Two Fortnite creative developers are accused of falsifying the popularity of their islands to get paid based on engagement, Epic Games says
www.polygon.com
Fortnite is more than just a battle royale game: It's also a platform that
hosts a wide swath of player-created experiences, much like Roblox does. Developer Epic Games encourages fans to make islands by providing a user-friendly Unreal Editor as well as an engagement-based creator program. It's big business, too. Every year, Epic pays out millions of dollars to the most popular map creators.
But at least two developers tried to trick Epic Games into believing their maps were much more successful than they actually were, the
Fortnite maker says. Now, Epic Games is pursuing legal action.
"Botting" is a common occurrence on the internet. It refers to the practice of creating or purchasing fake accounts to drive up numbers on digital media. Livestream platform Twitch, for example, recently took action against viewbots
that artificially inflated concurrent numbers for streamers.
By some estimates, the majority of internet traffic as a whole is led by bots, not humans.
When it comes to
Fortnite, Epic pays creators based on a number of metrics, like session length and whether users went on to purchase anything from the
Fortnite shop. The number of people who participate in a fan-made Fortnite Creative map is also taken under consideration by Epic to determine the payout, and that's apparently what two men attempted to exploit.
According to Epic, players Idris Nahdi and Ayob Nasser allegedly created multiple fake accounts to upload multiple map experiences. The two are accused of relying on more than 20,000 bots to artificially engage with their own creations. Real people did appear to interact with the maps in question, but Epic says that anywhere between 88% to 99% of engagement was never real.
"Defendants programmed the bot accounts to engage with Defendants’ own
Fortnite Islands by using a cloud gaming service that allows users to play video games, like Fortnite, remotely," the filing reads.
The two purportedly made tens of thousands of dollars through this scheme, Epic says. Once Epic caught on, it stopped payments — and the concurrents for the maps were dropped in accordance.