Maybe a little counter-intuitive, but Fortnite emotes (essentially, animations) takes up much less memory than skins. Generally for a modern polygonal game, yo

Maybe a little counter-intuitive, but Fortnite emotes (essentially, animations) takes up much less memory than skins. Generally for a modern polygonal game, you are using skeletal animation for the characters. A character consists of a polygon mesh and anywhere from dozens to hundreds of bones. Animations consist of keyframes. Each keyframe represents just a handful of bytes for each bone (the XYZ coordinates for each end of the bone, and the rotational angle, or something like that). The animators create as many keyframes as they want, maybe 10-20 per second max. So a 5-second emote animation might contain something like 8 32-bit floats * 100 bones * 10 frames per second * 5 seconds = ~120 kilobytes of uncompressed data. That's all you need to specify an animation. The rest is calculated on the fly at runtime and rendered to the screen at 60fps or whatever the current frame rate is. The graphics engine interpolates bone positions between your keyframes, and the player model mesh is deformed by the bones. Also, those skeletal animations can be shared between all player models. The alternative to skeletal animation is fully prebaked animations. This involves minimal interpolation and calculation at runtime. It is more memory intensive because you are calculating the position of every point on the mesh ahead of time, and then storing that data on disk. This is generally how a very complex and non-interactive animation (think: cutscenes, etc) would be animated and stored on disk. Note, this is still far less storage-intensive than storing rendered video, and you still maintain a great deal of flexibility at runtime - you can change the camera location, rendering passes, resolution, etc. That's why you don't see a lot of prerendered video cutscenes these days.