Creator-Made 'Grand Heist City' to Launch in Fortnite
Prominent streamer Typical Gamer is set to launch 'Grand Heist City,' a new game experience built entirely within Fortnite. The launch highlights the growing creator economy inside major gaming ecosystems, where top influencers are now becoming full-fledged game developers on established platforms.
'Grand Heist City' was partly funded by an Epic Mega Grant, a program designed to support projects built with the Unreal Engine. This initiative offers grants typically ranging from $5,000 to $75,000 to foster innovation within the engine's ecosystem. The program maintains a hands-off approach, allowing creators to retain full intellectual property rights and creative control over their projects. The game was developed by JOGO Studios, a company founded by streamer Andre "Typical Gamer" Rebelo with an initial $2 million investment. Rebelo, who serves as CEO, is already ranked as the sixth most popular creator on the platform. The studio employs a team of around 50 people and aims to expand to create its own original intellectual property beyond *Fortnite*. This launch is part of a larger creator economy that saw Epic Games pay out $352 million to creators in 2024. That same year, 58 creators earned over $1 million, with seven of them surpassing $10 million in earnings from their *Fortnite* creations. Despite these high-end payouts, the earnings are concentrated, with the top 100 developers receiving 71% of the total revenue share. The foundation of this creator-led development is the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), a tool that provides many of the powerful features of Unreal Engine 5. This allows for the creation of more complex experiences with custom assets, advanced lighting, and unique game logic. The platform has seen the publication of nearly 200,000 user-created "islands," with an average of 60,000 being played daily in 2024. This model of in-game economies is also prevalent on other platforms like Roblox, which paid out $741 million to its creators in 2023. In 2024, 1,728 *Fortnite* creators earned at least $10,000, while Roblox had 3,500 developers reach that same threshold the prior year. 'Grand Heist City' will be one of the first major UEFN titles from a prominent influencer to include its own microtransactions, a feature Epic is rolling out to more creators. This will allow developers to sell their own in-game items directly to players, opening up new revenue streams beyond the engagement-based payouts from Epic Games.
