Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, renews his attack on ‘gatekeeper’ platforms
The next GamesBeat Next event is fast approaching! GB Next is a premier event for gaming leaders and product leaders. Join other leaders and speakers such as Matthew Bromberg, CEO Unity, Amy Hennig, Co-President New Media Skydance Games and Laura Naviaux Sturr, GM Operations Amazon Games and Amir Satvat. See the full speaker list and register here.Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney opened the Unreal Fest Seattle event today with an update on news that included a blistering criticism of monopolistic platform owners.
Sweeney is a big proponent of open platforms and the open metaverse. He will be giving a virtual presentation on this subject at the GamesBeat Next 2024 conference in San Francisco, October 28-29. You can get a 25% discount by using this code: gbn24dean. And so Sweeney continues to pressure the major platforms to give more favorable terms to game developers.
He started out on that front by giving a price cut for users of Unreal Engine 5, Epic’s tools for making games. Epic Games Store is reducing its royalty rate for Unreal developers from 5% down to 3.5% if they release their games first on the Epic Games Store or simultaneously.
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“I’m happy to tell you now that the company is financially sound and that Fortnite and Epic Games Store hit new record records in concurrency and success,” he said.
Fortnite reached a peak last holiday season of 110 million monthly active users, and Sweeney said the Epic Games Store is seeing record success. Sweeney said that the Epic Games Store is experiencing record success. Fortnite reached a peak of 110 million monthly active users during the holiday season. Unreal Engine 6 is a result of combining Unreal Engine 5 high-end features and Unreal Editor Fortnite (UEFN), aiming to simplify, scale up game development. He also mentioned the financial cushion provided by a $1.5billion investment from Disney. Disney has teamed up with Epic Games to build a Disney-based, virtual world that includes all Disney characters and is interconnected with Fortnite. He also noted Epic’s victory in Epic’s lawsuit against Google Play, the app store of Google. This victory was in addition to the federal win over Google in an antitrust-related case. But he still had harsh words for Samsung and Google, noting a fresh antitrust lawsuit over their alleged collusion to block Fortnite’s return to the Samsung app store on Android smartphones.
Sweeney noted there is a generational change in the game industry, with established titles with familiar gameplay not doing as well with consumers, while players are gravitating to big games with more friends.
“This is all happening in the context of a game business. The game industry is changing at a pace that has only been seen by a handful of developers in their lifetimes. Sweeney explained that it’s a change in generation. “We’re seeing a lot more games with big budgets being released, but they aren’t selling as well as we expected. Other games, however, are doing extremely well,” Sweeney stated. The real trend is that players gravitate towards games with large numbers of friends. This is an example of Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of social experiences or networks increases in proportion to how many friends you have.
“In the gaming world, this means you and your friends playing together, chatting online, attending concerts, and doing other cool virtual things,” he said. “And this new trend – some will call it the Metaverse and we are not in agreement as to what that means. When some people hear the term metaverse, they immediately think of Facebook’s VR and AR. Metaverse is a term used by some to describe the current Fortnite Season. But when you look at what’s happening in the world of Fortnite, it’s new and it’s exciting, and it’s something that never happened at this scale in the history of entertainment, with all an original story that’s evolving with original content and also all the world’s brands participating, dropping in, musicians, reaching users, Disney and Star Wars and others, all coming together to create a world class entertainment experience.”
This is the future of gaming, he said.
Back to growth
Bernice is not real. Bernice is not real.
He said that the primary goal of this decade was to help developers reach their growth targets. Our strategy to achieve this is to share with you everything we have built over time so you can do the same things. This isn’t just a message for game developers. It’s also a message the entire real time industry.”
That means film and TV makers can use Unreal Engine for virtual production on a massive scale. He said that architecture firms, automobile companies, fashion, entertainment, businesses, and gaming can all use Unreal Engine. Fortnite, I believe, is only one example. Sweeney added that other games do similar things. “As this becomes more widespread, we believe it is a great opportunity for everyone, and we are way out of the current malaise in the gaming industry,” Sweeney stated. Unreal Engine 5 is used for consoles, PCs and mobile games. Unreal Editor is being used by smaller companies and user-generated content creators to create a new development thread. This will lead to Unreal Engine 6 and foundations for gameplay programming that are easier to learn and more scalable. He said Epic would help everyone build a single game and then ship it across all platforms, including all app stores, at the same time. The game developers will be able to create experiences in Fortnite, or on their own. Purchases in one place are honored in other places, and the entire economy is an open economy where everybody can participate.”
He said that Epic and Disney are working together to build a “new Disney ecosystem that is Disney’s but is also fully connected to Fortnite, such that anything you get in one place can work in the other place, and your experiences aren’t disconnected, and you have the same friends, same items and the same the same social experience as you go.”
He said this partnership is just the first step towards an open system in which all companies and creators can participate together in the future as peers.
More litigation
Step 1 in installing Epic Games Store on iOS.
He said that the app stores are focused on restricting what developers can achieve, and imposing additional restrictions to prevent the likes of metaverse or taxing developers to the extent where they extract all the profits from the sale of a game. “We’re now at a stage where game development costs a lot. Apple and Google make more money from most games than the developers do, while contributing nothing,” Sweeney said. Sweeney stated that Apple and Google made more money from games than developers did, but they contributed nothing. He misses those days when he could do whatever he wanted with his computer without having to ask permission from a company. He said that’s why Windows, Mac, and Linux have more innovation than mobile platforms. He referred to Apple and Google as gatekeepers.
“Among the fights we’ve taken on here, he noted the case with Apple is still an ongoing fight to open up payments so developers can process payments without Apple mediation and without Apple fees,” he said. He referred to the “massive win” that Google had in an antitrust lawsuit in which it lost all charges. He cited the Digital Markets Act implemented by the European Union, which allowed Fortnite to be brought back to iOS in Europe. There is still much to be done. “We’ll keep fighting until we win,” he said. I’ve asked Apple and Google for comments. Stay informed! Subscribe to receive the latest news daily in your email.
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