Good morning. What’s old is new again, even in the creator world. TikTok creator Vattey Archives is selling bejeweled digital cameras from the mid-2000s starting at $227. All that work Apple put in to make iPhone cameras this good…and we find ourselves browsing eBay for a product we had as kids for 4x the original price.

— Hannah Doyle & Nate Graber-Lipperman

Typical Gamer Invests $2 Million in ‘Fortnite’ Content

Andre Rebelo, AKA Typical Gamer, recently launched a gaming company called JOGO that will invest $2 million in creators building custom Fortnite content. Their ultimate goal? Make their own IP that lives on Fortnite, Roblox, and beyond.

Set the scene: Rebelo makes family-friendly gameplay live streams in Fortnite as well as challenge content for over 14 million YouTube subscribers.

Rebelo is also one of the highest-earning creators on Fortnite and made more than $3 million in total revenue last year from custom games and maps. For reference, Fortnite parent company Epic Games paid out $320 million total to creators last year. 

Now Rebelo wants to make those stats even bigger by investing $2 million in attracting top Fortnite creator talent to JOGO.

• “A lot of Fortnite maps are combat based, but Epic wants it to be a place where all kinds of games can live and find an audience,” Rebelo told GamesBeat.

• “We’re going to be ushering these new genres in and we’re spending big bucks to make that happen.” Rebelo says he’s looking to hire 20 more developers to make up a 40-person team.

Big picture: UGC gaming content development is heating up—in addition to Epic’s big payouts, Roblox paid out $741 million to creators in 2023. That momentum is attracting developers from companies like Activision and Pixar to the user-generated field (developing a traditional game can take years, while UGC platforms can shrink the timeline to a couple months). 

It’s also winning over creators looking to leverage UGC to engage deeper on the gaming platforms where their audiences are. For example, creators Karl Jacobs and Keekcraft recently teamed up with Misfits Gaming to launch Pixel Playground, a Roblox game creation studio.

Travis Hunter Helps Launch ‘College Football 25’

Travis Hunter, a YouTube creator and wide receiver for the University of Colorado Buffaloes, is one of three players to appear on the cover of EA Sports’ College Football 25 video game.

Why it matters: As part of the game’s highly-anticipated rollout, EA let Hunter film behind-the-scenes footage of the cover shoot and upload the resulting vlog to his personal YouTube channel with over 305,000 subscribers last Thursday.

The next day, EA dropped its first trailer for the game, which peaked at No. 2 on YouTube’s trending charts.

Quick backstory: EA discontinued its popular college football video game franchise in 2014 after former student-athletes sued the NCAA, arguing they should be compensated for the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL).

• Those landmark lawsuits helped pave the way for the NCAA’s 2021 policy revamp that allowed college athletes to cash in on NIL.

• Now, the College Football franchise is returning with the help of athletes including Hunter, who’s built a lucrative creator career while maintaining his athletic scholarship status.

Looking ahead: EA plans to pay every current Division 1 football player around $500 for the use of their name, image, and likeness in the game—though some players are considering holding out for more money, according to sports publication On3.

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Kai Cenat’s ‘Elden Ring’ Stream Tops 165 Hours

Twitch streamer Kai Cenat finally completed Elden Ring last Friday after streaming his attempts to beat the notoriously difficult video game for over 165 hours straight.

The marathon stream peaked at 230,000 concurrent viewers, leading gaming publication Kotaku to dub it “The Gaming Event Of The Season.”

Zoom out: Cenat regularly plays a role in driving pop culture trends, and his Elden Ring stream helped vault the game into the top five most watched categories on Twitch last week, according to streaming stats tracker SullyGnome.

👀 Creator Moves

• Chloe Shih is looking for an assistant video editor for short-form content.

• Mythical is hiring an editorial intern to write 2–5 articles per week for Sporked, its online food publication.

• JOLLY is hiring a YouTube Shorts editor to help produce vertical food and travel videos.

• Matt Wolfe is hiring a personal assistant to help scale his AI-focused YouTube channel and website.

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🔥 Press Worthy

• Anthony Fantano addresses recent retirement rumors.

• Olayemi Olurin and F.D Signifier talk about the pressures that come with growing large YouTube channels as Black creators.

• Convert fans into paying customers by sharing your most valuable links through Bio Sites.*

• Emma Chamberlain's Chamberlain Coffee raises $4.6 million in equity funding.

• ByteDance seeks to fast-track its lawsuit against the U.S.

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