The UGC revolution the games industry is clueless about
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A challenge for you in this newsletter: name the top five games on Roblox and Fortnite right now.
An extra challenge: name the top Fortnite games not made by Epic Games.
If you can: congrats! I suspect you’re part of a small group of industry insiders.
For the rest of us – you might know of a few games like Grow a Garden and Adopt Me, and think that the rest of these ecosystems are filled with branded experiences.
In its last report, Roblox said it had 97.8 million daily active users, with 1.2m representing average daily unique paying users. Last year, AppMagic estimated Roblox was the fifth top grossing mobile game across the App Store and Google Play, above PUBG Mobile and Candy Crush Saga.
Grow a Garden is Roblox’s big moment in the sun. It recently attracted some 21.3m concurrent users to become a global sensation.
Fortnite, meanwhile, has clocked up hundreds of millions of registered players, with the Epic Games Store (which includes other titles of course) reaching 898m registered users across platforms.
Fortnite.gg says in the last year the game hit a peak of 14.3m in November 2024, with a peak in the last 24 hours of 1.5m. Meanwhile, the recently launched Blitz Royale mode built for mobile saw 443k peak users.
To compare, in the last few days Steam reported a peak of 36m users online, Nintendo Switch has surpassed 150m sales, PS5 has sold 77.7m units as of March 31st, 2025, while the Xbox Series X/S consoles have sold more than 33m. Mobile, of course, is the most prolific of them all, with billions of players worldwide.
UGC feels a bit like the early days of mobile in some ways. These platforms are dismissed despite rivalling console hardware for scale.
Down to business
Perhaps the kicker for UGC right now is the business opportunity. Evolving revenue terms may not all be that enticing to large publishers. If you didn’t like the App Store’s 70/30 revenue share, welcome to a world of engagement-based payouts and other convoluted terms.
Of course, in return for building games on Roblox and Fortnite you get creation tools, which beats Apple charging you to not promote a rival when they search for your title.
Curiously, in the wake of the success of Grow a Garden, Roblox has updated its monetisation terms. It’s replacing premium payouts with creator rewards – proving a hot topic of debate amongst developers. New criteria for payouts includes players spending at least 10 minutes within an experience, while it must also be one of their first three games in a day.
In the face of these terms it’s understandable why top publishers on other platforms aren’t all flocking to UGC in their droves where the business case is still not as lucrative as the ceiling for other platforms.
But it’s worth giving more than a cursory glance to places where hundreds of millions of players are spending their time. Especially when Newzoo claims that in 2024, only 12% of total playtime on PC and console came from new games, with most hours spent on established franchises or lifestyle titles.
These aren’t future platforms with some unknown potential like VR, AR and cloud gaming. This is the here and now.
If you made it this far, congrats! Here are the five top games on Roblox and Fortnite by concurrent users right now:
Roblox:
- Grow a Garden
- Steal a Brainrot
- 99 Nights in the Forest
- Brookhaven
- [NOLI] Forsaken
Fortnite:
- Battle Royale
- Royale Ranked
- Blitz Royale
- Reload
- Battle Royale Zero Build
