We Need To Talk: Fortnite’s Steady Decline.

Has Fortnite Started Lowering Its Standards?

Fortnite has had a very difficult 12 months. It’s had some of its lowest player numbers ever.

While it’s had some successes, such as the Simpsons collaboration, Epic could not have foreseen just how big Arc Raiders was going to become. Neither did Call of Duty. And the resurgence of the Battlefield series, while it kind of lost its way for a while before eventually getting back on track, resulted in a significant number of Fortnite players moving to other games.

To lose such a large portion of your players (and your potential income) is not easy to mitigate.

Unfortunately, this resulted in over 1,000 layoffs at Epic Games, which again is terrible. There are already enough layoffs in the industry, and for one of the titans of gaming to take a blow this big is surprising.

A Lowering of Standard.

Unfortunately, one of the ways Epic appears to have reacted to this is by lowering its standards.

Not quality standards, mind you. Fortnite is still amazingly fun and incredibly well made. In fact, I’m currently playing Star Wars: Droid Tycoon, a fantastic new official mode, while writing this review,  It’s on in the background, and I find myself playing it far more than I could have imagined

And that is just one of the hundreds of amazing modes created by Epic and by third-party creators. Fortnite has truly become the platform that Tim Sweeney always wanted it to be.

However the one area in which Epic seems to have lowered its standards is its portrayal of female characters.

The Calamity Controversy

Anyone who’s been here since Chapter 1 will remember the controversy surrounding the character Calamity, introduced in Chapter 1, Season 6, who launched with rather “impressive” jiggle physics.

And if people don’t know what jiggle physics are, let’s just say that her chest was rather bouncy.

It caused controversy, and Epic patched out jiggle physics for all female characters going forward, which in itself caused more controversy due to a certain group of (unsavoury) people who liked that type of thing a little too much.

Years of Playing It Safe

As a result, Fortnite has pretty much played things safe ever since, from adding privacy shorts, finding ways to cover beneath short dresses, blacking out obscured views where possible, and pretty much doing everything it could to have a wholesome portrayal of female characters.

Fortnite still has a massive player base of children, and little girls and little boys alike need to see that female characters can be cool, they can be powerful, and they don’t have to be sexy, especially when male characters rarely have to be sexy to be cool.

And this stayed pretty much Epic’s standard way of releasing female characters up until around a year ago.

Until the introduction of Cat Holloway in late November 2025, the first Fortnite character with visible cleavage.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a huge amount of cleavage, and Fortnite characters are not realistic, but I was surprised.

While Fortnite has shown comical amounts of midriff on many different skins for years, and shorts have gradually become shorter while still never revealing anything of consequence, this was the first noticeable shift.

Especially when some characters from third-party IPs had their costumes left largely unmodified, featuring considerably more cleavage as a result.

When Cat Holloway was released, I genuinely thought more people would react to this than they did. While there may have been the occasional mention, for the most part people didn’t care, or a certain unsavoury element cared a little too much.

And It Didn’t Stop There.

Within Days of Kat Holloway launching, Kim Kardashian was added to Fortnite as with voluptuous cleavage, followed shortly after by Magik from Marvel Tivals, another skin which showed a considerable amount cleavage.

And now, most recently in the latest season, there’s Dylan a character in basically very short shorts and a bikini.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not pornography.

Fortnite is not an adult game, and there is nothing explicitly wrong with any of these characters/personalities or their designs, nothing shown in Fortnite is worse than what you’d see at the beach or award show.

But it’s a slippery slope.

At this rate, if they don’t stop soon, privacy shorts will be the next thing to go, opening the way for less savoury characters to flood Fortnite related discussions with up skirts and other unsavoury images, while I do no think Tim Sweeny or Epic Games will allow things to progress to that level, there is a time and place to say “this is as far as we go”, and that place is Dylan.

For a game which has basically done everything it could since the beginning not to portray women as sex symbols, I’m not sure how much further we can go until they are no better than other titles such as Marvel Rivals, which, while not the worst offender, is certainly not The First Descendant, one of the worst games I’ve ever seen in this regard.

Why It Matters

More Than Just Pixels

I understand they’re short on money, and I understand that sex sells.

But I also understand that creating content, as comical as it may sound and as cartoonish as it is, designed to encourage lust is wrong.

Jesus had this to say on the matter.

Yes, I take it that seriously.

It’s not that the skins themselves are sinful. They’re not.

They’re skins.

They’re pixels.

But just a brief look at some of the less savoury parts of Reddit and the Fortnite community makes it clear that some people like these skins for all the wrong reasons, reasons which can only be classified as lust.

Final Thoughts

Will I Stop Playing Fortnite?

Am I disappointed?

Yes.

Will I stop playing Fortnite?

No.

Because I still think the good outweighs the bad.

But honestly, it’s a slippery slope Epic have found themselves on, and its time they reversed course to their former standard or at least took a few steps back from the edge.

So many live service games have a dismal portrayal of women.

Even Roblox, the game where they’re basically made out of building blocks, has more than its fair share of “sexy” costumes.

And to see Fortnite slipping into that same trap, I must admit, is disappointing.

I hope they turn it around.

A Message to Tim Sweeney

Ultimately, I still like Fortnite a great deal, and I still highly recommend it.

If I could say anything to Tim Sweeney right now:

Stop the rot.

Stick to what you’ve always done.

And don’t let a temporary decrease in users due to market conditions cause you to lose sight of what you’ve always made very important.

Portray female and male characters as equally cool.

And let that coolness be based not on how sexy they are, or how much flesh they show, but rather on their characterisation, their portrayal, and ultimately their design.

I’m pretty concerned.

But let’s see where things go.

Please Note

"We Need To Talk" is an editorial format used when there is a specific issue, trend, or topic that we feel deserves attention.

Because of this, We Need To Talk articles should not be viewed as representative of the length, depth, or overall format of our traditional review coverage.