Fortnite Is Killing Creative Maps, Here’s Why…

Dominic Pastino

12 Jan 2026 — 3 min read

Epic’s decision to allow paid items inside Fortnite Creative maps is INSANE, plain and simple. This is something that shouldn’t exist in a game that was built around people jumping in together and having fun. Fortnite was and should be an experience built for everyone to enjoy together. Regardless of income or background, you should be able to hop into a Creative map with your friends and experience it together without someone being locked behind a paywall, perk system, or microtransaction screen. The moment money starts dictating who gets what inside a community-made experience, the entire spirit of Creative starts getting chipped away.

If I’m going to spend money in Fortnite, it should be on things that actually make sense and stick with my account. I shouldn’t have to drop sixty dollars on anything other than maybe every ridiculous Fortnite crossover skin or something genuinely fun and permanent. If I want a pet that follows me around and looks like my favorite real-life pet, cool, that’s the kind of stuff the Item Shop is built for. There’s no real rhyme or reason why buying experiences or perks inside a Creative map should ever be considered necessary. Epic Games already makes more than enough money from in-game V-Bucks purchases alone, so pushing monetization deeper into Creative feels unnecessary and greedy. Maybe the Apple lawsuit is costing them a fortune, and they need our help, who knows, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of what made Creative special in the first place.

Roblox Is Exactly the Future I Don’t Want Fortnite Chasing

If anyone thinks this can’t spiral into something ugly, just look at Roblox. Roblox has become a platform overrun with half assed children’s experiences that exist solely to extract microtransactions from players. I recently spoke to a Roblox experience creator who casually bragged about making around twenty thousand dollars a month off their game. Once you dig into how that actually works, it gets even worse. They claimed to have hired random developers from foreign non-English speaking countries, barely paid them anything, and pocketed the majority of the money without reinvesting it back into the experience.

That kind of system doesn’t reward creativity or fairness. It rewards whoever can extract the most money the fastest. That’s exactly what worries me about this move from Epic. Instead of creators focusing on building genuinely fun experiences, the incentive slowly shifts toward building monetization and engagement traps. It stops being about creativity and starts being about who can manipulate children of all people into spending the most. Fortnite should not be chasing the same road Roblox went down, especially when Fortnite has always felt more like a shared experience than a storefront.

This Feels Like a K.O. to the Players

What makes this even harder to process is that Creative creators already get paid based on playtime engagement, and now they’re also getting direct purchases layered on top of that. After the first year, Epic Games announced it would take a 50% cut, but the money from Creative purchases still flows primarily to individual creators. That makes it hard to believe this is about keeping Fortnite sustainable. It feels far more like squeezing extra dollars out of players inside spaces that were never meant to feel this kind of pressure.

Players are already calling this a scam, and honestly, it’s not hard to see why. You’re being asked to spend real money on perks or access to things that only exist inside a single map that could fall off in popularity or disappear entirely. Meanwhile, what used to be a simple, exclusive way to jump in and have fun with friends starts feeling strained. For a game that built its identity around easy-to-access shared fun, this whole move feels like a big middle finger to the community.