Aug 19, 2026

From last-ditch pitch to thriving on Fortnite: Future Trash's UEFN journey

When Kevin Marciano, CEO of Future Trash, took the stage at State of Unreal 2026, he had just a few minutes to tell the story of how Future Trash went from an indie studio struggling to stay afloat to releasing the blockbuster UEFN hit, Star Wars: Droid Tycoon.

Behind that short on-stage presentation was a much longer journey—one filled with uncertainty, difficult decisions, and the challenge of learning a new game development platform from scratch. Here's the full story.

It began at GDC in March 2023. Marciano was doing his best to drum up interest in the game his team had been working on over the past year. It was the last roll of the dice for Future Trash, the indie development studio Marciano had co-founded 12 months earlier.

The studio had been working on a vertical slice of a competitive party game, but they were finding it difficult to secure a publishing deal, and that all-important funding to take the project forward was increasingly looking out of reach.

“We had a few months of runway left,” says Marciano. “I flew to GDC with a Steam Deck, trying to get anyone to care about what we’d built.”

It was a stressful few days, and with no deal on the table, Marciano became resigned to the fact that traditional publishing was not a viable path for his game. Then, Epic announced Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) during the State of Unreal at the same conference.

For Marciano, watching in the audience, it was a lightbulb moment. “We thought, why don’t we bring our game into Fortnite?” he says. “That bold pivot didn’t just save our company—it changed our perspective on the future of the games industry.”

Marciano left the keynote and the team immediately got to work. Over the course of two days, while Marciano was still at GDC, they ported all the UE5 assets for their game across to UEFN. By Sunday, they had the bones of FOAD Lane Wars, a MOBA-lite experience that was showcased in Epic’s Picks right out the gate.

“It felt like we’d skipped six months in a traditional pipeline,” says Marciano.

The speed at which they could move forward was exhilarating, but the team had no experience in developer-made islands or Fortnite. Switching to UEFN seemed like a shot in the dark.

“We felt like outsiders,” says Marciano. “We didn’t know what types of games worked for this audience, we just started building what felt right for us.

“What took us nine months to build and ship on Steam took us less than three weeks in UEFN. That’s when we looked at each other and thought, this is it. Development at this velocity is the future of games.”

Creating a great game is just the beginning

Future Trash was founded in 2022 when Kevin Marciano, Nate Reese, Scott Ulliman, and Eric Leino quit their jobs to build an original IP in Unreal Engine 5—FOAD: Fully Operational Annihilation Devices.

Featuring anthropomorphic explosive characters and ‘90s-rebel energy, it was a genuinely original creative vision. They built a vertical slice, put it on Steam, and waited.

The game got 3,000 installs. “Hardly enough to build a business around,” says Marciano.

Future Trash’s experience here isn’t an anomaly—distribution and discovery are growing challenges for all developers, especially at the indie level. Kevin and team built something great, but were left with no path to the players who’d love it.

Backend infrastructure, discoverability, distribution: the barriers to success for small teams are myriad—and traditional platforms like Steam make them solve all of it simultaneously.

A new path for indie development

A few months after that pivotal weekend at GDC, Future Trash launched the game Marciano credits with saving the studio: Boom Tycoon.

Boom Tycoon gained traction immediately, seeing 200,000 unique players within weeks—a marked contrast to the 3,000 total installs they had eked out for their previous game on Steam.

It was a breakout success for Future Trash—further proof the pivot to UEFN had worked, and that Fortnite’s audience wanted what they were building.

The breakthrough didn't happen overnight. As a first-time founder, Marciano says there wasn't a guidebook for navigating the difficult early period. The team kept building and iterating, shipping several experiences in Fortnite as they learned the platform. The speed at which they could experiment and test ideas in UEFN was crucial in taking the studio to the next level—not just because of the projects that landed, but because of the ones that didn’t.

FOAD Lane Wars—the game they had kicked off over that GDC weekend—was well-received by fellow developers but didn't quite resonate with the Fortnite audience at the time. There were games that were never released. But the team persevered through multiple launch cycles—including the misses—and eventually found their footing, releasing a consistent stream of titles that would see the Fortnite audience come flocking, including Boom: Boss Battle and Factory Deathrun—nominated for Best User-Created Island at The Game Awards 2024.

After the rapid rise of Boom Tycoon, Future Trash racked up another big win with Box Fight PVP, giving the co-founders the confidence and conviction to seek venture capital backing. By the time of their $5 million seed round in late 2024, Future Trash had accumulated over two billion total minutes of playtime across their releases on UEFN.

Scaling up

This was just the beginning of the studio's upward trajectory. What followed was a rapid expansion of their core roster.

Successes included a licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) mode called Mythic Medallions and a sequel to their own hit, Boom Tycoon 2, nominated for the 2025 Game Awards in Fortnite. Future Trash even acquired another studio and its island, bringing Axis Studios under the FOAD umbrella so the team could continue iterating on We're Cooked.

And to cap it all off? A collaboration with MrBeast: Beast Parkour, built for the prolific YouTuber’s Beast Games show, after the MrBeast team reached out directly, having become familiar with the studio's work.

“Factory Deathrun, Beast Parkour, Box Fight PVP, and Boom Tycoon were all transformative launches for us at different phases of the company,” says Marciano.

Exploring the power of Star WarsTM IP

Future Trash’s track record had caught Epic’s attention—the player numbers, the Game Awards nomination, and the demonstrated ability to ship and iterate at speed. As a result, in late 2025, Epic selected the studio as one of a small group of UEFN creators who were granted early access to officially licensed Star Wars assets.

It was an achievement the small Future Trash team could scarcely have imagined. The programme brought together a handful of Fortnite developers tasked with building launch-ready islands that showcased the potential of the new toolkit, while providing feedback that would help shape it before it was released to the wider creator ecosystem.

For Kevin, who started his journey with UEFN in a last-ditch effort to save his studio, it was somewhat surreal. “We never thought we’d have the chance to craft an original Star Wars game,” he says.

That opportunity took shape as Droid Tycoon. “The droids of Star Wars do the hardest work, survive the worst odds, and get the least credit—and we said, let’s make a game about them,” says Marciano. “Droid Tycoon was our love letter to these unsung heroes of the Star Wars universe.”

The combination of their tycoon expertise with these instantly recognizable Star Wars droid characters proved an instant hit.

Droid Tycoon saw 1.5 billion minutes of playtime in the first month. It became the second most-played game across all of Fortnite in its first weekend, and set a new record for the highest concurrent players over a two-hour period for any IP experience in Fortnite history. All of this was achieved by a team of approximately nine, building the game in just five months. Epic has since transferred publishing rights for Droid Tycoon to FOAD, which now independently publishes and operates the game.

The scale of player activity has driven meaningful engagement payouts for the studio, while in-island transactions are emerging as an increasingly significant revenue opportunity.

“UEFN is absolutely the best platform to be generating significant revenue if your goals are to build an independent business in the games industry right now,” says Marciano. “With the engagement payout alone from Droid Tycoon, we could sustain a game studio of dozens of people. And with the ability to have in-island transactions, it unlocks a whole other layer of opportunity for game developers.”

The story comes full circle at the State of Unreal

This year, Kevin Marciano took the stage for the State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest Chicago—the same keynote in which, three years earlier, he had sat in the audience and watched UEFN get announced.

He presented Future Trash’s story to the global developer community as testimony to the opportunity UEFN opens up for indie developers. From fretting about his studio's future in the State of Unreal audience before UEFN was announced to becoming the event's standout success story—and an inspiration to other UEFN developers—the journey has been transformational.

“We had years of building, failing, and this was a reminder to never give up and trust the process,” says Marciano. “Amazing things can happen.”

There’s plenty more to come from Future Trash. The studio is determined to keep Droid Tycoon fresh with new updates, and continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with UEFN, both in visual quality and storytelling, while building their own timeless original IP.

For developers thinking about exploring UEFN, Kevin’s advice is simple: “Roll up your sleeves and start building,” he says. “Keep trying—and play other games to learn from them.”

The door that opened for Kevin in 2023 is still open—and the future is full of exciting possibilities.