Top Fortnite creators are increasingly putting young women front and center in their marketing materials — blurring the line between hiring them as spokespeople and framing them as the creators themselves. Some female creators in the space believe this practice is threatening their bottom line.
Over the past year, the phrase “Pandvil is a baddie” has become a meme within the Fortnite creator community. The subject of this meme — the Fortnite creator Pandvil — is male, according to three other prominent Fortnite creators with knowledge of his real-life identity, who spoke with GamesBeat on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging business relationships. But many of Pandvil’s hundreds of thousands of followers are under the impression that he is a woman, in large part because his Instagram and TikTok accounts are littered with videos of a young woman promoting his maps. (Pandvil did not respond to requests for comment.)
Pandvil appears to have leaned into the widespread perception that he is a so-called “baddie” — a popular slang term describing attractive women. Popular Instagram accounts such as Artifaxing and Dealhunt have shared posts describing Pandvil as a woman and promoting the creator’s success. Last month, the media company Complex became the largest social media account yet to run with this framing, writing in an Instagram post that “her success shows how the digital gaming world lets creativity pay off.” (A Complex representative did not respond to a request for comment.)
From a business standpoint, Pandvil’s marketing strategy is just good sense. It gets clicks — Pandvil’s “Box Fights” map is one of the most popular creator-made islands in Fortnite, consistently boasting thousands of concurrent players — and makes money, with Pandvil reportedly making over $20 million through Fortnite’s engagement payout system. And although the woman who is the face of Pandvil’s brand was not necessarily the person who coded his maps, she is employed as a social media manager for his studio, giving her a legitimate claim to have had a hand in creating them. The fundamental purpose of marketing strategy is to attract eyeballs — and enlisting a young woman is certainly one way to do so, particularly among hormonal young men.
“The whole ‘Pandvil is a baddie’ meme — it’s not targeted to spread the message of empowering women,” said one Fortnite creator familiar with the marketing practice, who requested anonymity to avoid damaging business relationships. “I would say it’s more just trying to get young guys.”
Pandvil is far from the only Fortnite creator to leverage young women as a marketing strategy. Other examples of Fortnite creators or creator studios that have put women front and center in their marketing are Team Hive and UNC Creative. (Representatives of both studios did not respond to requests for comment.)
Pandvil is arguably the creator who leans most into the vagueness around his identity, with other Fortnite creators taking a more moderate approach to their women-centric marketing strategies. Hive, for example, openly employs the Hive Sisters to both operate its social media and manage its brand partnerships business.
Regardless of the specific approach, however, female creators in the space are not enthused about the growing trend of male Fortnite creators marketing their maps as female-made. Over the past six months, GamesBeat spoke to seven female Fortnite creators who expressed significant misgivings with this marketing practice and said they believed they were hurting their bottom lines by taking away potential media attention and brand partnerships, as well as traffic to their islands.
“It’s great to see development studios putting women front and center, giving women a bit more visibility, in terms of marketing and community building. And I think it’s a signal that shows that women gamers do make up a huge portion of the audience,” said Nancy “yourboujeegal” Chen, a Fortnite creator and founder of Girlies Squad, an all-women Fortnite server boasting over 47,000 members, in a recent interview. “But, on the flip side, it’s disappointing if there are male creators out there that are then using a tactic of hiring women to go down the approach that these are women-led games. It’s quite disappointing and misleading, because that definitely takes away the recognition from initiatives and games that are actually women-led.”
To some extent, Fortnite developers’ increasingly creative marketing tactics demonstrate the lengths creators feel they have to go to in order for their maps to find traction within the increasingly busy Fortnite ecosystem, according to Mackenzie Bell, the co-founder and CEO of the Fortnite studio Alliance Studios.
Bell — who pointed out that her studio had experimented with a similar marketing approach last year — said she understood why some male creators were putting women front and center in their marketing, speculating that improvements to Fortnite’s creator ecosystem could help to naturally curb this approach.
“It’s less about calling out the individual creators or teams and more about addressing the overall systemic issues,” Bell said in a recent interview. “If the platform and the creator economy balance itself better, with stronger discovery tools, more equitable payouts and support for diverse voices, I think creators wouldn’t feel as pressured to lean into potentially misleading marketing just to survive.”
The growing trend of Fortnite creators putting young women at the core of their marketing — and female Fortnite creators’ discomfort with this practice — reflects a broader issue of gender parity within the Fortnite creator space. Although millions of women play Fortnite on a daily basis, there are very few prominent women creating maps for the platform. In this context, even a few male Fortnite creators framing themselves as women muddies the water significantly for brands looking to work with women in the space.
“I would say those teams have taken opportunities away from other smaller female devs,” said Fortnite creator Hayley Johnson in a direct message exchange on X. “I’m sure they are approached by brands or sponsors to integrate into Fortnite because of their spokeswomen.”