Every few months, the same slide shows up in a pitch deck:
a render of a glowing island, a logo floating above it, and one line underneath. Your brand, inside the game.

It sounds like the obvious next step. Players spend hours in Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft, so why not give them a place to spend time with your brand? I have seen that pitch many times in my work as a creative director, among others at Twitch EMEA.

My view after years of watching these projects launch: the branded map is easy to sell and hard to justify. Many of them look great in a case film and are empty a few weeks later.

The bet made sense, once

In 2021 and 2022, a branded world was a fair bet. Roblox and Fortnite were new territory for brands, press coverage was almost guaranteed, and the first numbers looked strong. A December 2022 analysis by Peter Gasston counted 11.6 million unique visitors each for Gucci Town and Nikeland, and almost 42 million total visits for NARS Color Quest. For a pitch deck, those are excellent figures.

They also explain why the format spread. A map is a tangible deliverable. You can render it, show it in a case film and enter it for awards. And it comes with a story that sounds right: the brand stops interrupting the game and becomes part of it.

The same analysis already contained the warning. A visit is not play. On average, a visitor came back only about 1.5 to 2.3 times to the big fashion worlds in the study. Gasston called his own study small and preliminary, but the pattern is clear enough: visits were high, repeat play was modest.

What the numbers say

Public data on single brand maps is thin, so the best view comes from the industry itself. GEEIQ’s State of Brands in Virtual Worlds 2026 tracked 2025 and found that the market has already moved on:

• Brand integrations inside existing experiences rose 14% to 335. Brand-owned worlds fell 57% to 252, from a peak of nearly 600 in 2024. For the first time, integrations outnumbered owned worlds (GamesBeat).

• Total tracked activations dropped 17%, from 1,220 to 1,011, while the average brand ran 1.8 activations a year (Net Influencer).

• Of the brands that launched an integration in 2025, 31% had built an owned world before (GamesBeat).
  
  

GEEIQ’s CEO Charles Hambro called this a structural change. His reasons: the novelty has faded, and building an audience for an owned world takes a large marketing budget. The exception is entertainment IP, where fandom brings players along. Universal’s How to Train Your Dragon experience drew the most visits of any persistent branded world in 2025.

That last point matters for brands outside film and games. A fan of a dragon movie has a reason to come back. A fan of a bank, a razor or a soft drink usually does not. Producers who build these maps say the same: new branded maps rarely gain traction on their own, players decide within about a minute whether to stay, and sessions of one to two minutes signal a serious problem.

The cost gap sharpens the choice. Four marketers told Digiday that a custom Fortnite map typically costs $300,000 to $500,000, while five creators and talent managers put an integration into a popular existing map at $20,000 to $50,000 (Digiday, September 2025). Costs vary: a simple map from an agency starts at a mid five-figure sum, and the bigger ones can go into seven digits.

Why players do not come back

A branded map sits outside everything players already care about. It has no link to the battle pass, the daily quests or the item shop. It gives no progression, no cosmetic to show off and nothing a friend would notice. Cosmetics are the one currency players really value, and they are reserved for very few brands and cost a lot.

Nike shows the exception, and why it is one. In 2023 Nike’s Airphoria gave players who spent ten minutes on the island a free Air Max back bling, and sold sneaker-themed outfits, pickaxes and a glider for V-Bucks on top (GameSpot). The map was tied to cosmetics, and the sums behind such deals run into the millions. On top of that, Nike’s challenge appeared in Fortnite’s own challenge list, and the island was reachable straight from there. Custom maps never get that. Only challenges from the main modes, such as Battle Royale, No Build and LEGO, show up in the daily, weekly and monthly lists. Nike also is a love brand, like Gucci. It starts with goodwill in the players’ world and can do a lot before it does anything wrong. Almost every other brand has neither that goodwill nor that budget, and for most of them the business goal does not justify the spend. That is not a failure. It is a reason to look for a different way in.

Then there is discovery. Fortnite holds an enormous number of creator-made islands, and attention is concentrated on very few. At the top sit game modes like Red vs Blue, which appears twice in the current most-played list on Fortnite.GG. Money follows the same pattern: Epic told GDC 2024 that nine developers received 40% of the $320 million paid to island creators, and the top 100 received 71% (80.lv). That measures payouts, not plays, but it points in the same direction. A branded island that Fortnite does not feature is only found by players who type in an island code. Without a place in the main game, the brand has to buy every player.

That buying is expensive. Creators do not fix it. People watch a creator play a map on Twitch or Kick, but they rarely pick up the controller afterwards and play it themselves. They watch to be entertained, and the next stream is one click away. A viewer is not a player. If a map built for a mid five-figure sum or more ends up with 10,000 to 20,000 players, each of them cost somewhere between roughly $2.50 and $15.

The production side arrives at the same test. The team at New Game+ asks whether players would enjoy the map without the brand. If not, it is an advertisement with a map skin. Amy Zehren, CMO of Basket Entertainment, puts it this way: “Players don’t want to visit an ad, they want something that enhances how they already play” (Chief Marketer).

The narrative is the weak spot. A story about the brand is easy to write and has no effect on how the game plays. In a game, mechanics are the language. A narrative that never touches them is a caption.

The challenge is the cheaper version of the same mistake

When the map is too big, the next idea is a challenge: a creator plays a game with the brand’s product, logo or slogan on screen. It is quick to produce and easy to approve. It also asks nothing of the game and nothing of the creator beyond the performance.

The fans of a creator recognise that immediately and read it for what it is, a weak attempt to borrow their trust. Practitioner guidance says the same: viewers notice when a sponsorship feels out of character, and a tightly scripted segment struggles when chat goes somewhere the brief did not expect (ContentGrip). The agency AIR describes the opposite approach in its own case study for Lenovo Legion: hardware that came up in unscripted moments, graphics built to match each streamer’s style, and viewers who mentioned the brand in chat without being asked. The mechanism is the useful part: the brand became part of what the community was already doing.

What works instead: do not fake the game

A collaboration lasts when the brand adds one thing a story cannot: a reason to play, or a reason to show up. Two German examples show that this does not need a giant custom map.

In August 2025 the Sparkassen and Jung von Matt Sports released Schwein gehabt together with the Fortnite studio Beyond Creative (GamesWirtschaft). It is a first-person horror puzzle in which you rescue the piggy bank Berta from the house’s owner, who wants to smash her. The bank does not put a logo into someone else’s game. It built a small game of its own with Fortnite’s creator tools, with its own mechanic and a lot of care in the story, and it feels less like a branded map than a game people might play anyway. W&V reported more than 120,000 players and a multiplayer mode for Halloween.

Edeka went the other way and came at gaming from the outside. It did not build a custom map or contort itself into a game world. It organised a LAN party. That is far more credible for a supermarket, and more fun, because the brand brings something real to the culture around gaming instead of pretending to belong in it.

The other half is where you put the idea. Agencies in the Digiday report on custom maps now steer clients to integrations inside popular maps, which are cheaper and already have the players. One fast-food campaign inside a popular creator map reached 721,000 unique visitors, and only 892 of them redeemed the coupon. That ratio is a useful reminder that reach is not the same as intent.

Five questions before you pitch the next map

A map is not always wrong. It can be right for entertainment IP with a fandom, or for a love brand with the budget to bring cosmetics and a place in the main game.
For everyone else, five questions help before a render goes into the deck:

• Would players choose it without the brand? If not, it is an advertisement with a map skin.

• What does it change in the game? A mechanic, an item or a status gives players something to talk about. A story does not.

• Who already owns the audience? An existing popular experience or a creator may reach players for a fraction of the cost. Dario Raciti of Omnicom’s Zero Code told Digiday he cannot remember the last time his team recommended building an own game, unless a brand has strong homegrown IP.

• What happens after week one? Design for repeat play, not for a single moment. New Game+ suggests planning traffic for at least 90 days after launch.

• What will we measure? Awareness and play counts answer different questions. One marketing director in the Digiday piece calls awareness his biggest KPI, and an agency lead there says both sides are right because they measure different things. Decide which one you are buying before you build.

None of this is new to anyone who has worked with creators. The point is that the format keeps selling because it is easy to picture, not because it works.

The next time a deck shows a glowing island with a logo above it, ask what players can do there on a Tuesday evening, and why they would come back on Wednesday.