Epic has spent the last few years trying its best to bring the Fortnite metaverse to life, and now, at the end of 2025, it seems that it is already getting closer to the goal. Things are still very messy, but Epic's moves in this direction, which often involve trying random things just to see what happens, may have finally paid off.
Back in late 2023, Fortnite attempted to kick off its metaverse in earnest by launching Fortnite Festival, Rocket Racing, and Lego Fortnite at the same time. It didn't quite work because all three were half-baked and missing key features. The only way to play racing was in ranked mode, Festival had no tool support and still doesn't have a practice mode, and Lego Fortnite felt like a generic early access survival game in Lego clothing.
Two years later we have a much prettier picture, but not because Epic went all in on these modes. Instead, Epic simply continued to release new modes, some of which worked reliably. Likewise, Fortnite Creative released its first long-running blockbuster map. Thanks to some key legal victories, Fortnite is once again available on mobile devices in most places, greatly increasing the game's potential impact. And the new cosmetics added last year have proven to be much more popular than the cars and musical instruments introduced in Chapter 5.
A lot has happened in Fortnite over the past year. To make it all a little easier to digest, let's look at the most important events one by one.
Rise of the Brains
The creative side of Fortnite got its first real blockbuster in 2025 with Steal the Brainrot, a licensed clone of one of Roblox's most popular modes. Steal the Brainrot was an instant success in Fortnite and consistently has enough concurrent players to rival Epic's battle royale modes. Now Epic plans to capitalize on Brainrot's success by allowing creators using the Unreal editor for Fortnite to add V-Bucks transactions to your islandssomething that the Roblox version of the game Brainrot has that Fortnite currently doesn't have.
Unfortunately, the success of this mode means that Epic has decided to use it as a major focus in their marketing for Fortnite as a whole, as well as promoting it overall by featuring it in the in-game news feed. This is incredibly off-putting to people who aren't interested in the mode, which is pretty much everyone who isn't already playing it.
With Brainrots seemingly here to stay, there's reason to worry that Fortnite could soon be overrun with the kind of stupid nonsense aimed solely at children. Epic has already made it difficult for people who just want to play BR to have to browse through all the creative islands and other modes they don't care about in Fortnite's messy Discover tab.
The problem is that Fortnite doesn't offer any way to customize the Discover tab at all, other than choosing modes and favorite maps that you like. You can't, for example, tell it that you're not interested in Steal the Brainrot, so there's no way to escape the noise or pretend it doesn't exist because Epic is constantly marketing it to you. It's not fun.
Battle Royale Breakup
Last year, Fortnite added several new additional battle royale modes, starting with the persistent OG mode, which revisited Chapter 1. In addition to more or less recreating the game as it existed seven years ago, the mode even received its own new battle pass, the OG Pass, for each season.
Then we had Blitz Royale, which arrived in the summer and was aimed at mobile players with short matches on a small island. Epic has done a lot of fine-tuning to Blitz Royale since its launch, trying out all sorts of new mechanics, like giving all players a super-powerful medallion to start a match – although since early November, Blitz has felt more like a tiny version of standard Battle Royale, without as many gimmicks. But Blitz changed so often that it never really had a status quo, which is a great way to keep players interested.
Epic followed this up with Delulu, a weekend-only mode with voice chat that allows players to form makeshift teams and then betray each other if they choose.
Somehow, these new modes—along with Reboot, OG, and the usual Battle Royale—managed to maintain a healthy population at the same time. They do cannibalize each other a little, but not enough that it affects matchmaking in any particular mode for most people. It's hard to imagine Epic being able to get by without the new BR modes without increasing Fortnite's overall population, but Epic knows that too – which is probably why Delulu is only available on weekends.
I bet everything on celebrities
Being a rhythm game, Fortnite Festival was never going to attract hundreds of thousands of concurrent users in the long term like Battle Royale does. The mode has a small but dedicated player base these days, but the cosmetics associated with it—pop star skins in the item shop and seasonal music passes—have clearly been a big hit for Epic, because the company has been doing a lot more of these kinds of collaborations overall this year.
In just the past few months, Fortnite has unveiled new collaborations with five music artists (Deadmau5, Daft Punk, Doja Cat, Tyler the Creator, and Playboi Carti) who weren't headlining the festival, and then Epic highlighted its recently increased obsession with celebrities by adding Kim Kardashian in December. Considering how popular these celebrity and pop star skins have been lately—it feels like we've been fighting Sabrina Carpenters non-stop in BR this year—you can probably expect even more crossovers of this type in 2026.
New virtual toys you can spend money on
Over the past few years, Epic Games has gradually introduced new types of cosmetics. Back in the fifth chapter, cars, musical instruments and various Lego things were added. Pinkies appeared just before the start of Chapter 6 a year ago, and in 2025 we got helpers – essentially pets that follow us around and are happy when we perform certain in-game actions. While the new Chapter 5 cosmetics didn't come out of the gate so badly that Epic had to lower some of their prices (it turns out that 4,000 V-Bucks was quite a lot for the Fortnite machine), the Strikes seem to have done well, and the Helpers have seen some success.
Yes, there's been a lot of grumbling about both of the latest new types of cosmetics added – people who aren't sneakerheads tend to scoff at the kicks, and there's been a lot of frustration over the fact that you can only customize your assistant's appearance once before it's locked out forever. But people still buy them. It's rare that I have a teammate who isn't followed by a pet dog or cat (or chicken).
And speaking personally, as a person who has been playing for many years and has a lot of skins, I like to be able to create something new. I don't really need more skins at this point, but having Itchy from The Simpsons follow me around and celebrate my kills is adorable.
AI slop is coming?
While Fortnite isn't currently a wasteland of artificial intelligence nonsense, the first warning signs emerged this year. Epic's most notable creation based on artificial intelligence was NPC Darth Vader in Battle Royale during the Star Wars mini-season in May, which could dynamically respond in the voice of the late James Earl Jones to what players told him. It was definitely weird, but at least it wouldn't be practical to try. without AI.
Since then, other obvious things related to artificial intelligence have begun to appear in Fortnite. In October, Epic gave away a free jam track that had AI-generated cover featuring Hatsune Miku.–although this track had nothing to do with Mick. Chapter 7 of the game features several pieces of art that are commonly accused of being created by artificial intelligence, such as a poster of a yeti in a hammock, which he has five toes on one foot and four on the other.. AND emotion Lisa's music pass uses a licensed song from 2025 that is so obscure that no one even knows who wrote it, and sounds very much like it was generated by artificial intelligence. Oh, are these brain rotters? These are all AI-created memes from Italian trend Brainrot.
Honestly, none of this really means that much. But when you take these things together Recent comments from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney— in which he said it's absurd for Steam to require disclosure if AI-generated content is used in game development because AI will soon be involved in all development work — there's certainly some cause for concern that Epic might be planning to dish out slop in its never-ending pursuit of kids who play Roblox.
