Inside Fortnite’s Winning Brand Partnerships and What Marketers Can Learn

Fortnite has established itself as one of the most popular games to date, and its longevity in the competitive gaming landscape is no accident. While the game's multi-generational appeal and accessible gameplay certainly contribute to its success, one of Fortnite's most powerful tools for staying culturally relevant is its strategic use of collaborations. These partnerships with movies, musicians, brands, and entertainment properties have become a cornerstone of the platform's engagement strategy.

But here's the question that brands and content creators often ask: when Fortnite partners with an external property, who really benefits more—Fortnite or the collaborating brand? To answer this, we used Infegy Starscape’s topic trees to examine the data around conversation distribution during major collaborations, analyzing how much each entity gains from the partnership.

Why Topic Trees?

Topic trees provide a powerful way to visualize how specific terms relate to a query topic, with square sizes reflecting how frequently each term appears. This makes them particularly effective for demonstrating scale and relevance in conversations. When evaluating partnership success from a social perspective, such clear, intuitive visuals are essential for telling a compelling story.

The Modern Era of Fortnite Partnerships

Fortnite X KPop Demon Hunter Movie (Late 2025)

Fortnite just partnered with the KPop Demon Hunters movie. This movie has been extremely popular and has broken records since its release in July. The data tells an interesting story about who benefits more. When examining conversations about the KPop Demon Hunters movie during the collaboration period, Fortnite mentions represent only 1.6% of the total discussion around the film (Figure 1). This suggests that the movie's broader cultural conversation happens largely outside the gaming space.

Figure 1: Overall KPop Demon Hunters conversations Topic Tree (September 2025 - October 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

However, when we shift our perspective and examine Fortnite conversations during the same period, we see a different picture entirely. Mentions of "Demon Hunter" account for 5.6% of all Fortnite conversations (Figure 2), and when combined with “KPop”-related discussions, the movie collaboration represents over 10% of Fortnite's total conversation volume.

Figure 2: Overall Fortnite conversation Topic Tree (September 2025 - October 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

While the Fortnite community actively discussed the movie and its character additions, film-only audiences remained more focused on the movie itself. This dynamic favors the film, since when a community generates enough buzz around something, curiosity naturally draws some in to see what all the excitement is about. Showing that Fortnite garnered the most benefit from this partnership.

Fortnite X Sabrina Carpenter (2024-2025)

The Sabrina Carpenter collaboration came just months after the release of her Short and Sweet album and presented a different dynamic, one where both parties had established fanbases. During the collaboration announcement period, Fortnite appeared in 1.7% of all Sabrina Carpenter-related conversations, indicating that fans discussing the artist were also mentioning the game (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Overall Sabrina Carpenter conversation Topic Tree (August 2024 - October 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

When looking at Fortnite conversations during the same timeframe, Sabrina Carpenter was mentioned in 1.1% of the game's total discussions (Figure 4). 

Figure 4: Overall Fortnite conversation Topic Tree (August 2024 - October 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

This collab was balanced between both sides. Her fans talked about Fortnite, and Fortnite players discussed her. Neither one completely dominated the partnership, but she benefited slightly more than Fortnite.

Older Collaborations: Learning from the Fortnite X Marvel Partnership

Fortnite X Marvel (Thanos Game Mode, 2019)

To understand how Fortnite's collaboration strategy has evolved, it's worth examining one of its earliest and most successful partnerships: the Thanos-themed game mode released during Marvel's peak cultural moment—the release of Avengers: Infinity War.

At the time of this collaboration, Marvel was genuinely at the height of its mainstream cultural dominance, having just released one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Fortnite, while popular within its gaming community, was still considered primarily a gaming phenomenon rather than a mainstream cultural entity.

Marvel dominated the broader cultural conversation so completely that Fortnite didn't register in main discussions about Marvel properties. The gaming collaboration simply couldn't penetrate the massive wave of Marvel-related discourse during that period.

However, from Fortnite's perspective, the Thanos collaboration was transformative. A single game mode—not even a full season or battle pass—generated 0.56% of Fortnite's total conversation volume (Figure 5). Compared to the newer collabs with lesser-known people and entities, it might not be much. However, at the time, attention within Fortnite conversations was so divided that it was eye-opening, as this was the first major game mode collab, and it appeared in the data at all.

Figure 5: Overall Fortnite conversation Topic Tree (January 2018 - January 2019); Infegy Social Dataset.

Recognizing this success, Epic Games (Fortnite’s parent company) and Marvel expanded their partnership significantly, eventually releasing entire seasons and battle passes based on Marvel characters. These deeper collaborations have continued to generate sustained interest over multiple years.

What These Collaborations Reveal About Partnerships

The data reveals that collaborations benefit different partners in different ways. Major properties like Marvel dominated the broader cultural conversation, giving an at-the-time, lesser-known partner, while smaller collaborators gained more from Fortnite's engaged audience. For brands and creators, the key isn't who to partner with, but understanding how the new spaces can introduce their content to new fans while deepening engagement with existing ones.

Three Takeaways for Brands

1. Partnerships reach new groups of people without replacing your old fans. When a brand partners with a platform like Fortnite, it doesn't take away from the brand's regular audience. Instead, it introduces the brand to gamers who might not have known about it before. The movie stays popular with movie fans, and Fortnite gains new conversations about the movie—these are two separate groups, not competing ones.
   
   
2. Quick partnerships create quick attention, but longer partnerships create lasting interest. A one-time event might make people talk for a week or two, but a genuine, ongoing partnership keeps people interested for months. Brands should think about whether they just want a quick burst of attention or if they want to build something that lasts.
   
   
3. The benefit of a partnership depends on more than just size. The Marvel partnership showed that a massive brand can help a platform reach new audiences. The KPop Demon Hunters movie showed that a platform can benefit more when partnering with emerging properties. But the Sabrina Carpenter collab showed that when both sides have active, engaged fanbases, the benefits can be pretty balanced. Understanding all these factors helps both sides set realistic goals for what they want to achieve.