Only Up! quickly became a smash hit on Steam thanks in large part to its simple premise and its popularity on the streaming site Twitch. But while the excitement around that game has cooled, a clone of the game built in Fortnite has become bigger than the original, making itone of the most popular games around.
Only Up! is a game about climbing up a large tower of random items and obstacles. The goal is simple: Go up, reach the top, and don’t fall off. If you do fall off, you start over and climb back up. When the game first launched in May, it didn’t really make a splash. But since late June, Only Up! has become more and more popular, thanks to big-name Twitch streamers and content creators playing the game online. Five days ago it reached 11,000 concurrent players and currently has around 82,000 viewers on Twitch. Not bad at all for such a simple game.
However, a new user-made clone of Only Up! built in Fortnite has quickly overshadowed the original Steam hit and become one of the most popular game modes in Fortnite, beating out modes created by Epic itself.
Released in June, OnlyUp Fortnite is a user-created map built using Epic’s recently released UEFN (Unreal Engine Fortnite) tools. These tools let creators and players make more advanced games and maps using a specific version of Unreal Engine designed exclusively for Fortnite. We’ve seen some cool shit get made using these tools, but OnlyUp Fortnite is easily the most popular game created so far.
How popular is OnlyUp in Fortnite?
As of this writing, it currently sits at around 83,000 players. And over the last few days, its concurrent player count has cracked 110,000.
For some context, these high player numbers make OnlyUp Fortnite—which plays nearly identical to the original game but uses Fortnite props and assets—easily the most popular UEFN creation in the game. It also makes it one of the most popular modes in the entire game, beating out Ranked Zero Build and even Ranked Battle Royale as well as other official Fortnite modes.
Even wilder, if OnlyUp Fortnite were on Steam, it would currently be the 9th most played game, beating out Ark: Survival Evolved, War Thunder, Unturned, and Seven Days To Die.
It also has nearly 8x as many players as Only Up!’s peak concurrent player count on Steam. That’s probably not a great situation for future indie devs who create the next big hit game on Steam, as it means a few days later folks can clone your work in Fortnite and instantly have access to a large playerbase hungry for free content. But it’s good news for UEFN devs who create something super popular in Fortnite, as Epic has a system in place to pay devs based on how long people play custom maps and how many players keep coming back. Based on the data available, I assume the OnlyUp Fortnite devs are in for a decent-sized payout, possibly bigger than what the original devs have made on Steam.