Big Changes for Discover
Discover is the go-to place for players to find their next game, but there’s more we can do to surface your experiences to the right players. We're accelerating some big changes to Discover to make Fortnite better for players, and give fun and original games more of an opportunity to find their audience.
What’s Changing
- Reducing spam and duplicative islands to help players discover original experiences.
- Downranking islands that are highly similar to games that were published before them.
- More stringent content pre-checks to require a higher level of originality in island thumbnails.
- Decluttering Discover and preventing games from showing up in rows where they don’t belong.
- Requiring developers to select a single genre that dictates where they can appear in Discover. The placement of these rows will rotate.
- Moving popular and Recently Played rows higher in Discover.
- Stopping fraudulent campaigns from taking Sponsored Row space, providing more inventory for interested developers.
- Introduced incremental billing to cancel fraudulent campaigns on April 21.
- Added new processes to identify and remove inauthentic Sponsored Row campaigns.
What Developers Need to Know About These Changes
Discover is Reorganizing to Focus on Personalization and Islands that Players Enjoy
We’re developing new systems and better signals to help surface new and relevant games to players in Discover–this is why we’re streamlining Discover rows to reduce clutter.
Rewarding Fun and Original Islands
Discover now favors original islands and games that keep players engaged. Islands that are highly similar to games published before them, or that show signals that they aren’t fun should expect less visibility. To make sure we’re connecting players with great games, we'll continue adjusting the signals we use to determine if players are enjoying your islands.
We put stricter controls in place to prevent spam and duplicative content from crowding out games from legitimate developers. Islands using keyword stuffing, inaccurate titles, or other tactics to manipulate Discover placement will be downranked, making it harder to qualify for top rows. Games that are highly similar to games published before them now also receive less visibility.
High-quality, original thumbnails are an important signal to players about the islands they see in Discover. Low-resolution thumbnails will be surfaced less, and we’re making our existing content pre-checks more stringent to require a higher level of originality in your island’s thumbnail. Thumbnails that were previously published without these restrictions may now receive warnings.
Your Islands are Now Categorized by Genre
When you publish, you'll need to select one of 12 genres:
- Adventure & RPG
- Battle Royale
- Deathrun & Platformer
- Horror
- Music & Rhythm
- Party & Mini Games
- Roleplaying & Social
- Shooter
- Simulation & Tycoon
- Sports & Racing
- Strategy
- Survival
Live islands now have a genre automatically assigned. You can assign a genre to your island in Creator Portal when publishing, or re-publishing, an island. The genre you select determines which genre row your island is eligible for and an island can only be featured in one genre row at a time.
Note: The new genre category is separate from existing island tags, which you can use to give players more signals about your game.
Sponsored Row Billing Thresholds
To combat fraudulent campaigns, on April 21, we rolled out new spending thresholds for Sponsored Row that trigger a charge as your campaign spend accumulates at $50, $250 and $1,000 intervals.
If your account’s lifetime Sponsored Row spend exceeds $1,000, your payment method is only charged at the end of each campaign day.
Discover is going to be a much more dynamic space going forward–we’ll continue to experiment with how rows, categories, and layouts show up, and introduce more personalization features.