For Minecraft, Fortnite, and Sea of Thieves, all you have to do is stay away from a Chromebook. This is not the place to get advice on a gaming laptop. Set your budget, and let the reddit hordes fight over which laptop is best at that price point for the intended games. They will be able to produce load times and frame rates and other stats for essentially any combination of games and laptop.

Does it have to be laptop?

If your teen son is a casual gamer, maybe it makes sense to get a console (like PS5)? When our son was teen, he had console and as he grew older he played less. True gaming laptops can be expensive.

Does it absolutely have to be a laptop? A desktop will give much better bang-for-the-buck and will be upgradable in the future.

Minimum would be something like an i5 13th or 14th gen with an RTX 3060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 144Hz or faster LCD refresh rate. This would give you playable (but not competitive) performance. Note that comparably named laptop processors and GPUs will be significantly slower than the desktop equivalents. You will want a separate keyboard and mouse and probably a full-size monitor (also 144Hz or faster) as well. If you go with a laptop, get the extended warranty--gaming laptops tend to not be built that well.

Games will be primarily minecraft, sea of thieves, maybe fortnite.

What are the bare minimum specs we need? I know nothing about this and teen son wants one for Christmas. He will be paying some. Any brand recs?

Any points in the right direction would be much appreciated, thanks.