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How to become a Fortnite millionaire
(3 min read) How a YouTube star teamed up with an indie game studio to build an epic partnership and a brand new world on Fortnite.
Avi Gandhi
July 30, 2024
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We’re trying something new - an interview with a Creator and their partner about an interesting partnership. Hit reply or answer the poll question at the end to let me know what you think!
Tl;dr
JustDustin reaches 5.7 million subscribers with his fun challenge videos, themed around destroying stuff.
VLOStudios is a self-funded indie game studio focused on building games in Fortnite (more on that below).
Dustin and Peter / VLO Studios partnered to launch a new “Island” in Fortnite: Grand Theft Bacon!
Dustin brings the creative juice, initial player base (a launchpad), and his YouTube brand.
VLO Studios brings funding, production, and distribution.
The Partners
JustDustin is a YouTube Creator who produces fun challenge videos themed around destroying stuff (e.g. an ice prison, a million sheets of paper) to win big prizes. He reaches 5.7 million subscribers.
VLO Studios is a self-funded indie game studio founded by Peter Knell and focused on building games in Fortnite (more on that below).
Dustin and Peter both met with me to tell me more about what they’re building together and how their partnership works.
The Product
Dustin and Peter / VLO Studios partnered to launch a new “Island” in Fortnite: Grand Theft Bacon!
Hang on - what are Fortnite Islands?
This is going to blow your mind.
Islands are UGC maps built with Fortnite developer Epic’s new UGC engine Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). UEFN allows third-parties to build and launch their own monetized Islands in Fortnite.
In 2023, Epic paid out $320 million to UEFN developers, and 40 of those developers became millionaires (though for now, the way revenue-share is calculated is still a bit opaque - see if you can decipher it here).
It's just like YouTube in many ways…it's all engagement, views, length of time, a mix thereof. They have their own monetization system and dashboard that you can use.
Fortnite is becoming YouTube for games! Anyone can create an Island and, if other players like it, the Creator can make a lot of money. You have to be willing to learn how to use the game editor in UEFN - but that’s no different to how the early YouTubers were just kids who taught themselves how to edit.
For those who have the time and inclination to learn, there’s a ton of opportunity.
It's very user friendly - that's why it's so exciting for so many creative people, because it allows you to essentially become a game Creator and publish via Epic pretty easily with a fairly low entry barrier.
As for Dustin and Peter’s collaboration - Grand Theft Bacon is epic. It’s a game world creatively-driven by Dustin, even featuring a Mt. Rushmore-style bust of his head, and the gameplay brings the more fun concepts from his videos to life. For example:
In my actual video, we made a giant piggy bank, we armored it up, and we put a bunch of money inside…so we created that in Fortnite.
The piggy bank spills money, players deposit it in their ATM, and once you reach a certain amount in your ATM, you win.
If a viewer goes into the game, they realize the game mode is more or less the challenge that they just watched in real life.
JustDustin
Dustin’s sizable audience are primarily young men. He’s streamed and partnered with Fortnite in the past, so there’s a reasonable alignment, but he knows he alone can’t sustain a games business simply through promotion.
I'm not naive. You can count on one hand the number of Creators in the world who could actually move a million people from a video to a platform. That's an extremely rare thing.
The game has to be good enough to grow and monetize on its own; Dustin is simply the creative driver and the initial firestarter.
I want to make the game good enough that people want to play it on its own, and I’m just a boost for its discoverability.
Like YouTube, that boost matters because Fortnite Island recommendations to the game’s 230 million monthly active players is governed by an algorithm.
You want to use your audience as a head start for the Fortnite recommendation system to pick the game up and promote it as a holistically good game - like, forget JustDustin. This is a good game.
The Partnership
It all has to lead with creativity and ideas and community, so that's where Dustin's going to keep us honest - by leading with ideas - and why we're in this together.
The specifics of Dustin and Peter’s partnership are simple.
Dustin brings:
Creative - he had the initial vision and continues to bring ideas as the Island evolves.
Launchpad - Dustin’s promotion brings in the initial player base, with the goal of boosting the game into UEFN’s recommendation algorithm.
Brand - JustDustin is the face of Grand Theft Bacon - literally and figuratively - and his involvement gives prospective players something to anchor on as the game evolves.
VLO Studios offers:
Funding - UEFN is free for developing simple games, but complex Islands with custom artwork requires special skills - and that means Peter has to pay people.
It's not millions of dollars and it's not hundreds of thousands of dollars to start. It can be very low cost. We're self funding this thing, so that should speak a little bit to it.
Production - Once you pay people, you have to manage and coordinate them to make sure the game ends up the way you want it to, which takes time and effort. VLO Studios is investing this time and effort into the partnership.
Distribution - Uploading the game, adding all the assets and metadata, optimizing for the algorithm, building a relationship with Epic - all of this costs time and money to do well, so VLO Studios are acting as the equivalent of a YouTube channel manager for the game.
To be successful, VLO Studios will have to deliver on three mandates:
1) Empower Dustin’s creativity,
2) Make something that's true to who he is and what his audience wants to see, and
3) Make sure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to see it?
There are also two other opportunities to be had beyond Fortnite:
Syndication - taking the game and putting it on other platforms, like Steam and Roblox
IP exploitation - Turning the Grand Theft Bacon IP into other monetizable media (merch, film/TV, etc.)
There's no reason that we can't take Grand Theft Bacon and take it out of the Fortnite ecosystem to other places.
As for how they each get paid in success? That part’s easy.
It's a revenue share model. Not to be so frank about it, but that's how this works.
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Written by Avi Gandhi, edited by Melody Song,
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