DYLAN JOHNSON
Age: 26 • Founder, Good Gamers
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 multiplayer game Fortnite to relax. Using the platform’s creator tools, he designed new popular minigames like Go Goated, an intense, zonebased 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 an estimated $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.
GAMES
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Linda Chen, 26
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Player, Version1
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Creator
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Dylan Johnson, 26
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Mari Kyle, 29
Senior Game Producer, Meta
Benjamin Lander, 29
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Victoria Leary, 28
Global Subscription Optimization Manager, Sony Interactive Entertainment
Morgan Ling, 29
Product Lead,
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Xalavier Nelson Jr., 26
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Ally Parker, 23
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Alex Singer, 22
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Alexandra Takei, 28
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Alex Vanover, 23
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Lia Zhang, 28
Investor, Makers Fund
JUDGES: Moritz Baier-Lentz, partner, Lightspeed Ventures; Christine Chi, head coach, Valorant, Evil Geniuses; Alex Gonzalez, head of luminosity, Enthusiast Gaming; Ali “SypherPK” Hassan, cofounder, Oni Studios