For a hearty chunk of 2025, Fortnite was fallow.
It’d be an exaggeration to say the game’s subreddit was pure misery between June and November, but there was more than enough gloom to go around: the novelty of a Star Wars cameo quickly wore off and the next two seasons, Super and Shock ‘N Awesome, felt bland and messy. When players finally departed Oninoshima, Chapter 6’s map, it was a sloppy soup of disconnected ideas, with First Order bases straddling bug-fighting military outposts and buildings from feudal Japan.
I struggled to cajole my usual teammates to install updates over this period, let alone dedicate an evening to the game. I wasn’t alone—the peak player count regularly dipped below 1.5m over this period, which would’ve seemed unthinkable a year ago.
At the end of that Simpsons mini season, the Chapter 6 finale Zero Hour drew over 10 million players: more than triple the peak player count of any game on Steam, ever. Fortnite is clearly still culturally relevant, even if some of its veteran players have migrated elsewhere.
And Chapter 7 is, so far, refreshing. It has a balanced loot pool of strong weapons including three solid shotguns, unique locations with hidden secrets, and a smattering of the cartoonish oddities that make Fortnite special, such as the DeLorean car that transports you back in time to find weapons from previous chapters. Player counts tick back up.
I’m hopeful that as we move into 2026, the rest of Chapter 7 will continue to surprise us. Its overarching theme—the West Coast and Hollywood—is broad enough to tie lots of seemingly disparate concepts together. There are very few games where South Park characters could conceivably dance with James Bond without breaking the fiction, but both are rumored collaborations (I’m imagining a slapstick South Park shotgun and an outlandish Bond gadget, like a pen that fires an explosive dart, shaking up the meta).
Nearly a decade into Fortnite, Epic has shown that it is still willing to take big creative risks, and that is promising. For Chapter 7 the studio added ragdoll physics and self-revive, reset gold between each match and made some of the reboot vans—where you can respawn downed teammates—driveable, so you can chuck your allies in and scoot away.
Each of those on its own could have derailed the new season’s start. Each, at least in my eyes, has worked. I love that vending machines actually mean something now, and gobbling gold from a cash register can genuinely transform your loadout.
So, low troughs, high peaks. No doubt some fans enter 2026 full of optimism while others, especially anybody who hasn’t dived into Chapter 7 yet, might feel they’re done with Fortnite.
But I’d also understand if your overriding feelings about Fortnite had nothing to do with the loot pool or map, and you’re instead just exasperated about Epic’s insistence on generative AI.
‘Doesn’t belong in Fortnite’
Mollie wrote earlier this week that developers are “limit-testing” players with increasingly egregious forms of gen AI that are both boring and damaging. Epic Games is a prime offender: CEO Tim Sweeney has insisted that “AI will be involved in nearly all future production”. Suspected AI art and music has already annoyed players in Chapter 7, as Jody wrote at the start of this month (it should be pointed out that one of the suspected AI artworks did not, in fact, use AI).
Gen AI in Fortnite doesn’t divide players, it unites them. In a Reddit poll, more than 80% of respondents, or nearly 4,000 people, said gen AI “doesn’t belong in Fortnite”, a game that makes billions a year and could afford to shower artists and musicians with actual gold V-bucks.
I’m convinced there’s nothing for Fortnite to gain. Gen AI can only harm this community. If Tim Sweeney truly believes most games will be produced with AI, then having it in Fortnite offers no draw, no differentiation—it can only drive players away, as I’m sure it already has. “I really hope there’s enough backlash from the community to have them change all the AI-generated slop to actual artwork done by real artists,” wrote one heavily upvoted Redditor.
It’s left me with an uncomfortable taste as 2025 draws to a close.
And it’s a reminder that Fortnite is, as always, complicated. Exciting. Infuriating.