Epic and Lego have a long-term plan to make Fortnite more than battle royale

A year ago, Epic kicked off a bold plan to turn Fortnite into a broader ecosystem for all kinds of games. And that plan was led by the launch of Lego Fortnite, a Minecraft-style survival game that sits alongside the likes of battle royale and the music-themed Fortnite Festival inside of Fortnite. Now, Epic is pushing into another new direction with the launch of Brick Life, a Lego-themed city where players can live virtual lives, much like in Grand Theft Auto roleplaying servers.

The ongoing goal, according to Devin Winterbottom, Epic’s executive vice president of game development, is to keep expanding in ways that make people rethink what Fortnite actually is. “The worst outcome for us is that everything looks like battle royale,” Winterbottom says. “That’s not what we want to do.”

For Brick Life, that takes the form of a family-friendly nonviolent space where players can explore and socialize inside of a Lego city. It launches today as part of a broader rebranding of Lego Fortnite; now, those two words refer to a hub that houses all of the Lego experiences in the game, while the survival title has been renamed Lego Fortnite Odyssey. In between those two major releases, Lego has also released a handful of smaller, more experimental games meant to broaden the audience even more.

Remi Marcelli, head of games at Lego, says that the initial plan for these experiments was to be very different from Fortnite as we know it now — that’s why one of the first releases was about taking care of cats on a cozy island. “We launched Cat Island Adventure, where you had to find kittens and nurture them, which is the furthest away from battle royale that we could think of,” he explains. “We had a decent playerbase at launch, but it was sort of lost in an environment where nobody was opening Fortnite to play that specific type of game.”

One of the key things the Lego team learned over the last 12 months through those kinds of launches, according to Marcelli, is to attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. “If we want to be relevant, we need to appeal to everyone, including the hardcore battle royale players,” he explains. “We need to find things that are exciting enough for them to visit us. Finding that match is what we’ve been trying to do for the entire year.” A hope is that the new hub area will help make some of those more offbeat experiences like the cat island easier to discover for players.

An issue for all of these new game experiences within Fortnite is competing with the behemoth that is battle royale. Right now, all of the various iterations of BR — like Zero Build or Fortnite OG — still dominate in terms of pure player count. And while some other games, like Odyssey, have carved out a large audience, others, like Rocket Racing from Rocket League developer Psyonix, have struggled.

“The battle royale product can kind of distort and make it difficult to see success,” says Winterbottom. “Odyssey can look smaller compared to some of the other stuff that’s in the ecosystem, but it’s actually a successful game. It has a lot of players. If you were to see it as a standalone product outside of the ecosystem, the numbers that it generates would be considered very successful.” But he adds that “we believe success comes in a lot of different sizes. There are games that can be really compelling for a small group of players, and that variety is good. Not everything needs to be a monolithic mega game. That’s actually bad in our opinion.”

And while we’re already a year out, it’s also still early in the grand scheme of this plan to turn Fortnite into a video game platform. Right now, that includes everything from first-person shooters to Ninja Turtles roguelikes to musical experiences, in addition to an ever-growing list of battle royale variations (and eventually something big with Disney). Lego, meanwhile, offers a big opportunity to appeal to a very broad audience — and both teams are thinking very far out. “We’re in this for a very long term partnership,” says Winterbottom. “We talk about this in decade increments, not years.”