Fortnite was pulling in healthy player counts until around the mid-point of Chapter 5. Simpsons (which came at the end of a very weak year for Fortnite with a cold chapter 6) injected some life into it which led to Chapter 7 getting a good start until the length of the season.
Disney, from what I remember, signed the deal coming off of the launch of Chapter 5 and coming off of the successful Fortnite OG experiment, which had people buzzing.
Around this point however, they tacked on the Rocket Racing, Festival and Lego modes, which splintered their development team, budget, and was the start of expanding Fortnite beyond the money maker and into a "metaverse". Battle Royale season quality went down, cosmetic quality went down unless it was collabs, meanwhile they kept trying to support the other modes. They pulled support for Racing first (and are now sunsetting it), with Lego and Festival still getting semi-regular content updates with a slowed down consistency.
I'd argue that if they never went all in on chasing the metaverse/web3 dragon and kept their focus on Battle Royale, the game would be in a healthier spot. But the CEO of Epic forced a square peg into a circle hole, used a knife to make the square fit, and now we're here with 1,000 people losing their jobs and game modes being sunset inside of Fortnite.
As mentioned before, Epic is more than Fortnite, it's the Unreal Engine that really drives it, but Fortnite was a cow they could milk, but now the cow is sick and not producing a lot of milk. And without that milk, they don't have the money to throw at things like Unreal as much. The cow could be nursed back to health, but it'd take time, effort, and patience, something the gaming industry has shown as of late, they don't like to give to games.
