Exhausted after working long night shifts as a nurse in the Covid unit at the University of Virginia Medical Center, Johnson logged into the hit multiplier game Fortnite to relax. Using the platform’s creator tools, he designed new popular minigames like Go Goated, an intense, zone- based shootout that garnered 500 million plays in 2022, turning his hobby into a full-time job. Last March, Fortnite’s parent company, Epic Games, began distributing a small percentage of the game’s $6 billion in annual revenue to creators like Johnson, and within six months, it had paid $120 million to 13,000 creators. Eighty-five percent of them made less than $100, but Johnson is on track to make $8 million in 2023. And he’s scaling. His startup, Good Gamers, now employs six freelance developers to produce Fortnite games like Teddy, where players try to escape a monstrous stuffed bear, and Food Fight, featuring hamburgers battling tomatoes. “There’s a huge market for this, and we can grow astronomically,” he says
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Dylan, it's fabulous to be here with you today.
00:05 Thank you so much.
00:06 - Yeah, thank you.
00:06 - So let's start at the very beginning.
00:09 How did you get so into gaming?
00:11 - Yeah, it's a funny story.
00:12 I mean, obviously Fortnite kind of came out,
00:15 took over like the world by storm
00:16 and all of my friends in college,
00:18 we all started just like playing and really got into it.
00:21 I graduated, became a nurse.
00:22 I was first in the trauma ICU.
00:24 And then when COVID came around,
00:25 I was switched into the COVID ICU.
00:28 I started to get like a little bit burnout
00:30 after like six, seven months of that.
00:31 I had been doing Fortnite on the side
00:33 just as a little hobby kind of thing.
00:36 It really kind of transitioned though,
00:38 from like gaming and like the gamer sense
00:40 to like more of the like creating sense
00:43 when they released their like creative platform in 2018.
00:47 And that's where I kind of like picked up
00:48 doing more of the creative and development side of things
00:51 'cause it's more interesting to me.
00:52 And it was very simple at the time.
00:53 So I was able to like kind of pick things up slowly
00:55 and teach myself how to make a game.
00:58 A legendary YouTube gamer named Ali A,
01:02 he messaged me and he was like, "Hey, like your stuff,
01:04 would you help me develop games?"
01:07 So that was kind of like the signal
01:08 that I needed to like fully jump into this.
01:11 And after about three, four months
01:14 of just doing it full time,
01:15 I started to like be able to identify
01:17 like where players would wanna play.
01:19 And it led me to wanna create like something bigger.
01:23 And that's kind of how it led to me forming a company
01:26 and trying to grow that way.
01:28 - So now talk to me about your new company
01:31 and what you're doing.
01:32 - Yeah, so it's called Good Gamers.
01:34 The idea behind it is like,
01:36 we wanted to approach the development side of games
01:39 from like a more of like a marketing
01:42 and organization focused.
01:44 So we have Good Gamers and those are our marketing
01:47 and influencers and content creators.
01:49 And we bring them into the team
01:50 because they are the people who can reach a lot of people.
01:53 But then on the backend, we have, you know,
01:55 people like me and a couple others that I've brought on
01:57 who developed the good games.
01:59 - I wanna get a sense of the scale of your business.
02:03 Are you able to talk to me about users or customers
02:05 or anything of that sort?
02:06 - Yeah, since we can't sell anything,
02:08 we don't have customers yet, but we have plenty of users.
02:11 The game Go Goated, that one reaches between 800,000
02:15 and a million players every day
02:17 and has over 750 million plays total.
02:21 And then for our team, we launched like six
02:23 or seven months ago and we already have,
02:25 I think four games that are totaling
02:27 over 500,000 players a day.
02:29 So we've reached over a hundred million unique players
02:33 since I started in 20, like early 2020.
02:37 - And you've taken on no outside funding, correct?
02:40 - Not yet, no.
02:41 - How has that been then building a business,
02:44 just bootstrapping it?
02:45 - Yeah, it's been interesting.
02:47 I mean, I'm very blessed to have the game
02:50 that I have, Go Goated, and that one has hovered,
02:53 you know, as one of the top games for a while.
02:55 And so it has been able to fund like these ideas
02:59 that I've wanted to kind of implement
03:01 and just I'm lucky to be able to do that
03:03 with, you know, what I have.
03:05 - Now, some of the things I hear from the older generation
03:08 is it doesn't quite understand, you know,
03:10 the gaming space is that, you know, this is just a hobby.
03:14 This is not a career.
03:16 And I'm sure you've probably heard that
03:18 from a lot of people in your life.
03:19 How have you dealt with that?
03:21 And do you have any advice for people
03:23 in the gaming industry who are dealing with that?
03:25 - That's a good question.
03:26 I mean, it is a hobby for a lot of people,
03:28 but I think just like with so many hobbies,
03:31 like if you are passionate about something
03:34 and you are, you know, a little bit savvy,
03:37 like you can turn a hobby or a passion or whatever
03:40 into a business for yourself.
03:42 So, I mean, my answer to that would be like,
03:44 this space has hundreds of millions of people playing,
03:47 like every year, every day, millions and millions of players
03:50 and it's constantly growing.
03:51 So it can be more than a hobby if you want it to be.
03:54 - Yeah.
03:54 And last one for you,
03:55 it's really hard to go from just being a nurse
03:58 to then taking the dive into entrepreneurship.
04:01 What advice would you have for people
04:02 facing similar situations?
04:04 - There's a point that you get to where you're like,
04:06 I think this is the right thing to do.
04:07 This is something that I believe in.
04:09 And you're kind of like fear,
04:11 your fear of the unknown is like holding you back.
04:13 So it kind of is just like that point
04:16 where I'm gonna commit to something
04:17 and I'm not gonna look back.
04:19 And for me, that was when I decided
04:22 I'm not gonna renew my nursing license.
04:24 I'm gonna just commit to what I'm doing
04:26 and I'm gonna give it my all.
04:28 Just like be confident in yourself
04:30 and then you just have to take that leap of faith
04:31 and commit to it.
04:33 And good things can come from that.
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