Fortnite advertising friction: creators say brands are wasting money on custom maps

Most brand activations in Fortnite currently take the form of custom experiences designed to promote individual advertisers, like The General’s “Road Test Royale” and Dairy Max’s “Diner Tycoon.” Brands typically spend between $300,000 and $500,000 on this type of custom map, according to four marketers with knowledge of the space. Creator studios like Look North World and Zoned act as brands’ agencies inside Fortnite, building their virtual worlds and hiring creators to promote them to their fans. Neither creator studios nor individual creators are officially affiliated with Epic Games.

But as ad dollars pour in, creators warn that advertisers may be overspending. Five Fortnite creators and talent managers told Digiday that they believe brands are overspending on the platform by focusing their efforts on custom-branded maps, rather than integrations into pre-existing popular experiences, which usually cost between $20,000 and $50,000. 

For example, Good Gamers — the development team of Fortnite content creator Dylan “TheBoyDilly” Johnson — currently charges most brand clients less than $100,000 to integrate into its games, according to Good Gamers strategic partnerships manager Zack Billingham. Currently, Good Gamers operates three of the top-10 most popular maps on Fortnite, including “Go Goated” and “Murder Mystery.”

Fortnite creator Dagwummy, the co-developer of popular maps like “Minigame Box PVP,” believes integrations give both brands and creators room to maneuver.

The debate between custom-built maps and integrations on Fortnite parallels similar tensions that arose between creators and studios on Roblox earlier this year. As Fortnite creators grow more vocal about their vision for brand activations on Fortnite, the clash shows how the creator economy on Fortnite is evolving in similar ways to the Roblox creator economy — just lagging slightly behind.

“Roblox is far more advanced,” said Dario Raciti, the director of Omnicom’s gaming group Zero Code. “They’ve accelerated and opened up to advertisers incredibly fast over the past year.”

The creator perspective

The crux of the argument between Fortnite’s creators and agencies is measurement metrics — an increasing focus for advertisers on the platform as brands scrutinize the ROI of their creator spend in 2025. Fortnite creators view a map’s peak concurrent player count as the ultimate marker of its success, with Good Gamers achieving peak player numbers in the tens of thousands for its popular experiences. On the other hand, custom-branded maps like The General’s “Road Test Royale” often garner peak concurrent player numbers in the hundreds — which is why creators like Billingham believe brands are wasting money by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this type of activation.

To highlight the effectiveness of integrations into pre-existing Fortnite maps over custom branded maps, Billingham flagged an April Popeye’s campaign inside “Murder Mystery,” a popular Good Gamers map. In addition to reaching 721,000 unique visitors, the experience convinced 892 players to redeem a coupon for a free chicken sandwich in exchange for making a social post that used the hashtag #PopeyesPickleQuest.

“Brands don’t need to rely solely on PR or influencers to reach gamers. An exciting integration in a top game, paired with marketing, guarantees both attention and impact,” he said.

The studio/agency perspective

But Fortnite’s agency–studios and the brands that work with them argue that peak concurrent players is only one of a constellation of metrics that indicate the performance of a branded map. In the case of The General’s recent launch, for example, Look North World CEO Alexander Seropian said that his company had designed the game less for long-term high concurrent player counts and more as part of a broader campaign that also included Twitch streamers such as Faheem “T-Pain” Najm. Seropian said that the broader campaign had brought in over 50 million total views, a metric that he said was far more relevant to the brand than raw player counts. 

“The intention of that activation [type] is to bring a brand into the Fortnite ecosystem — to start creating a relationship between the brand and the players. In that specific case, it’s as much about the engaging play as it is about the exposure,” he said. “Sometimes, we measure that exposure in impressions and views.”

The buyer perspective

Player turnout aside, The General counted its Fortnite map as a win. The General marketing director Chauncy Citchens declined to share specific performance numbers, citing the ongoing nature of the campaign, but noted that the brand had generated additional impressions by hiring popular Twitch streamers to broadcast themselves playing the map.

“Our biggest KPI is awareness; it’s not game plays,” Citchens said.

Still, disappointing player counts have convinced some brands to pivot away from custom Fortnite maps and toward integrations into pre-existing experiences.

“We don’t focus on brand-owned Fortnite maps,” said Chris Mann, an svp at the agency REVXP, which leads the gaming strategy of brands like Chipotle. “One of the things we learned quickly was, if you’re going to do a map, you need to put media behind it, and you need to put the media behind it where players are playing. I think a more impactful way in for brands in Fortnite is to work with existing map creators to find a value adding in for that experience.”

Mann flagged low player counts as one reason for his lack of interest in Fortnite maps.

“If you look at brand-owned Fortnite maps, even some of the biggest brands in the world struggle on attracting players,” he said. “Major brands peaking at sub-200, sub-100, sometimes sub-50 peak player counts. That does not feel like a strong and goal-driving investment.”

Ultimately, the right way to show up inside Fortnite is a matter of a brands’ specific goals, according to Sami Barnett, senior director of gaming for the agency TMA, who said that the positive press and influencer impressions that can come with a fully custom branded map can still be valuable to the right brands, even if player counts are low. 

“A lot of the time, brands want that full, ownable moment, so I think that’s the benefit there,” Barnett said. “From a creator’s perspective, they’re built on concurrent viewers and concurrent players; when those are low, that signals to them, ‘this is a failure.’ So, neither side is wrong — they’re just measuring different things.”

Raciti said that he doesn’t recommend clients build their own Fortnite maps unless they are an entertainment property with particularly strong homegrown IP that could attract players’ attention. He said that integrating into a pre-existing experience is his preferred option, both because it is cheaper and because it allows brands to sidestep the issue of discoverability on Fortnite’s platform.

“I can’t even remember the last time that we recommended anybody to build their own game, whether it’s a mobile game or in Fortnite or in Roblox,” Raciti said. “We always recommend they find a place that fits their brand inside one of those games that already has a large audience.”