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.
“Defendants worked together to create multiple Islands in an attempt to disguise their scheme by spreading the fake engagement across multiple developer accounts and Islands,” the suit reads.
Once they were caught, Epic Games implored the accused to “destroy all copies of Fortnite in their possession.” Evidently, the two did not, in fact, stop playing Fortnite despite the warning, which is one of the many reasons Epic Games escalated things.
In the filing, Epic says that it intends to recuperate the money it paid out under false pretenses, which is one motivation for the lawsuit. Epic Games also wants to protect the sanctity of its program, it says.
“Developers trust that the time spent creating Islands will be rewarded in accordance with the Engagement Program Payout Terms, and based on how real players engage with the Islands,” the filing reads. “Defendants’ conduct undermines Epic’s relationship with developers, however, depriving legitimate developers of the full share of funds they otherwise would have received and eroding the trust Epic has built with them.”
Beyond money, Epic Games hopes the courts will bar both players from creating accounts in the future, and from downloading or playing Fortnite overall. Curiously, the language used here says that Epic would like to apply these measures to apply to the defendants and their “heirs [and] successors.” This suggests that if the duo ever go on to have children, they would also be legally prohibited from hitting the griddy with Peely. TBD if the legal system will go that far, though.
In the past, Epic Games has pursued litigation against cheat makers and sellers, and shown a general intolerance for falsities of any kind. During the summer, Epic Games forced two tournament cheaters it banned for life to publicly apologize for their conduct.
