Fortnite is getting a new Discover page — and it looks a lot like the corresponding pages on platforms like YouTube and Netflix.
At Unreal Fest 2026 in Chicago last week, Epic Games unveiled a new Fortnite Discover system intended to grow the platform’s ecosystem by reliably surfacing the right creator experiences to the right players. Currently, players who log into Fortnite are sent into a lobby where they can jump back into the most recent experience they played — often Fortnite’s default Battle Royale mode. Under the new system, players will start in Discover and will be prompted to try out new creator experiences as soon as they log in, with the goal of driving more traffic and engagement to experiences built by third-party creators on the platform.
“We’ve reached an all-time high of playtime in third-party experiences — that’s not good enough. We want it to be twice as much,” said Epic Games senior director of product management Harold Emsheimer in a presentation about Fortnite’s updated Discover system at Unreal Fest. “We want the playtime to be very competitive inside our ecosystem; it’s the only way for us to truly develop as a platform. In order to do that, we feel like we need to make this type of bold move.”
Epic plans to roll out Fortnite’s Discover changes incrementally in the coming months, with some elements already live or in testing. Moving forward, the company intends for Discover to be a more targeted experience, with players receiving personalized recommendations rather than being shown a single static list of recommended titles. Fortnite islands’ thumbnails will be enhanced with user data including like percentage and concurrent user numbers, among a host of other changes.
“I’ve been watching ‘The Pitt’ [on HBO Max] a lot, and when the new season drops, that put that tag on, and I’m just like, ‘okay, I’m going to click on that,’” Emsheimer said in an interview with GamesBeat following the Unreal Fest presentation. “We think that same thing can happen in games, where it’s like, ‘oh, there’s a big update here.’”
Indeed, many of the changes that Epic Games is implementing to Fortnite’s Discover system are in line with broader shifts to content discovery and surfacing across video streaming platforms like HBO Max and Netflix. In an interview with GamesBeat, Emsheimer and Epic Games senior director of analytics Jonathan Fox acknowledged that they had borrowed from other platforms to implement discovery tactics they felt would be effective for Fortnite, such as increased personalization and the inclusion of more information on content tiles.
“We were definitely influenced by other platforms that people were dealing with in everyday life,” Emsheimer said. “It just makes a lot of sense.”
Since implementing some Discover changes in mid-April, Epic Games has already observed a boost in a metric that the company describes as “time-to-traction,” or the amount of time it takes a new island to hit milestones like 1,000 or 10,000 players. In May, roughly 60 percent of newly published islands were reaching over 100 players in their first week — a 3x improvement over new island performance in February, according to numbers shared by Fox during the presentation.
“We’re already seeing time-to-traction actually pretty meaningfully improve over the last couple of months,” Fox said during the Unreal Fest talk. “It’s about two times faster — even more, actually — to hit 1,000 or 10,000 players for the islands that do.”
In addition to increased personalization, Fortnite’s updated Discover system allows Epic Games to support creator experiences that the company has determined might be beneficial for the long-term health of the Fortnite ecosystem based on an algorithm. Epic will be “boosting” certain islands that the company has algorithmically determined might benefit from more “shots on goal,” per Fox, using data analytics to crunch the numbers on whether an island might need an extra push to achieve viral success. Fox clarified that the purpose of boosts is not to highlight islands that Epic feels are particularly unique or innovative, although he acknowledged that “we do want to do that too.” Boosts are determined by an algorithm, rather than resulting from editorial decisions made by Epic Games staff.
“If you’re in place seven and you’ve never been in place six, or if you’re putting a lot of good updates into your island, we also have this thing called a ‘low-exposure boost’ that we have, where if you just never got a lot of views, we’ll put you up really high for a little bit, just to see if people actually really like it,” Fox said in an interview with GamesBeat.