Digital Conversations Around Fortnite: Digital Fan Communities and the Cultural Industry

Fortnite is a predominantly social game with highly positive reviews, produced by Epic Games. Although it is known for its constant innovation, few studies have analyzed the digital interactions between the voice of the company and digital fan communities. This study thus analyzes digital texts generated by the Fortnite digital fan communities on social networks to examine the role of the producer and its marketing strategies in shaping digital conversations. To this end, a mixed methodology was adopted. First, we scraped 435,365 mentions (posts) of Fortnite in written form produced by digital fan communities. Second, we used visualization strategies to describe the evolution of mentions over time. Third, NVivo allowed for a conventional qualitative discourse analysis of mentions. The results showed that the industry maintains an asymmetric position relative to other users, influencing the direction of digital conversations about Fortnite based on marketing strategies. Conversation content focused on the game’s social dynamics and mechanics, representing the game’s external and internal dimensions, respectively. The study demonstrates the importance of digital conversations in analyzing gamers’ engagement with the community and the role of prominent users, including the voice of both fans and the industry gamers participating in social networks. The findings contribute to the understanding of gamers’ activities as consumers and offer practical insights for industry professionals, particularly game developers and community managers, interested in fostering user engagement and optimizing platform strategies. Additionally, we examine how less powerful participants exercise fan agency through everyday conversational practices (e.g., asking questions, offering peer support, and creative remixing), showing how bottom-up meaning-making coexists with top-down orchestration by the industry.