Week 40

3,316 new islands were published this week, down 17.7% from last week, while 5,133 left the active pool, producing a net contraction to 281,512 live islands. The active-island ratio (islands reaching at least 5 players) fell to 13.4%, an 8.6% week-over-week decline, meaning the share of the catalog that earns any real audience keeps shrinking. Active creators dropped 7.8% to 18,277. Total creator accounts grew a nominal 0.8% to 78,579, but that divergence between account growth and active-creator decline confirms that publishing momentum is cooling faster than the creator base itself.

847.9 million total plays and 10.8 billion total minutes are both up solidly (9.8% and 7.8% respectively), but the per-player and per-session metrics tell a quieter story. Average session length sits at 12.8 minutes, down 1.6%, and the favorite-to-play ratio dropped 10.1% while the recommend-to-play ratio fell 9.3%, both reversing recent gains. Players are playing more sessions but converting to saved or recommended content at a lower rate, which points to Brainrot islands driving high-volume, low-commitment traffic rather than the kind of deep engagement that compounds into return visits.

Top by Uniques

Chess World (pharaohcm) leads top-growth with a 141,373% unique-player gain to 69,322 uniques, and it also placed 6th in D7 retention at 53.5%, a rare combination that distinguishes it from the other growth leaders. BALLISTIC EVO (richytoons) reached 327,276 uniques and 24,452% growth while also ranking as the week's second-largest recommendation gainer, suggesting an organic word-of-mouth loop. Among the top-uniques list, BOX PVP and PILLARS both held their #1 and #2 positions with only minor movement, confirming that the volume ceiling is dominated by established shooter and party titles that new entrants rarely displace.

D1 / D7 Retention Distribution

0-5% bucket WoW: -16118 islands (D1), -23268 islands (D7) · 90-100% bucket WoW: -410 islands (D1), -117 islands (D7)

Platform-wide average D1 retention rose 1.1 percentage points to 38.0% and D7 rose 1.1 points to 27.6%, the only clearly positive signal in an otherwise contracting week. However, all D1 and D7 retention buckets declined in absolute island count, meaning the improvement comes from islands with weaker retention leaving the measured pool, not from islands getting better. Star Wars Droid Tycoon (foad) is the standout: it holds a top-5 D1 (67.6%) and top-2 D7 (61.9%) position simultaneously, while also ranking 5th in the D1 retention-adjusted engagement list and 5th in the D7 version, proving that high-traffic tycoon builds can sustain genuine loyalty, not just volume.

ferins ranks 3rd by unique players (5.0 million) with only 6 islands but leads all creators in total plays (24.1 million) and peak CCU sum (894,391), a portfolio efficiency that no other top-10 creator approaches. hive holds 1st by uniques (13.2 million) across 13 islands and contributes the highest peak CCU sum outside ferins at 87,238, showing that breadth at scale is still viable. Both bullseye (22 islands, 9.8M uniques) and prettyboy (23 islands, 3.5M uniques) demonstrate the opposite model: wide catalogs with moderate per-island averages. raider464 is the week's only top-10 creator with positive week-over-week unique growth (+5.2%), worth watching as a signal of an emerging challenger.

THE LADDER (codeseany) again leads average minutes per player at 1,148 minutes, holding #1 for the second consecutive tracked week. Three islands by creator heny62 hold the next three positions (hop mountain battle at 1,130, peak battle assault at 1,124, Hedge Parkour at 1,015), all up week-over-week, pointing to a specific loop design that retains players for extended sessions. On the growth side, BALLISTIC EVO (richytoons) appears on both the top-growth-uniques and top-growth-recommendations leaderboards simultaneously, which is the clearest sign of an island reaching escape velocity through social amplification rather than algorithmic placement alone.

Category Share of Plays

Fastest-Growing Categories

Top Categories by D1

Category Intensity (Plays / Island)

STAR WARS holds 44% of category plays at 7.8 million, up 6.4% week-over-week, and leads all categories in D1 retention at 12.2%, making it both the largest and stickiest category by a wide margin. TMNT is the only other growing category at +3.3% week-over-week. For plays-per-island intensity, KPOP DEMON HUNTERS leads at 2,166 plays per island and STAR WARS follows at 2,076, both well above the next tier. Among genres, Simulation & Tycoon has the highest weighted D1 (44.8%) and D7 (33.7%) by a large margin, and its 28.9-minute average session far exceeds most other genres, confirming that tycoon players are the most committed audience on the platform regardless of which individual island captures them.

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

Averaged over 6 days of available data.

Biggest Chart Movers

Movers computed among top-100 chart positions.

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

Supply vs. Exposure

Retired 2026-09-18: the Discover genre row this measured no longer exists.

Genre-chart rankings reflect Epic's own chart standing, not plays volume, and this week's averages are based on 6 of 7 days, so all figures should be read as near-complete rather than definitive. In Simulation & Tycoon, GO UP FOR BRAINROTS (ferins) averaged rank 1.3 across six days. The week's largest chart mover was NUCLEAR TYCOON (rcn-studio), which improved from an average rank of 94.3 to 6.8 in Simulation & Tycoon, a 87.5-position climb. In Party & Mini Games, frozenarctic placed three separate islands among the top movers (TIKTOK PILLARS, PILLARS TRIO, PILLARS SQUAD), each climbing 58 or more positions, indicating a coordinated multi-island portfolio strategy paying off in chart standing. Sports & Racing and Music & Rhythm saw the sharpest genre-size declines, down 22.3% and 16.2% in total island count respectively.

Movements & Debuts

Real movement through the leagues this week: promoted, demoted, new debuts, and islands that left our top-500-per-genre capture entirely (not a demotion).

Biggest Climbers

By typical genre rank moved, week over week.

Payout Share, Week over Week

Genre-league data covers 6 days through 2026-10-03, tracking from early August 2026 when rank tracking began, so the window is short and movements should be read cautiously. Music & Rhythm had the most volatile chart standing, with 270 promotions against 441 demotions and 139 debuts, the highest churn ratio of any genre. Shooter was the only genre where promotions (52) nearly matched demotions (51), indicating a more stable competitive order. The biggest individual climber was HARD PARKOUR (Deathrun & Platformer), moving from rank 468.5 to rank 24, an improvement of 444.5 positions, consistent with the halloween-adjacent content surge visible elsewhere in the data. On payout share (the same retention-weighted D1+D7 blend used in payout_concentration), Simulation & Tycoon fell 5.7 points to 39.8% while Shooter gained 2.1 points to 22.1%, the most significant redistribution in the tracked window.

During the fully settled week of September 21 to September 27, 9,135 islands stopped appearing on Discover. The largest by lifetime plays was GUESS LOGO DEATHRUN PLATFORMER (kjwgames) at 1.32 million lifetime plays, last seen September 22, followed by Blitz Chapter 5 (jadeni) at 873,495 plays, last seen September 25. Both islands had reached audiences large enough to appear in weekly top-traffic discussions in prior periods, which underscores that even established, high-play-count islands can exit Discover without warning. Creators relying on a single island for the bulk of their traffic should treat this as a reminder that catalog breadth is a risk hedge, not just a growth strategy.

As of October 4, Simulation & Tycoon holds 39.8% of the retention-weighted sticky engagement share (using the D1+D7 average blend documented at dev.epicgames.com/documentation/fortnite/engagement-payout-in-fortnite-creative, which weighs playtime alongside players returning on subsequent days with no disclosed window). This is a proxy for one input to Epic's engagement payout pool and is not a payout figure. The top three genres (Simulation & Tycoon at 39.8%, Shooter at 22.1%, Battle Royale at 17.1%) together hold 79.0% of sticky engagement share. By contrast, their raw unweighted engagement-minutes shares are 22.2%, 26.4%, and 21.1% respectively: the gap between raw minutes and sticky share is widest for Simulation & Tycoon, confirming that tycoon players return at rates that compound their weight far beyond their raw time on island. Creators outside these three genres collectively share roughly 21% of the retention-weighted pool.

The breakout cohort covers September 26 to October 2 (a Friday-Thursday window, not this report's Monday-Sunday week). The top breakout island is +1 Tongue Escape (anywonder) with 417,614% growth to 58,480 plays, a deathrun-adjacent format built around the viral '+1' incremental escape mechanic that has appeared repeatedly in growth charts across multiple recent weeks. The second-ranked island, +1 SPEED KEYBOARD ESCAPE BRICKS (cheerztoons), confirms the '+1 escape' format is not a single-island anomaly but a repeatable template actively producing breakout results. Creators looking for a format with demonstrated breakout potential in the current environment have a clear signal here.

The favorites-to-play ratio fell 10.1% and the recommend-to-play ratio fell 9.3% this week, both moving in the wrong direction. The top favorites-per-player performer is TRIO RELOAD FIRST PERSON (giovafncreative) at 1.67 favorites per player, while the top recommendations-per-player performer is 67+ ESCAPE ROOM HIGH IQ (simondj) at 0.83 per player. Horror and escape-room formats appear disproportionately in both lists, suggesting that content with a social-sharing hook or a clear shareable moment drives conversion better than pure competitive formats regardless of raw traffic volume.

Watch whether the Brainrot category sustains its CCU peaks into Week 41 or begins the decay curve that typically follows viral-format saturation. The +1 escape mechanic showed up in both the breakout and growth lists this week, so monitor whether it attracts enough copycat supply to compress the opportunity. Simulation & Tycoon's 5.7-point sticky-share drop is the largest single-genre shift in our tracked window: if it continues into next week it will confirm a structural rotation toward Shooter and Battle Royale rather than a one-week anomaly. Finally, with the active-island ratio at a new low of 13.4% and publishing down 17.7%, any meaningful uptick in new island launches would be an early signal that creator confidence is recovering.