The sheer scale of Fortnite and the money involved has meant Epic Games has to deal with a sizable contingent of ne’er-do-wells. Amusingly enough, in some cases it has pursued a strategy of crushing the cheaters in court and then making them apologise, like some sort of giant corporate stepmother. But when things start to get into the realm of cheating the system itself, and illicitly siphoning off money from the creator program, it turns out Epic’s lawyers play a whole other ballgame.
Fortnite has for many years hosted user-created experiences called islands, provides a suite of tools to make their creation as easy as possible, and then pays out money to the creators of the most popular maps. There are various metrics to determine payouts: session length, player count, and whether players go on to buy anything. This isn’t chump change either: Epic says it pays out millions of dollars every year to community creators.
So two miscreants took a look at that situation, and came up with a plan. Build some experiences, juice the player numbers through the roof with bots, and then sit back and profit. That’s what Epic alleges in a new filing in Michigan against Idris Nahdi and Ayob Nasser (first spotted by Polygon), who it says created over 20,000 bots to ‘play’ their own creations between December 2024 and February 2025. Epic says the maps created by the pair did have real players, but it believes between 88% and 99% of the engagement in these maps was faked.
“Defendants programmed the bot accounts to engage with Defendants’ own Fortnite Islands by using a cloud gaming service that allows users to play video games, like Fortnite, remotely,” reads the filing. “Defendants worked together to create multiple Islands in an attempt to disguise their scheme by spreading the fake engagement across multiple developer accounts and Islands.”
Epic says the pair made tens of thousands of dollars through the practice but, once Epic noticed something funky and stopped payments, the bots all suddenly disappeared. Epic at this point told the pair to stop playing Fortnite and “destroy all copies” of the game in their possession: which they didn’t, and is one of the reasons things have reached this stage.
The lawyers now say Epic wants to recuperate the money paid out for the alleged con, and wants to protect the integrity of the creator program. “Developers trust that the time spent creating Islands will be rewarded in accordance with the Engagement Program Payout Terms, and based on how real players engage with the Islands. Defendants’ conduct undermines Epic’s relationship with developers, however, depriving legitimate developers of the full share of funds they otherwise would have received and eroding the trust Epic has built with them.”
Epic further asks that the court bar both players from creating Epic accounts in future, and stops them from downloading or playing Fortnite. It even asks that these measures apply to the defendants’ “heirs [and] successors.” That feels incredibly unlikely, though it is somewhat funny to think about some poor kid who can’t play Fortnite with his mates because daddy ran a botting ring and got caught.
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