By Alexander Lee  •  April 2, 2025  •

Ivy Liu

Although the plurality of brands’ marketing spend inside virtual world platforms still takes place inside Roblox — 47 percent, according to data platform GEEIQ’s 2025 report on the state of brands in virtual worlds — Fortnite is nipping at Roblox’s heels, and currently accounts for 33 percent of brands’ total marketing spend inside metaverse platforms. Between January 2024 and January 2025, brands’ spending in Fortnite increased by 99 percent, per the report.

Rebelo’s success in building a million-strong following reflects Fortnite’s ongoing evolution from a video game into a creator platform and media channel in its own right, similar to the million-follower moments of platforms such as YouTube and Twitter.

“The more people who start understanding the analogies between what Fortnite is doing, what Roblox is doing and what Netflix has done, et cetera, in terms of being a platform that hosts content that other people are creating — that should be something that brands care about a lot. You need 1,000 followers to get a Creator Code, so 1,000 times that is pretty significant, right? That should carry some cachet for brands looking to integrate,” said Max Bass, director of emerging connections at the agency Gale, referring to Epic Games’ Support-a-Creator program, which provides promotional codes to any creators who can prove they have over 1,000 followers on YouTube, Twitch, X, TikTok or VK.

Although the numbers tracked by data platforms such as Fortnite.GG lag slightly behind the true numbers displayed in-game, Digiday was able to verify that Rebelo had reached one million followers by viewing his follower count on Fortnite itself. 

“I plugged away every single day, enticing people with what they would get if they followed me,” Rebelo said. “Most importantly, whenever we update something, you’ll be the first to see it. If you follow me on these other platforms, you watch me mostly for Fortnite. Why not follow me on Fortnite?”

Rebelo is the first individual creator to reach one million followers on Fortnite, but his account is technically not the first one to cross that threshold. That honor goes to Epic Games’ official account, whose following currently stands at roughly 2.8 million. But Rebelo has definitively won the race to become the first million-follower creator on Fortnite, with the next-largest creators, Unc and SypherPK, respectively standing at roughly 750,000 and 450,000 followers.

One reason why most Fortnite creators have not yet reached one million followers on the platform is that Fortnite’s follow system was only implemented by Epic Games in November. In the months since, creators have gradually begun to realize that in-game follows could be a promotion and distribution channel for their Fortnite experiences.

“Any time we push an update, there’s a discovery row called ‘updates from your favorite creators,’ where our game will then pop up,” said Fortnite creator Dagwummy, who co-leads the Fortnite studio Minigame Maps with his partner Birdo and asked to keep his real name private. “It’s not that helpful — it’s not really a notification, and it’s below a lot of the other tabs — but it does help, because we do update our game frequently. We have 25,000 followers, and any time we update it, there’s a chance some of them will see that.”

For Rebelo, reaching one million followers means he can now reach more players and potentially glean more revenue from Fortnite’s “Engagement Payout” revenue share system. More followers means more exposure, and the platform determines how much it pays out to creators based on engagement metrics such as the total number of active players and active playtime, creating a clear financial incentive for creators to drive more attention toward their experiences.

Rebelo declined to share specific engagement metrics for his Fortnite account, but his page on Fortnite.GG shows that his maps have accrued a total play time of 10.3 billion minutes, over double the 4.7 billion minutes played in his experiences in May 2024. At the time of this article’s publication, roughly 13,000 users were actively playing one of Rebelo’s maps, per Fortnite.GG data.

“It could be a source of inspiration for others, seeing that you can convert viewers from one platform to another,” Rebelo said. “A million followers on any platform these days is incredible, and to do so on Fortnite is a different ballgame. It takes a different set of skills to make it happen — but it can happen, and it can be a useful tool for promotion and marketing.”

As Epic Games looks to establish Fortnite as an alternative to platforms such as Roblox for metaverse-interested brands, seeing an individual creator reach one million followers could help convince more marketers to turn their attention to Fortnite.

“In my experience, brands are much more used to Roblox being a UGC environment than Fortnite, and so the awareness of, ‘we want to work with a developer that has a reputation for building big games, and a big Discord and a big following’ — that is something that we hear on the Roblox side a lot,” Bass said. “On the Fortnite side, we’ve just heard less of that, and I think there’s more optimism — well-placed or not — around the ability for brands to break through because of a good concept.”

https://digiday.com/?p=573936