Epic has spent the past few years trying as hard as it can to will the Fortnite metaverse into being–and now, at the end of 2025, it’s actually starting to look like it’s getting there. Things are still very messy, but Epic’s moves in that direction–which frequently seem to involve trying random things just to see what happens–may have finally borne fruit.
Back at the end of 2023, Fortnite attempted to usher in its metaverse in earnest by launching Fortnite Festival, Rocket Racing, and Lego Fortnite all at once. It didn’t quite work, because all three were half-baked and missing key features. The only way to play Racing was in Ranked, Festival lacked instrument support and still doesn’t have a practice mode, and Lego Fortnite had the feel of a generic early-access survival game wearing Lego clothing.
Two years later, we’ve got a much prettier picture, but not because Epic went all in on those modes. Instead, Epic has simply kept churning out new modes, some of which have done consistently. Likewise, Fortnite Creative has produced its first blockbuster map with any staying power. Thanks to some key legal victories, Fortnite is once again available on mobile devices in most places, which has dramatically increased the game’s potential footprint. And the new cosmetic types added in the past year have proven a lot more popular than the cars and musical instruments that were introduced in Chapter 5.
A lot happened in Fortnite during the past year. To make it all a little easier to digest, let’s go through the biggest developments one by one.
Rise of the Brainrots
The Creative part of Fortnite got its first genuine 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 it consistently averages enough concurrent players that it can compete with Epic’s battle royale modes. Now, Epic is planning to capitalize on Brainrot’s success by allowing creators using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite to add V-Bucks transactions to their islands, something the Roblox version of the Brainrot game has that Fortnite’s currently does not.
Unfortunately, the success of this mode means Epic has decided to use it as a focus in its marketing for Fortnite as a whole, as well as promoting it generally by placing it in the in-game news feed. That’s proven to be incredibly off-putting for folks who aren’t interested in that mode–which is pretty much everyone who doesn’t already play it.
With the Brainrots apparently here to stay, there’s reason to worry that Fortnite might soon be flooded with this sort of goofy nonsense aimed entirely at children. Epic has already made it unnecessarily difficult for folks who just want to play BR to sift through all the Creative islands and other modes they don’t care about in Fortnite’s messy Discover tab.
The problem is that Fortnite does not offer any way to tailor your Discover tab at all except favoriting modes and 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 promoting it to you. It’s not fun.
The fracturing of battle royale
Fortnite added several new battle royale spinoff modes in the past year, starting with the permanent OG mode that has been revisiting Chapter 1. In addition to more or less recreating the game as it existed seven years ago, this mode even got its own new battle pass, the OG pass, for each of its seasons.
Then we had Blitz Royale, which arrived during the summer with a focus on mobile players, thanks to its short matches on a small island. Epic has done tons of fine-tuning on Blitz Royale since it launched, trying all sorts of novel mechanics, like granting all players a super-powered medallion to start a match–though since the beginning of November, Blitz is more like a tiny version of standard Battle Royale, without as many gimmicks. But Blitz has changed so frequently that it’s never had a real status quo–which is a great way to keep players’ interest.
Epic followed that up with Delulu, a weekends-only mode with proximity voice chat that allows players to form impromptu teams–and then betray each other if they want to.
Somehow, these new modes–alongside Reload, OG, and regular Battle Royale–have all managed to maintain healthy populations at the same time. They absolutely do cannibalize each other a bit, but not so much that it affects matchmaking in any particular mode for most folks. It’s tough to imagine that Epic could get away with any more new BR modes without a bump to Fortnite’s overall population, but Epic clearly knows this too–that’s probably why Delulu is only available on the weekends.
Going all in on celebs
Being a rhythm game, Fortnite Festival was never going to pull hundreds of thousands of concurrent users over the long term in the way Battle Royale does. These days, the mode has a small but dedicated playerbase, but the cosmetics associated with the mode–skins of pop stars in the item shop and the seasonal music passes–have clearly been a big success for Epic, because the company has been doing a lot more of those types of collabs in general this year.
Just in the past few months, Fortnite has introduced new collaborations with five musical artists (Deadmau5, Daft Punk, Doja Cat, Tyler the Creator, and Playboi Carti) that were not Festival headliners, and then Epic punctuated its newly ramped-up celeb obsession by adding Kim Kardashian in December. Considering how popular these celebrity and popstar skins have been lately–it feels like we’ve been battling Sabrina Carpenters nonstop in BR this year–you can probably expect even more crossovers of this type in 2026.
New virtual toys to spend money on
Epic Games has been gradually introducing new types of cosmetics over the last couple of years. Back in Chapter 5, it added cars, musical instruments, and various Lego things. Kicks popped up just before the start of Chapter 6 a year ago, and in 2025, we got sidekicks–essentially pets who follow us around and get excited when we perform certain in-game actions. While the new Chapter 5 cosmetics struggled so much out of the gate that Epic had to lower some of their prices–it turned out that 4,000 V-Bucks was kind of a lot for a Fortnite car–kicks seem to have done well, and sidekicks are a definite hit.
Yes, there’s been plenty of grumbling about both of the most recently added new cosmetic types–folks who aren’t sneakerheads tend to scoff at kicks, and there was a lot of frustration that you can only customize your sidekick’s appearance once before it locks permanently. But folks are buying them nonetheless. It’s rare that I have a teammate who doesn’t have a pet dog or cat (or chicken) following them around.
And speaking personally, as somebody who’s been playing for years and has tons of skins, I like being able to branch out with new stuff. I really don’t need more skins at this point, but having Itchy from The Simpsons follow me around and celebrate my kills is delightful.
The AI slop is coming?
While Fortnite is not currently any sort of wasteland of AI nonsense, the first red flags popped up this year. Epic’s most notable AI-driven creation was the Darth Vader NPC in Battle Royale during the Star Wars mini-season in May, who could respond dynamically, in the voice of the late James Earl Jones, to things players said to him. It was definitely weird, but at least it was something that might have been impractical to try without AI.
Other apparent AI things have begun popping up here and there within Fortnite since then. Epic gave out a free jam track in October that had AI-generated cover art featuring Hatsune Miku–even though the track had nothing to do with Miku. There are some pieces of art in the game in Chapter 7 that have commonly been accused of being AI-generated, like a poster of a Yeti in a hammock in which one of his feet has five toes while the other has four. And an emote on Lisa’s music pass uses a licensed 2025 song so obscure that nobody even knows who made it–and it sounds very much like it’s AI-generated. Oh, and those Brainrots? All of those are AI-generated meme designs from the Italian Brainrot trend.
To be honest, all of that really doesn’t add up to very much. But when you take those things alongside 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 a game’s development because AI will soon be involved in all dev work–there’s certainly some reason to worry that Epic might be planning to unleash the slop in its never-ending pursuit of the children who play Roblox.