when is he coming To know the formula for a successful game that keeps players coming back year after year, Sachs Pearson would know it. Now at Epic Games overseeing the Fortnite ecosystem, Pearson previously spent 12 years at Mojang building Minecraft to the massive success it is today.
Pearson moved to Epic in 2022 to work on the Fortnite maker’s roadmap, shepherding Lego Fortnite from a press release last year into a polished, ambitious standalone experience designed to bring new audiences to the free-to-play world of Fortnite.
We spoke with Pearson about Epic’s big plans for Lego Fortnite and its two other new games, Rocket Racing and Fortnite Festival. Given Fortnite’s penchant for maxing out and its constant feed of new content, triple play is just getting started – but here’s a glimpse of the direction it’s headed.
The questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
TechCrunch: With the three new games, especially Lego Fortnite, is the goal to expand Fortnite’s appeal to new types of players?
Pearson: Battle Royale has been very popular. From a Battle Royale perspective, we understand our players very well. We’ve done our best over the past six years to always make a game that feels fresh and cutting-edge, never stops, is constantly updated and sets us apart from the competition by never taking itself too seriously. This has always been the goal of Battle Royale.
The next episode that evolved from that was when we released Fortnite Creative and then when we launched it UEFN [Unreal Editor for Fortnite] In March of this year – it fully realizes that Fortnite players want to play more games, not just Battle Royale. The more content they have, the better the content they have, the more diverse the content is, the happier they are.
So, if your sole goal is to say, if you come to Fortnite, we want you to consider all of these different options, and to stay as long as you want because we hope you have fun.
TechCrunch/Epic Games
Our creators have done a great job expanding the scope of who already plays Fortnite. The battle royale game is really important – it’s a major tenant, whatever you want to call it. But if you ask players like “what do you play in a week,” I think the average island played in a week is about seven or seven different islands. They are diverse in style, aesthetics and genre… We ask our creators what they would like to create. If they want to create it, we bet there will be players who want to play it. This has been the strategy so far.
…In order to make really good tools, we have to use them ourselves. We know that in order for us to scale deep tools and new genres, our best bet is that we need to create some first-party content that really expands what the Unreal Engine can do. Then take these tools and hand them to the creators and say that you now have these abilities.
With that in mind, we’ve announced the three games, Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and [Fortnite] The festivals all have different goals of expanding the toolkit in a certain direction, but also attracting new players to say, “Oh, I guess Fortnite isn’t just Battle Royale.” Really, we just need to get them past the trouble of installing 54GB… and once you get there, there should be a lot more to do.
What do these toolkits look like and what can people build with them?
“[With] Lego Fortnite… We’ve been working a lot on it [procedural generation]We’ve been working a lot on different modes – like adding Lego modes so you can play in Fortnite style and as a Lego style minifigure. And in the future, we fully expect content creators to have access to this as well.
The procedural world is really cool. Again, like we’ve always been working on a very fixed playing field, but Lego is pioneering a huge range of procedural tools that hopefully we can expand to include creators, and a much larger island – like we’re 20 times larger than Battle Royale Island. It is a huge island and we are still working on expanding it. This again should benefit the creators.
Rocket Racing adds reliable racing mechanics to our creators, track design editors, and more. So the game is important because it comes from Rocket League, which is an excellent game. We really believe in this game. A secondary effect is that creators get cool composite tools.
And finally [Fortnite] festival. A lot of effort has been put into music creation tools, music editing tools, and tools for making music and playing with music. And many of these devices, as we call them, are already made available to creators.
This is the goal. Music attracts new audiences. Racing attracts a new audience. Lego is attracting a new audience. While we know it appeals to existing Fortnite players, it will definitely appeal to fans who aren’t interested in Battle Royale.
What about expanding Fortnite to younger players, is that part of the goal here?
We have presented separately from LEGO but in collaboration with Lego a Fortnite’s new ratings model, where each piece of content is evaluated. This is facilitated really well with our parental controls. It’s like when you’re a parent when you let your kid into Fortnite, you don’t just have to slam the door wide… you can still control on a granular level what your kids play.
And you can see what. So, yeah, like, Lego is an E10 game, so it mechanically opens up a new audience. But I think underneath that, again, there’s a whole bunch of new features, just to be able to evaluate the islands on an individual level. And just to focus on like, how can we provide a great experience for all ages that is age appropriate and safe?
Lego Fortnite seems to be cleverly dabbling in some of the genres and gameplay loops that people already love in other games. Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Valheim all come to mind, but there are quite a few.
I think all games should be inspired by something. What do we all enjoy? We really enjoy Zelda, we really enjoy Minecraft, we really enjoy Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley. All four of them are certainly, in their own right, excellent examples of games that have just stood the test of time. This really resonates emotionally with people and we would love to add to the genre and be a part of the genre.
I don’t think we are anything in particular. As if we had aspects of Animal Crossing and a social sim… As it turns out, there’s nothing as cute as building a building with minifigures that all have jobs, and they all want to be part of your village and can [help out] With the harvest and go on adventures with you. The social sim’s design is largely focused on fulfilling the Lego fantasy, but it certainly seems to have the laid-back gameplay aspect of building houses, building villages, and investing in your people.
![](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SHARE_20240103_0124073.jpeg)
TechCrunch/Epic Games
In a procedurally generated survival game – when you’re playing something like Valheim or Minecraft – you have a big moment when you first open the map. It’s exciting, and you don’t know what’s around you and how dangerous it is. Lego Fortnite has the same feeling.
I think a key part of Fortnite is, “What’s waiting around the next corner?” When we started working on procedurally generating these landscapes, there was a lot of walking around and making these cool looking things and then adding more and more and more to it and kind of doing a real crossover between Lego and Fortnite and trying to find what satisfies Lego players and satisfies Fortnite players – I really feel We understand these two IP addresses. And the landscape is full of that.
I think the internal model was that Fortnite is the canvas and Lego is the paint. Basically, anything you touch becomes a Lego as you play, and the more you play, the more you create in the world with your Lego pieces. I really liked the idea of landing on a Fortnite planet that had mysteriously turned into a Lego character and then, like, turning that into a survival sandbox – an actual sandbox in which anything could happen.
I love the genre and I really think it speaks to all of us, in a very simple way where you can set your own stakes and what’s really important is not to die. But everything else like prosperity is completely up to you.
![](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SHARE_20240103_0125172.jpeg)
TechCrunch/Fortnite
People who don’t follow Fortnite and don’t know anything about user-generated content might still think it’s just a battle royale game where 100 people fight to the death. How do you know that Fortnite is an ecosystem full of a lot of different things, including now these three main games that we’ve developed?
There’s nothing like YouTube videos showing off Lego Fortnite cheats or your favorite streaming device to spend time on. Because we think it has huge storytelling potential for YouTubers and Twitch streamers. It’s a sandbox designed just for you to tell stories.
This is what made Minecraft so successful. It’s what you make of it, which means the more creative you are, the better your videos will be, and we really feel that the streaming community and YouTube will help tell that story for us.
Now it’s about updates. If there’s one thing that Epic knows and the Fortnite team knows is that players want content, they want updates, and that’s what the team focuses on a lot.
We all agreed that our best chance at retelling the story of Fortnite was to exaggerate the content. And it really shows that when Epic puts its mind to it, we’ve done our groundwork and we believe that Fortnite is a place you want to be and spend time, no matter what age you are, no matter how old you are. You are interested in. There needs to be content that will resonate with you.