Week 36

The platform ended Week 36 with 286,012 live islands across 76,074 registered creators, both figures nominally higher than last week, but the active-island picture tells a different story. Only 44,991 islands cleared the 5-play threshold this week, a 13.1% drop versus Week 35, pushing the active ratio down to 15.7%. That ratio has now fallen roughly 13.6 percentage points week-over-week, meaning roughly one in seven published islands is generating any meaningful traffic, and that fraction shrank materially in a single week. New publishing held near-flat at 4,984 new islands (down just 1.2%), so creators are not pulling back from launching, but the audience is concentrating faster than supply is rationalizing. The island flow also shows 3,172 removals over the six counted days, up 4.3% from last week, a signal that some creators are pruning aggressively in response to falling returns. The practical read: the ecosystem is growing in headcount but contracting in effective reach, and that gap between total islands and active islands is now a structural feature, not a short-term blip.

Session depth held better than volume. The platform avg session length landed at 12.3 minutes, down only 1.7% week-over-week despite a 16% drop in island-summed daily players, which means the audience that stayed is engaging at nearly the same rate as before. Avg minutes per unique player came in at 38.6, and avg CCU per island sits at 84.5, modest figures in isolation but stable given the contraction in active islands. The more telling signal is in the social metrics: the recommend-to-play ratio surged 226% week-over-week, and the favorite-to-play ratio rose 14.1%. Those numbers are still small in absolute terms (0.41% and 0.36% respectively), but the direction matters. Players who stayed on platform this week were more likely to recommend and favorite than last week's larger audience, suggesting the remaining active audience skews toward more engaged, habitual players rather than casual drop-ins drawn by Fortnite OG's novelty. Creators building for that audience type should be leaning into replay and social mechanics now, while the high-recommendation pool is proportionally elevated.

Top by Uniques

The top-uniques list this week is entirely legacy competitive infrastructure: BOX PVP (hive, 6.56M uniques), PILLARS (hive, 5.44M), and Piece Control 2v2 (bullseye, 5.09M) held the top three positions, but all three declined by 8-14%, consistent with the platform-wide contraction rather than any individual loss of product-market fit. The breakout story sits entirely in the top-growth list. FAMOUS TYCOON 3 by snowstudios posted a 171,943% unique-player growth rate off a near-zero base, and PILLARS DUOS by lasaccochedewail followed with 98,835%. The pattern connecting nearly every top-growth island is format proximity to an existing hit: PILLARS DUOS mirrors PILLARS, SKYBASE WARS riffs on vertical combat that Brainrot islands have primed the audience for, and ASEK 1V1 BUILD FIGHTS clones an established 1v1 template. Creators watching this list should recognize that the fastest-growing islands this week are not original concepts, they are well-executed adjacencies to formats already running at scale. Timing a launch to ride an active wave rather than to start one is the repeatable pattern here.

D1 / D7 Retention Distribution

0-5% bucket WoW: -27302 islands (D1), -37792 islands (D7) · 90-100% bucket WoW: -415 islands (D1), -190 islands (D7)

The D1 and D7 bucket distributions both deteriorated in the same direction: the 0% retention bucket (islands with no returning players) grew by 27,302 islands week-over-week for D1 and by 37,792 for D7, while every positive-retention bucket shrank. Despite this broad decline, the tier count of islands above 50% D1 retention held at 4,021 and above 50% D7 at 1,087, meaning a stable core of high-retention islands exists even as the mid-tier erodes. The individual leaders are instructive. Build A Brainrot (scoobb) posted a 90% D7 rate in its debut week, and 1V1 PRO clean (infinitepixel) held 83.7% D1 and 81.5% D7, both near the top of their respective charts. The retention-adjusted engagement (RAE) leaderboard reinforces a clear pattern: tycoon and persistent-loop islands dominate. Turbo Ramp Tycoon (aquasun) led D1-RAE at 188.5, and Only Up Volcano (perec) led D7-RAE at 213.9, both with play-to-unique ratios that indicate session-repeating rather than one-and-done behavior. For creators not yet in the tycoon or progression-loop format, the data suggests that adding a meaningful within-session goal that resets on return is the single structural change most correlated with top-decile D7 numbers this week.

hive retained the top spot on unique players with 16.55 million across 12 islands, but the more revealing comparison is portfolio efficiency. ferins reached 5.59 million uniques from only 6 islands and generated 28.56 million total plays, outpacing hive's 26.90 million plays with roughly half the island count. ferins also carried the highest avg D1 in the top 10 at 46.3%, more than 19 percentage points above hive's 27.1%, meaning ferins is not just pulling volume but pulling returners. At the other end, rvb saw the steepest week-over-week decline in the top 10 at 24.4%, and prettyboy fell 15.8% despite running 24 islands, the largest portfolio in the group. The lesson from this week's leaderboard is that island count does not protect against audience contraction: the creators holding ground or losing least (ferins down 6.1%, raider464 down 5.6%) are those with fewer, higher-quality islands running high-retention formats. Diversification into many mid-tier islands appears to provide less buffer than concentration in a small number of breakout ones.

The minutes-per-player leaderboard is dominated this week by a cluster of heny62 islands, with peak battle assault (957.6 min/player) and hop mountain battle (957.0 min/player) holding the top two positions. These are session-length outliers almost certainly driven by AFK or semi-idle session behavior rather than active engagement, so creators should interpret them as edge cases rather than benchmarks. The more actionable quality signal comes from Turbo Ramp Tycoon (aquasun), which grew its avg minutes per player 17.7% week-over-week to 392.8 minutes and simultaneously led the D1-RAE chart, confirming a compound-improvement trajectory. Among the growth leaderboards, FAMOUS TYCOON 3 and PILLARS DUOS are the clearest standouts, each growing uniques and recommendations by tens of thousands of percent from near-zero bases in a single week, consistent with Discover row placement driving a cold-start spike. The recommendation-growth list, where PILLARS DUOS added 467 recommendations (up 46,600%) and FAMOUS TYCOON 3 added 806 (up 20,050%), confirms that first-week Discover exposure is still the most powerful single lever available to a new island, and creators should be engineering their launch week to maximize the recommend signal during that window.

Category Share of Plays

Fastest-Growing Categories

Top Categories by D1

Category Intensity (Plays / Island)

Simulation & Tycoon is the performance outlier of Week 36 by a wide margin. Its 129 Discover-row islands generated 47.99 million total plays, the highest of any genre, with a weighted D7 retention of 29.2% and an avg session of 50.1 minutes, also the highest. Category-level data reinforces this: STAR WARS holds 37.8% of all category plays at 9.63 million, but its per-island intensity of 2,296 plays trails LEGO's 3,116 and KPOP Demon Hunters' 2,984, meaning LEGO and KPop islands are individually more productive even with a smaller total share. LEGO's 19% week-over-week growth is the only positive figure in the category table, and its D1 retention of 13.2% leads all categories. TMNT and Walking Dead hold the second and third D1 positions at 11.6% and 9.7% respectively, but both categories declined in plays. The Roguelike genre callout carries an opportunity score of 92 with a difficulty rating of Easy: median time to first reach the row is 24 days, 45.1% reach it within a week, and the supply pool sits at just 326 islands. Creators who can execute a roguelike loop have a structurally less competitive path to Discover row visibility than in any other genre tracked this week.

Genre Leaderboards

Player-weighted across each genre's islands. Peak CCU is the sum of island peak concurrents; retention is the returning-player rate.

Genre Weekly Rollup

Islands by Genre

Top Chart Position This Week

Biggest Chart Movers

Movers computed among top-100 chart positions.

Movers computed from 7 days this week vs 6 days last week of available data.

Supply vs. Exposure

Epic's genre chart is a separate ranking system from the Discover row categories discussed above, and chart position does not directly reflect plays volume. With all 7 days of data available this week (up from 6 days last week, so rankings now reflect a complete week), the picture is stable at the top: GO UP FOR BRAINROTS (ferins) held the Simulation & Tycoon chart's number-one position for the full 7 days, and PILLARS (hive) and Murder Mystery (goodgamers) both locked the top slot in Party & Mini Games and Horror respectively for the entire week. On the supply side, Shooter has 64,819 total islands with 145 currently in the Discover row. Roleplaying & Social has 17,343 islands and 132 in the row. Battle Royale runs 14,579 islands against 128 row slots. Simulation & Tycoon has 5,415 islands and 136 row slots. Roguelike has 326 total islands and no Discover row slot count recorded this week. Among chart movers, Hunt the Mutant: Chernobyl (tomnetwork) made the largest jump in Adventure & RPG, moving from an avg rank of 86.5 to 22.9 (a 63.6-position improvement). In Music & Rhythm, Visuals' Jam Fest (uivisuals) climbed 59.6 positions. ZOMBIE LAND (goodgamers) moved up 59.5 spots in Survival, and GRAND DRIVE VI (dacciyt) gained 47.8 positions in Sports & Racing. In Roguelike, STRANGER THINGS ESCAPE (hedwig) rose 45.1 positions, reaching an avg rank of 29.9 from 75.0 last week.

The recommend-to-play ratio's 226% week-over-week surge is the most important conversion signal in this report, not because the absolute rate is high, but because it moved that sharply in a week when total plays fell 16.8%. The islands leading recommend-per-player this week (Infinite gun game arena at 1.92, SMOOTHY 1V1 BUILD FIGHTS at 1.0) are small-volume islands where a tight, satisfied player base is recommending at rates above 1:1, meaning each player generates more than one recommendation on average. The actionable lever here is post-session friction reduction: creators who surface a recommendation prompt immediately after a natural victory or completion moment, rather than at a generic exit point, consistently outperform those who rely on ambient discovery. This week's data suggests that audience quality is unusually high relative to volume, and any creator who makes recommending easy to do in-context right now is capturing a disproportionate share of a more-engaged-than-usual player base.

The two variables to track in Week 37 are whether the Fortnite OG audience finds a new home within Creative or exits the platform entirely, and whether LEGO's 19% growth rate holds or was a one-week catch-up event. If OG players redistribute toward Brainrot and Tycoon islands, ferins and foad should extend their leads and the Simulation & Tycoon genre's D7 premium will widen further. If those players exit, the platform-wide active-island ratio will compress again and the active-ratio floor becomes the more urgent number to watch. On the supply side, the 4,984 new islands published this week despite a 16% traffic decline means the inventory overhang is growing: creators publishing into a contracting pool should prioritize a strong first-week recommendation signal over volume, because the Discover row is the primary escape valve from an increasingly crowded non-active tier.