A month after its release, Star Wars: Droid Tycoon continues to dominate Fortnite.
Droid Tycoon has been the most popular creator-made Fortnite experience since May 1, when Epic Games allowed creators to publish experiences built using officially licensed Star Wars assets. The game’s development team at Future Trash was one of a select group of creator studios granted early access to Star Wars assets by Epic Games, and Future Trash capitalized by developing Droid Tycoon.
On June 3, Droid Tycoon had surpassed 1.5 billion minutes of total playtime since its initial launch on May 1, according to numbers shared exclusively with GamesBeat by a Future Trash representative. Thus far, the game has peaked at 124,000 concurrent players, with an average session length of over 100 minutes and typical concurrent player counts numbering in the tens of thousands on weekdays.
“Honestly, we haven’t had time to celebrate. We’re in full live-ops mode: sustained updates, live events, more for players to dig into every week,” said Future Trash chief executive officer and co-founder Kevin Marciano in an interview with GamesBeat. “We’ve been building in UGC for years betting this moment was possible. Watching it actually happen is the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in entertainment.”
The success of Droid Tycoon reflects the power of IP licenses like Star Wars to generate interest and engagement on user-generated content platforms. By applying tried-and-true farming and idle simulator gameplay to the beloved IP, Future Trash created a game whose core loops felt familiar and comfortable for Fortnite and Roblox players, but also managed to bring in additive audiences that were attracted to the Star Wars IP like moths to a flame.
“Droid Tycoon works because we treated Star Wars with real respect while building a game that’s native to the platform. We didn’t port a Star Wars experience into Fortnite — we built the game Fortnite players actually want to play, then earned the right to wrap it in lore that’s meant everything to people for fifty years,” Marciano said. “That’s the lesson we’re applying everywhere: platform-first design, IP as the amplifier, not the crutch.”
In fact, napkin math would indicate that audiences have spent a similar amount of time playing Droid Tycoon as they have spent watching “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the Star Wars feature film that came out in theaters on May 22. So far, the feature film has brought in a worldwide box office total of $294 million. At an estimated average ticket price of $20 and a runtime of 132 minutes, that comes down to roughly 1.94 billion minutes watched of the film so far. That’s in the ballpark of Droid Tycoon’s numbers, especially because Future Trash announced that it had crossed the 1.5 billion minutes milestone seven days ago.
Future Trash started out in 2022 as a traditional game development firm before pivoting to a focus on UGC after the success of the studio’s flagship title FOAD. The success of Droid Tycoon helps bolster the investment thesis behind the company’s $5 million seed round in 2024, which was led by TIRTA Ventures and General Catalyst.
“Since 2024, the Future Trash team has shipped 8 games (plus many more that were never released), a development cycle measured in months, not years,” said TIRTA Ventures partner Justin Yuan written interview with GamesBeat. “By persevering through multiple launch cycles (including misses), the team’s capabilities got the attention of Epic and Disney, eventually leading to the opportunity to work on one of the biggest IPs in the world.”