8 ms·

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney changed video game industry

96 points by doppp 7y ago

dleslie 7y ago
Fortnite doesn't do anything particularly new; but it does a lot of existing things well, and combines some that haven't been combined well in the past. I'd like to stake out two wins that define Fortnite's success, to me: 1. It's on every platform that matters, with crossplay. That's hitherto largely unheard of for games; which is mostly a result of budget restrictions, middleware licensing, and partner contract limitations. 2. Its store combines time-limited access, games of chance, and vanity. You have to keep playing and keep spending in order to look how you want, and how you want to look is coerced to be ever changing by the continual churn of the store.
- dx87 7y ago
  Dota 2 has a similar store for cosmetics, but also includes the ability to sell them on the steam community market, giving Valve a 15% cut in addition to the money they made on the initial sale. People are willing to spend a lot of money gambling on $2.50 lootboxes for cosmetics that can be bought on the community marketplace for 3 cents the following year.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    > can be bought on the community marketplace for 3 cents the following year. Cosmetics don't depreciate that much over a year. Chances are if you get something rubbish out of a loot crate then it'll always be around that price.
- ksec 7y ago
  >Fortnite doesn't do anything particularly new; but it does a lot of existing things well, and combines some that haven't been combined well in the past. The best part is all the fruit of those learning and experience are now part of the Unreal Engine.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  While Fortnite might not do anything new as a business, as a game, on the technical side, it does offer new stuff. Fortnite supports large worlds with lots of players in fast-paced multiplayer. To make matters even more complicated, the players can build large structures in real time. The game also features a large amount of interactable objects with no loading screens. You could say that games like Minecraft do that, but those are graphically much simpler.
  - k__ 7y ago
    Sounds mostly like Tribes to me, the very first game I played online.
    - latch 7y ago
      Tribes didn't support more players than other games of that time, didn't have a build system beyond placing turrets, had no special world interaction, and maps weren't _huge_ (and for competitive play, mostly short maps were in the rotation)
      - k__ 7y ago
        Maybe the modded versions where different? I remember games with 50-100 players and maps that were multiple square kilometers in size.
      - int_19h 7y ago
        How about ETQW (2007)? Huge maps, 64 players per match, vehicles, lots of interactivity on the map in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6leg-2Let0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6leg-2Let0
      - oliwarner 7y ago
        Getting a dozen people in and on a dropship in Tribes2 was a highlight of my LAN gaming days. Utter chaos. Superb fun. Too intricate a game for online play but great otherwise. Codename: Eagle hit similar notes.
  - 7y ago
- Mdk25 7y ago
  Both these things came later on (once Fortnite took off). What Epic actually did do well, was take the most popular game in the world at the time - PUBG, copy it to the T on their own engine, and release it for free (instead of the $20 PUBG cost). That alone made it the most popular game in the world, and allowed them to make money off it, and create ports on all available platforms.
  - nobrains 7y ago
    And that's the same story of Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Fortnite was a total failure for the a long time. The battle royale gamemode was just further experimentation.
- lancesells 7y ago
  Don't forget it's also free on every platform. That isn't something new either but it's also a big reason for their success.
wyldfire 7y ago
> Sweeney isn’t quick to take all the credit for the mostly positive attention “Fortnite” has attracted, telling The Wall Street Journal his employees designed and programmed the game, not himself. Whatever his role, however, Epic has grown leaps and bounds under his leadership. If it was his decision to make it free-to-play-but-not-pay-to-win, then a good deal of credit is his.
- nolok 7y ago
  A more important decision was to take Fortnite, the paid co-op against zombie game, and add a free battle royale mode to it
shmerl 7y ago
What's going on with parallelized Vulkan renderer in UE? The Trello item was "archived": https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux Surprising that Google didn't back that effort with the whole Stadia push. And there is still no Linux support in Epic store.
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  Epic store is currently the turd of all game clients. I have a 1gbit connection and can download a 70gb game in 10m on steam. It took me 3 hours to download borderlands 3. I then copied it to my wife’s computer and epic... REDOWNLOADED ALL 63gb AGAIN... over 3 hours... I wish epic game store didn’t exist.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    The especially bad part is focus on exclusives.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Horrible platform.
  - nottorp 7y ago
    I have an Epic store account on one of my emails. Thing is, I didn’t create it but it’s a cheap Chinese turd that doesn’t validate emails. How can I trust them with my credit card then? And incompetence aside, Tencent made all their money they now use to bribe for exclusives with free to play “games”. And I don’t mean the likes of Fortnite. I doubt they even know what a honest business deal is.
  - yedpodtrzitko 7y ago
    I can remember how Steam was getting shit in its early versions too. But if they would wait with the release until the product would be complete/perfect, they would never ship it. So taking the approach of Minimum Viable Product + adding features as they go feels reasonable to me, even for the price of imperfection (a temporarily one, hopefully).
cloudking 7y ago
Fortnite is similar to the multiverse in Ready Player One. There have been multiple cross-over events in game, such as: 1) Live DJ show https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/47118989 https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/47118989 2) Avengers Endgame promo https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516452/fortnite-avengers-end-game-marvel-superheroes-crossover-event-infinity-war https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516452/fortnite-avenger... 3) Star Wars exclusive trailer https://www.wired.com/story/fortnite-star-wars/ https://www.wired.com/story/fortnite-star-wars/ It's proving it is more than just a battle royale shooter..
- m4rtink 7y ago
  That's really nothing new - Azur Lane has cross-over events all the time, for example.
- RenRav 7y ago
  I think Second Life or VRChat seem to have more similarity with Ready Player One. Maybe not the scale and popularity but everything else.
- jpindar 7y ago
  In Creative mode it's also a platform for a wide variety of user-created games, not just pvp shooters.
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  Isn’t that just classic advertising by product placement?
- rumok 7y ago
  Check out Facebook Horizon. It is eerily similar to The Oasis.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    ... if the sixers owned it
- smackay 7y ago
moksly 7y ago
I don’t like arena games, but they have been popular for a while. From what you can’t avoid picking up from general gaming media, it’s a genre that has been plagued by companies who offered horrible support and user experienced. It seems like Epic took the best bits of a popular formula and added a decent customer experience to it. Which, if I’m right, is a really nice message.
hotwire 7y ago
Thanks for ZZT Tim. That game changed my life when I was starting high school in the mid 90s; it was one of the ways I learnt to really have fun with computers as well as to program and make my own games. Also, Unreal Tournament still holds a very fond place in my heart. I don't play games these days, but on the very rare occasion I feel like it, that's one of my major go-tos, just for the nostalgia of Facing-Worlds ;)
- caseyamcl 7y ago
  Seconded re ZZT. I remember learning HTML so that I could build my first website, which was a ZZT fan website (there were more). That game literally launched my career as a programmer. My brother and I would sit at the computer for hours building elaborate 8-bit worlds fueled mainly by our imaginations. When I was 8 years old, I remember participating in a contest for which Tim Sweeney wrote me a personal letter. I’ve saved the letter. Here’s the link if you’re interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/12o0qgg2y1uzd30/1990-91%20album%2090.JPG?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/12o0qgg2y1uzd30/1990-91%20album%20... Thanks, Tim! It’s not every CEO who goes out of his way to encourage a kid. You inspired me.
coderunner 7y ago
Tim Sweeney has been extremely kind and generous with his time in all my interactions with him dating back about 10 years ago. I wish him all the success in the world. Him and Epic are getting a lot of hate on Reddit because of the exclusivity deals, but as a developer, I appreciate Epic trying to get the dev/store revenue split more generous for developers. Valve does the standard 70/30, and Epic is doing 88/12 I believe.
- politelemon 7y ago
  It isn't just the exclusivity deals, but the manner in which those deals are brought about, often with release promises broken, releases yanked and backers being outright lied to; I do not wish any success to such a business. As a gamer I don't like what the PC gaming landscape is turning into with Epic Games at the forefront of it. As a developer I would expect to consider a wider scope than a revenue split, a big part of which is an ecosystem, platform and tooling.
  - coderunner 7y ago
    All the extras like platform and tooling is nice, but don't mean anything if you can't support yourself as a dev. Better revenue sharing for devs is one thing that can make a big difference, provided the user base is there. Either it'll be there on Epic one day or Valve will match the revenue share of Epic or both. I'm all for having a competitive option in this space. I don't think it's entirely Epic's fault about the releases being yanked from Steam or crowd sourced titles making changes. The developers had to sign the contract with Epic and Valve decided that they're too big to fail (which they might be by now) so they didn't try anything to counter. The one thing that does suck from the gamer perspective is having to use multiple stores. As a dev and gamer I'm okay with this however as it helps the dev community at large in the long run if a viable store contender ever arrives.
  - tomnipotent 7y ago
    > As a developer I would expect to consider a wider scope than a revenue split Rev split was the best thing to happen to the game industry. Previously, game engines required ridiculous six figure contracts to even get started and meant a fixed cost regardless of the success of the game. We've had no shortage of amazing games thanks to this arrangement.
jokoon 7y ago
I wish PUBG would not be so slow.
- spats1990 7y ago
  I know exactly what you mean, but it's okay. I don't know if there will be a game to fulfil people's dreams of "exactly like pubg but better" for a long time, if ever. Because it was made mostly by people who I believe had never made an FPS/shooter before, it has a lot of problems, but the people were also able to make exactly what they wanted. A lot of the things about pubg that people think are bad, like how "sluggish" movement feels compared to say, csgo, were deliberate design decisions. It takes a really long time to get anywhere near competent even if you're already used to big multiplayer FPSs. E.g. you have to pick up a weapon then pick up ammo then load it. Anyone who wants to clone PUBG will most likely end up making something with a less brutal learning curve because it takes so much time and resources to make such a thing. In short I think such an idiosyncratic, buggy game with such brutally unforgiving gameplay, massive maps, and realistic bullet physics/weapons becoming a hit was a one off. I tried Apex Legends but it is nothing like pubg really. Even since I was a kid, I haven't played anything that sucked me in like PUBG did in 2017. It's so realistic, variable, and engrossing, and it doesn't hold the player's hand at all. Just my opinion.
thrower123 7y ago
The main thing that Epic appears to be doing is taking a big pile of Chinese money and using it to bribe users with free games as a carrot to go along with their stick of exclusivity agreements. Even that isn't really novel; EA's Origin store did the same thing, until they gave up on trying.
nottorp 7y ago
Damage control campaign to restore some of his rep after the Tencent deal?
archie2 7y ago
Personally, I think the best thing to come out of Fortnite is the revenue stream making it feasible for Epic to create its own game store and compete with Valve/Steam. Steam had been pretty stagnant for years until EGS came along and started poaching exclusives (opinions of this tactic aside) and got them to finally improve their platform.
cosmiccatnap 7y ago
Change doesn't always mean for the better... I think there is a desire to hate on steam and people point to fortnite as the creator of the epic store but steam has provided a reliable and secure platform for literally a decade plus while the epic store has had multiple breaches just this year alone and crashes quite often. The game itself is ok, it exists only because pubg couldn't fix their game though, that and the ability to play it across systems at any age, but to say it's a great game is kind of like saying McDonald's is a great resturant in that it's biggest appeal is that it's cheap, everywhere, and consistent...but that does not make it a great game in ant sense it just makes it a convenient game with market appeal and a payment system that works by getting thousands off of a hand full of people with expendable incomes or a serious problem. Tl;DR he did alot of things but I don't really think he changed the game industry any more than league of legends or pubg.
tracerbulletx 7y ago
Agreed, but because of Unreal Engine's licensing model change.
fredsanford 7y ago
I stopped reading about 3 paragraphs in when my spidey sense detected a press release... FWIW

96 points by doppp 7y ago

Fortnite doesn't do anything particularly new; but it does a lot of existing things well, and combines some that haven't been combined well in the past. I'd like to stake out two wins that define Fortnite's success, to me: 1. It's on every platform that matters, with crossplay. That's hitherto largely unheard of for games; which is mostly a result of budget restrictions, middleware licensing, and partner contract limitations. 2. Its store combines time-limited access, games of chance, and vanity. You have to keep playing and keep spending in order to look how you want, and how you want to look is coerced to be ever changing by the continual churn of the store.

dx87 7y ago
Dota 2 has a similar store for cosmetics, but also includes the ability to sell them on the steam community market, giving Valve a 15% cut in addition to the money they made on the initial sale. People are willing to spend a lot of money gambling on $2.50 lootboxes for cosmetics that can be bought on the community marketplace for 3 cents the following year.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > can be bought on the community marketplace for 3 cents the following year. Cosmetics don't depreciate that much over a year. Chances are if you get something rubbish out of a loot crate then it'll always be around that price.
ksec 7y ago
>Fortnite doesn't do anything particularly new; but it does a lot of existing things well, and combines some that haven't been combined well in the past. The best part is all the fruit of those learning and experience are now part of the Unreal Engine.
Mirioron 7y ago
While Fortnite might not do anything new as a business, as a game, on the technical side, it does offer new stuff. Fortnite supports large worlds with lots of players in fast-paced multiplayer. To make matters even more complicated, the players can build large structures in real time. The game also features a large amount of interactable objects with no loading screens. You could say that games like Minecraft do that, but those are graphically much simpler.
- k__ 7y ago
  Sounds mostly like Tribes to me, the very first game I played online.
  - latch 7y ago
    Tribes didn't support more players than other games of that time, didn't have a build system beyond placing turrets, had no special world interaction, and maps weren't _huge_ (and for competitive play, mostly short maps were in the rotation)
    - k__ 7y ago
      Maybe the modded versions where different? I remember games with 50-100 players and maps that were multiple square kilometers in size.
    - int_19h 7y ago
      How about ETQW (2007)? Huge maps, 64 players per match, vehicles, lots of interactivity on the map in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6leg-2Let0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6leg-2Let0
    - oliwarner 7y ago
      Getting a dozen people in and on a dropship in Tribes2 was a highlight of my LAN gaming days. Utter chaos. Superb fun. Too intricate a game for online play but great otherwise. Codename: Eagle hit similar notes.
- 7y ago
Mdk25 7y ago
Both these things came later on (once Fortnite took off). What Epic actually did do well, was take the most popular game in the world at the time - PUBG, copy it to the T on their own engine, and release it for free (instead of the $20 PUBG cost). That alone made it the most popular game in the world, and allowed them to make money off it, and create ports on all available platforms.
- nobrains 7y ago
  And that's the same story of Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Fortnite was a total failure for the a long time. The battle royale gamemode was just further experimentation.
lancesells 7y ago
Don't forget it's also free on every platform. That isn't something new either but it's also a big reason for their success.

wyldfire 7y ago

> Sweeney isn’t quick to take all the credit for the mostly positive attention “Fortnite” has attracted, telling The Wall Street Journal his employees designed and programmed the game, not himself. Whatever his role, however, Epic has grown leaps and bounds under his leadership. If it was his decision to make it free-to-play-but-not-pay-to-win, then a good deal of credit is his.

nolok 7y ago
A more important decision was to take Fortnite, the paid co-op against zombie game, and add a free battle royale mode to it

shmerl 7y ago

What's going on with parallelized Vulkan renderer in UE? The Trello item was "archived": https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux Surprising that Google didn't back that effort with the whole Stadia push. And there is still no Linux support in Epic store.

philliphaydon 7y ago
Epic store is currently the turd of all game clients. I have a 1gbit connection and can download a 70gb game in 10m on steam. It took me 3 hours to download borderlands 3. I then copied it to my wife’s computer and epic... REDOWNLOADED ALL 63gb AGAIN... over 3 hours... I wish epic game store didn’t exist.
- shmerl 7y ago
  The especially bad part is focus on exclusives.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Horrible platform.
- nottorp 7y ago
  I have an Epic store account on one of my emails. Thing is, I didn’t create it but it’s a cheap Chinese turd that doesn’t validate emails. How can I trust them with my credit card then? And incompetence aside, Tencent made all their money they now use to bribe for exclusives with free to play “games”. And I don’t mean the likes of Fortnite. I doubt they even know what a honest business deal is.
- yedpodtrzitko 7y ago
  I can remember how Steam was getting shit in its early versions too. But if they would wait with the release until the product would be complete/perfect, they would never ship it. So taking the approach of Minimum Viable Product + adding features as they go feels reasonable to me, even for the price of imperfection (a temporarily one, hopefully).

cloudking 7y ago

Fortnite is similar to the multiverse in Ready Player One. There have been multiple cross-over events in game, such as: 1) Live DJ show https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/47118989 https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/47118989 2) Avengers Endgame promo https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516452/fortnite-avengers-end-game-marvel-superheroes-crossover-event-infinity-war https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516452/fortnite-avenger... 3) Star Wars exclusive trailer https://www.wired.com/story/fortnite-star-wars/ https://www.wired.com/story/fortnite-star-wars/ It's proving it is more than just a battle royale shooter..

m4rtink 7y ago
That's really nothing new - Azur Lane has cross-over events all the time, for example.
RenRav 7y ago
I think Second Life or VRChat seem to have more similarity with Ready Player One. Maybe not the scale and popularity but everything else.
jpindar 7y ago
In Creative mode it's also a platform for a wide variety of user-created games, not just pvp shooters.
meheleventyone 7y ago
Isn’t that just classic advertising by product placement?
rumok 7y ago
Check out Facebook Horizon. It is eerily similar to The Oasis.
- jacobush 7y ago
  ... if the sixers owned it
smackay 7y ago

moksly 7y ago

I don’t like arena games, but they have been popular for a while. From what you can’t avoid picking up from general gaming media, it’s a genre that has been plagued by companies who offered horrible support and user experienced. It seems like Epic took the best bits of a popular formula and added a decent customer experience to it. Which, if I’m right, is a really nice message.

hotwire 7y ago

Thanks for ZZT Tim. That game changed my life when I was starting high school in the mid 90s; it was one of the ways I learnt to really have fun with computers as well as to program and make my own games. Also, Unreal Tournament still holds a very fond place in my heart. I don't play games these days, but on the very rare occasion I feel like it, that's one of my major go-tos, just for the nostalgia of Facing-Worlds ;)

caseyamcl 7y ago
Seconded re ZZT. I remember learning HTML so that I could build my first website, which was a ZZT fan website (there were more). That game literally launched my career as a programmer. My brother and I would sit at the computer for hours building elaborate 8-bit worlds fueled mainly by our imaginations. When I was 8 years old, I remember participating in a contest for which Tim Sweeney wrote me a personal letter. I’ve saved the letter. Here’s the link if you’re interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/12o0qgg2y1uzd30/1990-91%20album%2090.JPG?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/12o0qgg2y1uzd30/1990-91%20album%20... Thanks, Tim! It’s not every CEO who goes out of his way to encourage a kid. You inspired me.

coderunner 7y ago

Tim Sweeney has been extremely kind and generous with his time in all my interactions with him dating back about 10 years ago. I wish him all the success in the world. Him and Epic are getting a lot of hate on Reddit because of the exclusivity deals, but as a developer, I appreciate Epic trying to get the dev/store revenue split more generous for developers. Valve does the standard 70/30, and Epic is doing 88/12 I believe.

politelemon 7y ago
It isn't just the exclusivity deals, but the manner in which those deals are brought about, often with release promises broken, releases yanked and backers being outright lied to; I do not wish any success to such a business. As a gamer I don't like what the PC gaming landscape is turning into with Epic Games at the forefront of it. As a developer I would expect to consider a wider scope than a revenue split, a big part of which is an ecosystem, platform and tooling.
- coderunner 7y ago
  All the extras like platform and tooling is nice, but don't mean anything if you can't support yourself as a dev. Better revenue sharing for devs is one thing that can make a big difference, provided the user base is there. Either it'll be there on Epic one day or Valve will match the revenue share of Epic or both. I'm all for having a competitive option in this space. I don't think it's entirely Epic's fault about the releases being yanked from Steam or crowd sourced titles making changes. The developers had to sign the contract with Epic and Valve decided that they're too big to fail (which they might be by now) so they didn't try anything to counter. The one thing that does suck from the gamer perspective is having to use multiple stores. As a dev and gamer I'm okay with this however as it helps the dev community at large in the long run if a viable store contender ever arrives.
- tomnipotent 7y ago
  > As a developer I would expect to consider a wider scope than a revenue split Rev split was the best thing to happen to the game industry. Previously, game engines required ridiculous six figure contracts to even get started and meant a fixed cost regardless of the success of the game. We've had no shortage of amazing games thanks to this arrangement.

jokoon 7y ago

I wish PUBG would not be so slow.

spats1990 7y ago
I know exactly what you mean, but it's okay. I don't know if there will be a game to fulfil people's dreams of "exactly like pubg but better" for a long time, if ever. Because it was made mostly by people who I believe had never made an FPS/shooter before, it has a lot of problems, but the people were also able to make exactly what they wanted. A lot of the things about pubg that people think are bad, like how "sluggish" movement feels compared to say, csgo, were deliberate design decisions. It takes a really long time to get anywhere near competent even if you're already used to big multiplayer FPSs. E.g. you have to pick up a weapon then pick up ammo then load it. Anyone who wants to clone PUBG will most likely end up making something with a less brutal learning curve because it takes so much time and resources to make such a thing. In short I think such an idiosyncratic, buggy game with such brutally unforgiving gameplay, massive maps, and realistic bullet physics/weapons becoming a hit was a one off. I tried Apex Legends but it is nothing like pubg really. Even since I was a kid, I haven't played anything that sucked me in like PUBG did in 2017. It's so realistic, variable, and engrossing, and it doesn't hold the player's hand at all. Just my opinion.

thrower123 7y ago

The main thing that Epic appears to be doing is taking a big pile of Chinese money and using it to bribe users with free games as a carrot to go along with their stick of exclusivity agreements. Even that isn't really novel; EA's Origin store did the same thing, until they gave up on trying.

nottorp 7y ago

Damage control campaign to restore some of his rep after the Tencent deal?

archie2 7y ago

Personally, I think the best thing to come out of Fortnite is the revenue stream making it feasible for Epic to create its own game store and compete with Valve/Steam. Steam had been pretty stagnant for years until EGS came along and started poaching exclusives (opinions of this tactic aside) and got them to finally improve their platform.

cosmiccatnap 7y ago

Change doesn't always mean for the better... I think there is a desire to hate on steam and people point to fortnite as the creator of the epic store but steam has provided a reliable and secure platform for literally a decade plus while the epic store has had multiple breaches just this year alone and crashes quite often. The game itself is ok, it exists only because pubg couldn't fix their game though, that and the ability to play it across systems at any age, but to say it's a great game is kind of like saying McDonald's is a great resturant in that it's biggest appeal is that it's cheap, everywhere, and consistent...but that does not make it a great game in ant sense it just makes it a convenient game with market appeal and a payment system that works by getting thousands off of a hand full of people with expendable incomes or a serious problem. Tl;DR he did alot of things but I don't really think he changed the game industry any more than league of legends or pubg.

tracerbulletx 7y ago

Agreed, but because of Unreal Engine's licensing model change.

fredsanford 7y ago

I stopped reading about 3 paragraphs in when my spidey sense detected a press release... FWIW