And it has some details on what the process was there. And they were flying emissaries back and forth between Travis Scott’s team and Epic’s offices, and then doing mo-cap sessions and stuff. Facebook, Google–those are self-serve advertising platforms. You don’t necessarily need to be on the phone with Mark Zuckerberg to get an ad on Facebook.

Jamin Warren:
I think there’s one thing that I think folks need to understand is a volume of these activities are very, very high touch. And so they’re just by definition not going to be a ton of them, which in some ways I think that’s like the Super Bowl. It’s a scarce resource. It has a lot of impact because of its scarcity. So it has been interesting to see the things that have worked, I think in part because Epic’s being picky about what types of things they, even though it’s a place for everything, they are still being very picky. So that’s why I can’t play as the Geico gecko yet.

Lyn Rafil:
But give me the Geico Gecko.

Jamin Warren:
Yeah, exactly.

Paolo Yumol:
Every year you’ve been petitioning them. You’re in the comments section of every tweet.

Lyn Rafil:
Every tweet.

Jamin Warren:
To whom it may concern.

Lyn Rafil:
I think what is interesting, you made the Super Bowl comparison. Super Bowl ads are things that people got really excited for. Some people would say, “Oh, I watched the Super Bowl for the ads.” And I don’t think I’ve been hearing that as much anymore. Some people will probably argue the quality of the creative has been going downhill. But I also think maybe it’s less that and more like the quality of creative on other channels on nontraditional ad placements have been a lot more engaging or just as impactful or just as interesting because we have so many different media platforms. There are eyes on screens and so many different other ways that we talk about this a lot, as games being a media channel. Paolo as you were saying, Fortnite has been really successful is it’s not just the eyeballs. It’s about engagement. And what does engagement really mean in this case?

Lyn Rafil:
But I think interactivity, in this case, plays a huge part in what engagement means or why people outside of games or outside of marketing will end up hearing about something like the Travis Scott stuff is that it has this element of this is cool, but there’s also people who got to say, “Yeah, but you had to be part of it.” And which is the goal for both the creative end and marketing end. That is a really cool sensation for consumers and for the brands that are trying to create. That you created something that people are kind of proud or excited to have been a part of. That’s what Fortnite has done for, especially the larger IP collaborations. Even this past season with Nexus War partnering with Marvel is that there was a story that was embedded in the development of Fortnite as a game.

Lyn Rafil:
So yes, it was a brand activation, but the people who got to play a part of it and fight Galactus, it feels like a moment you got to be part of or that you got to contribute to. And I think that’s where in games, especially, there’s such cool territory. What does it mean to create a moment in a game? A moment can be a full season of Fortnite. It could be a weekend, it could be a premiere, it could be something, but people are there and they’re taking part in it and they get to choose how they experience it to some degree. You can be jumping around doing a bunch of emotes at whatever concert in Fortnite, or you can honestly just kind of wander around and be passive about it.

Lyn Rafil:
In the same way that at many music festivals I’ve been to, there are some sets that I’m really involved or engaged with, and there are some sets that I’m eating cheese fries sitting in the bleachers. Games still have that element. I think a lot of people still think of games as like this non-embodied space, but I think Fortnite has thought of it in a way where there is some level of embodiment, even though it’s not the kind that we envisioned with VR, for instance, in talking about the Metaverse. So much Sci-Fi thinks of the Metaverse as being also in VR, which I think is notable in terms of how people see that connection between the physical and the digital. I think Fortnite has said, “We don’t need VR to do that.” If we focus on what it is to experience or inhabit a space, even if you’re viewing it just through a screen, you can still make it meaningfully interactive, as Paolo said.

Jamin Warren:
Do you think we’re going to move beyond concerts? I mean, that seems to be the “low hanging fruit.” The Travis Scott thing is notable because of how different that was, is a 20-minute bounded experience. The comic book events have been interesting in terms of introducing characters, and there are different things that you’re being asked to do for these seasons. Do you think there’s a world for these things beyond concerts? Or do you think this is going to be a weird artifact of 2020, where artists can’t go out on the road or you can’t go to movie theaters? You’re like, “Okay, we’ll just put it in Fortnite. That seems to be where some people are.”

Paolo Yumol:
The major limitation of a game or a platform like Fortnite is that they can actually allow for completely unmoderated communication between participants and an event. So as a result, a lot of the actual participation has to take place one way, which I think is conducive for these timed event type activations or collaborations and stuff like that. If we’re still like evaluating this stuff on the grounds of whether or not it’s Fortnite and moving past concerts means moving further into cultivating a Metaverse environment for people. Then I think their main limitation, as I was saying earlier, it’s difficult to have interactions that don’t amount to just shooting at people in the game. I feel like the other cool things they could do are all probably going to be game-related like the Thanos gauntlet thing or do the Galactus event. The event itself is still within the framework of Fortnite because they know how to design a game and make a fun game.

Paolo Yumol:
Other than that, if you want to have a mass social event or something, the fact that they can’t have communication between people that’s free and unmoderated is probably going to be really limiting. I imagine that they’re going to probably stick to things like the Travis Scott thing. They might be longer. They might stop being timed to one-weekend events or something like that. They might find ways to make it interactive, but add another layer where it maybe you enter an event and you’re assigned to one of two teams or something like that placed in something that’s half a game and half like you’re still spectating an event. Maybe they’ll do something like that. But, otherwise, I still think a lot of the interaction can really only go one way.

Jamin Warren:
For brands that want to do things like either you’re on center stage, or it sounds like the opportunities are going to be more on the social real-time social side in terms of, “Hey, there’s a big event that’s happening in a player community. Can we piggyback off of that?” I mean, the Wendy’s example, I thought it was a really interesting one where they had this moment where they’re sending in the Wendy’s dressed character, who’s destroying all the frozen beef. They’re basically piggybacking off of something that’s happening in Fortnite.

Jamin Warren:
I thought that was really creative, but also I think is a better way to think about what brand activity could look like in the space, because again, it doesn’t involve you having to get permission from Epic and it works best if you already have a community that it cares about what you’re doing in the game space. And you’re just looking at it as another live event, the same way that you might have some kind of digital online viewing party for the VMAs or you’re sponsoring a tailgate party before the big event or something like that.

Jamin Warren:
So I think in so far as like Fortnite continues to be this place where these events happen. I think the opportunities for brands are going to be less one-on-one interactions. There’s only going to be so many of those things that can happen sponsored by Fortnite, by Epic games that happen in-game, really looking for these opportunities to do community engagement, more conversational dialogue with players, because that university’s so big. That to me, that seems like the way forward. And yeah, maybe concerts are a good way to do that in the sense that they create these events and these moments. And then you can piggyback off of them as a brand when something else is going to happen inside of this digital space.

Lyn Rafil:
Maybe this is getting meta and talking about the Metaverse too. There’s so many layers.

Paolo Yumol:
Meta Metaverse.

Lyn Rafil:
The meta Metaverse. As you were saying, Jamin, in order to play in the reboot culture, you yourself have to participate in reboot culture or the mashup culture or whatever you want to call it. The Wendy’s example is a perfect example of that, where you’re using Fortnite in the way Fortnite is made to be used, but also not in order to create an experience that isn’t the experience in terms of some of the other activations that are possible. I think that the pop-up mentality, there are some sad pop-ups out there where they’re like, Oh, I’ll just make it. You just hop onto this idea of pop-ups are cool because there’s scarcity, it’s limited time. There’s a gimmick.

Lyn Rafil:
It’s Instagram-worthy… and I think that’s actually how some brands also think of how “easy” it might be to do something effective in Fortnite. It’s a lot of eyeballs. They already do timed events. There’s some scarcity there like, Oh yeah, it’s Instagram bait, like Fortnite is Twitch bait. You could just say the same thing, just sub in a different social media platform name really. What really makes a pop-up successful is that there’s some sort of meaningful engagement or interactivity that creates an experience that sticks with people apart from the fact that it’s a branded experience. That is where I think there could be a lot more interesting stuff apart from concerts. And then somewhere between really cool concerts and massive IP long-term partnerships. When we’re talking about some of the things that maybe didn’t stick as well, or that we don’t think was nearly as impactful in Fortnite, like the Christopher Nolan Tenet screenings or the Quibi Punk’d reboot teasers-

Jamin Warren:
Never forget.

Lyn Rafil:
That was fully this year. Time doesn’t exist in Fortnite.

Jamin Warren:
We will tell our children someday about the Quibi Punk’d event that happened in Fortnite. I don’t know how many of those things will still be around. It’ll be completely unintelligible.

Lyn Rafil:
They’ll be like, “Okay, grandpa, let’s get you to bed.” Back in my day … But I would like to think that there is creativity that’s out there and it still requires dedicated resources and time and energy to create it. And that might not be what some brands want to do in order to get that cleared by Epic. There’s probably some financial politics involved in whether or not either party would maybe be really invested in creating something like that. But I do think that there is a space and an opportunity there to create smaller-scale events that have a lot of interpersonal, which maybe isn’t the right word, but what it means to actually interact with the world or Fortnite or something within the world of Fortnite, that is as of now still kind of an unexplored space. I think Fortnite opening up Party Royale as a whole mode and having our own custom islands and stuff is maybe the gateway to be able to do stuff like that and where brands can maybe play around. But again, it is a little bit harder to say like, “Here’s our branded island versus something that’s in the main game that everyone has immediate access to.”

Jamin Warren:
If you’re a brand and you’re looking at your overall marketing mix, I think it’s good to sort of think about Fortnite as this thing that can cut across a bunch of different categories but requires some thoughtful thinking. There’s an extent to which it can be a thing in and of itself. If you get one of those very expensive golden tickets to do a one-off with Epic, but there are these other places at the share and the experience level where you can be creating events that piggyback off of something that’s happening at Fortnite.

Jamin Warren:
And you see this a lot with game streamers all the time where they’re creating custom competitions, they’re playing the same game over and over and over again. And they’re looking for ways to make it more interesting. So they come up with stuff on the fly. Like, would it be funny if I did X, Y, and Z in a particular game? Or they created a challenge for themselves. There’s one that you had shared as a distributor playing GTA Online. And they basically allowed for everyone in Twitch chat to just populate random items inside of the game, right. There are these opportunities to do things like that inside a Fortnite. But if the only setting that you have is, I want to do the Travis Scott thing. Can we just do that? Then get aligned. You and literally every other Fortune 500 company on the planet wants to be doing this. That doesn’t mean you can’t do stuff in Fortnite. It just means that the way you think about it is going to be different.

Jamin Warren:
They’ll get the things that you’re doing in terms of like digital experiential or the things that you’re already doing on social. It’s probably not going to be like your brand inside of this video game. Which I think is frankly a good approach, generally speaking, that games can be an interesting site for brand activity, but it doesn’t always have to be, I want our logo or character inside of the game. There are other ways that you can use games and game communities and game events as ways to have very natural conversations, particularly if they’re additive and they’re interesting and unique, that’s a place where your creativity as a brand can really come through.

Paolo Yumol:
I’m pretty curious about what Fortnite’s longevity is as a game and platform at this point. Only because this is like an audience. It’s like incredibly fickle, which we know, I mean like Fall Guys has even fallen off based on what I have ambiently absorbed over the course of just scrolling through social media. I feel like it wasn’t too long ago that it was one of the COVID gaming sensations. Among Us seems to be lasting a little bit longer. It seems to have a little bit more only because I think due in part to the fact that it feels a little bit more like replayable only in that you could be playing with new people and it’ll completely change the experience. Fortnite and has survived like a couple of being the Battle Royale, Twitch game, at least like in the West. I don’t know, in both of your opinions, how long do you think Fortnite has until it gets subsumed by the next Fortnite?

Jamin Warren:
It’s an interesting question. I mean, I think there’s different ways we can look at it. I guess the more optimistic way is like, “Oh, they’re doing all of these partnerships. Look at how they’re extending this universe.” And then the other side of it is like Gilligan’s Island had an episode with the Harlem Globetrotters. There’s so many other forms of media for which you’re not on the ascent when you’re starting to lean on these other universes. Those are cries for help.

Jamin Warren:
I mean, Forbes was reporting that Travis Scott and generated like $20 million in additional revenue from that engagement. Obviously, some portion of it came from Epic, but just through merch and things like that. I think it’s complicated. I mean, the other thing is I think streamers play a really pivotal role, at least in terms of getting attention on a particular title, but maybe they’re only important to give something the lift it needs to get outside of the streamers’ direct audience. And then after that, there will be an audience of people who continue to play Fortnite religiously. And I guess only Epic will ever truly know how many of those people are actually active.

Jamin Warren:
It is definitely an open question. Are they doing all of these things because they’re finding that it’s adding value and it’s growing their player base or increasing retention? Or are they doing these things because they’re looking at the metrics internally and they’re like, “Oh, there’s a lot more competition here than used to be, and we’re not the game of the summer. We’re not the bright, shiny new thing. I know. Let’s do something with BTS.” Can’t go wrong with … And so in that way, it’s interesting because I think Fortnite much like many other media platforms will struggle for attention. Just like anything else.

Jamin Warren:
The reality is though, if Fortnite is not nearly as important to the future of Epic as Unreal Engine is unlike other game studios where it’s like feast or famine, and if this doesn’t work out, then the game company is going to shut down or we have to figure out a model that works for the size of the audience that we have. Unreal is much larger than the sum of its parts. And so in a weird way, they will be fine post-Fortnite. They have other things that they are continuing to work on, other initiatives.

Jamin Warren:
They’re not concerned about Epic as a company. I mean, this is a 20, 25-year-old company, but the extent to which Fortnite continues to want to hold this place in popular culture, it’s a bit of an open question, but it’s also possible. I think is that many things can be popular simultaneously. Maybe it’s just a part of the diet. Like people pop in, they spent so much time playing Fortnite and it’s like Monopoly or Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a thing that at this point it’s so big that people are familiar with it and they’ll always be willing to pop in and it will never truly go away. I don’t know. Lyn, what do you think?

Lyn Rafil:
I know that this is the problem is, especially with games as a service is the lifetime value of keeping it alive, I think is really hard. I thought it was so funny when you were saying the Harlem Globetrotters. I was also thinking like, “Scooby-Doo does that.” It’s like, Scooby-Doo is going to keep going on, it’s going to keep going on. It gets rebooted over and over and always has different partnerships. Very frequently I think of John Cena saving Mystery Inc. From a giant falling boulder. But I think that like Fortnite will have a cultural hold more so than people who actually play it. It’ll be that thing of like, there’s a weird fondness, and also ire depending on which part of the gaming communities you’re in or what your personal experiences were, but it will have this kind of cultural hold in a way that I don’t think necessarily people have to be playing it or coming in frequently for it to live on.

Jamin Warren:
I think that’s a key distinction. So if you look at Fortnite as a video game, right. And so the question is, is Fortnite going to continue as a video game, as video games have traditionally existed? And the way that you really extended that longevity in the past was you would release Fortnite two, Fortnite three. You released subsequent games. I mean, we have lots of those: Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros. You release a new game. Fundamentally, different question, whether or not it can exist as a media entity because we have many of those have existed. General Hospital has been around for almost a hundred years. WWE has been around. The characters shift, the audience shifts, and people outgrow it.
(Editor’s note: General Hospital has been around for 57 years while another soap opera, Guiding Light was on the air from 1937-2009.)

Jamin Warren:
So I think that that is an interesting future state for Fortnite, that it lives on in perpetuity. People outgrow it. There’s always someone new cycling into the system. They’re using these events to continue to increase, get a new group of people into it, but it might be this thing that’s never going to have the highs the way that it did. I might get these pops from time to time, but it will exist and live on in perpetuity because it’s so big at this point. We find media properties like this all over the place that, are they as big as they once were at some point in time? No, of course not. But they’ve been around for decades and decades. The Simpson’s, great example. It’s one of the longest-running television shows. So I think that’s the way we should probably be thinking about Fortnite is more in that media category than as a video game. And that does make it very unique from other video games where you really need to be producing new game-related content over a long period of time to keep players’ attention.

Paolo Yumol:
I personally feel pretty cynical about it though. Only in the sense of what we have observed over the past few years like gamers really hate being explicitly sold things to. Fortnite is reaching this place where anyone who logs onto Fortnite, even if you haven’t logged on in a really long time, you’d go on and you’d see, whoa, like I’m being bombarded with attempts to sell something to me, whether it’s the V-Bucks cosmetic thing or whether it’s participation in another immediate experience that is either authored by Fortnite or not. I guess my cynicism about it is just that I feel like most of the discourse that will take place around it will be fueled by the loudest, angriest people. It feels like the Battlefront lootbox thing. I just think that there’s probably going to be some mess up at some point, and they’re going to pull off the wrong collaboration.

Paolo Yumol:
It’s going to get to a point where they’re like, no more micro-transactions. I don’t want to be nickel-and-dimed every time I’m trying to log on to play a free-to-play game. That will probably reach a head. And it’ll probably conflate with general wariness of having every single part of Fortnite sold to a different company that people would probably just get tired of it. And I think the thing that’s probably going to take to actually overthrow Fortnite‘s position and the ecosystem of gaming and is what produced Fortnite. I think somebody is going to have to figure out a new, completely novel way to play games that is enabled by cutting-edge technology in the same way that I think the Battle Royale genre was. Either that person or someone huge like Epic is going to have to take it and make it incredibly popular and successful.

Paolo Yumol:
And then that will probably be the thing that people fixate on for a while. But I think that the reason I like Fortnite seems to have been so popular for so long is because prior to it existing, like other than pub geo, there just wasn’t anything like it. There just weren’t Battle Royale games. There have to be like new COD‘s and everything. Not just because they’re games first over media properties, but because they’re still at the end of the day FPSs. And there are a million of those, and we have to keep producing those in order to hold people’s attention. I think Fortnite‘s what it has going for is, it’s one of the only games like it that is good and exists. Good in the sense of, everyone has subjective claims about whether or not they think it’s a good game, but it’s still a solid game that people can play. It has some competitive stability. So I think it can last for a while, but I think it’s only a matter of time before it gets toppled by something else, probably in the next two years.

Paolo Yumol:
And only a matter of time.

Lyn Rafil:
I think, realistically, it’s just whenever Epic decides it’s no longer worth investing in.

Jamin Warren:
I think we see this and you see this all the time with other digital services, right? They get to a place where it’s big, but it’s not big enough. And maybe Epic as a company is not big enough to really start to kill things. But yeah, I think a world where like, “Oh, it’d be unthinkable for you to end Fortnite.” And it’s like, “Well, after a while it served its purpose.” Well, thank you all. I really appreciate it. Great insights. I look forward to hashing out the next one.

Lyn Rafil:
Thank you.

Paolo Yumol:
Me too.