Everyone has friends that are limited to one platform and ecosystem, whereas what we've built with 'Fortnite' is a friends system that works across seven platforms. You can have friends across Xbox and PlayStation and PC.
Tim Sweeney
It turns out having a fast car is an excellent hobby when you're a workaholic because even when you don't have any free time, you can always drive to work.
When gamers can play a game together with all of their friends, regardless of the devices they own, you have a much more compelling social experience. That applies to all multiplayer games.
'Fortnite' has, I think, the most positive gamer community that's ever emerged from a game at this scale. I think it's partly because of the great community and partly because of the tone set by the game.
If you throw a frog in boiling water, he'll just hop out. But if you put him in warm water and slowly amp up the temperature, he won't notice and end up boiled.
I believe that augmented reality will be the biggest technological revolution that happens in our lifetimes.
When you search for Fortnite on iOS, you'll often get PUBG or Minecraft ads. Whoever bought that ad in front of us is the top result when searching for Fortnite. It's just a bad experience. Why not just make the game available direct to users, instead of having the store get between us and our customers and inject all kinds of cruft like that?
In many ways 'Fortnite' is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers; they're playing with friends and using 'Fortnite' as a foundation to communicate.
The genre thing is overrated, and the platform decisions are overrated. It's what we see on 'Fortnite': so many of these gamers play on a variety of devices, so you can't say they're a mobile gamer or a console gamer. They're just a gamer.
Games like 'Fortnite' are way more fun to play with your real-world friends, and they're so accessible that anybody can play.
Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There's a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.
There are major benefits to building a game once and improving it over a long period of time based on user feedback and behavior. It's kind of depressing to have to build a game once, take all the user feedback, and then spend the next 3 years building another game.
We see that as 'Fortnite' evolves, it's evolving beyond being a game.
'Fortnite' is the same game on all platforms, including high-end consoles and PCs.
Augmented reality will change the world more than a lot of other technologies. Traveling around to meet people will be much less important when you can stand in a room and chat with a virtual representation of a person that's so close to reality - it'll be a whole new level.
Epic has prided itself on providing software directly to customers ever since I started mailing floppy disks in 1991.
VR as a display technology, as it's miniaturized and made comfortable and mainstream, will be a replacement for all other forms of display technology, input and output. So for anybody who works with computers all day, this is going to be our future.
Hollywood is moving movie production into VR because it may be more immersive. We see a convergence of different forms of media. VR and AR provide next-generation viewing experiences for games, movies, and visualization.
The awesome thing about 'Fortnite' is it's brought a huge volume of digital commerce to Epic.
Microsoft has been taking a series of steps for a while now to close down the Windows ecosystem. They can't do it all at once, because there would be an industry uproar. But one little step at a time, they're trying to take it all over.
We all remember the tech bubble of the late '90s, but companies like Amazon survived. Wherever there's strong, enduring value, it can last through that kind of turmoil.
My role is more like a chairman and founder. I am used to overseeing the company's heritage and our strategy.
First, we want to have a direct relationship with our customers wherever we can. On open platforms like PC and Android, it's possible for them to get the software direct from us. We can be in contact with them and not have a third-party distributor in between.
I think the most interesting things happening in VR are going to be somewhere in between what you call a traditional game and what you call a traditional movie.
While Hollywood's computer graphics quality is world-class, their production pipelines are a mess of non-standard tools and labor-intensive processes driven by the mantra of maximizing quality regardless of cost. It's very Balkanized.
We want a direct relationship with our customers. To build a business and sell products to them.
We've been happy to be able to work with Sony and Microsoft to have the first game that honors everyone's purchases across iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and the console platforms.
When lots of stores compete, the result is a combination of better prices for you, better deals for developers, and more investment in new content and innovation.
The thing that excites me most technologically is the ability to use VR not just for games and displaying our content, but also for creating that content. We're putting a lot of thought into what the Unreal Engine editor looks like as a VR application.
The YouTube revolution isn't a revolution in content consumption, although there's a huge number of content consumers. It's about how anybody with a camera or a smartphone can create a video and share it with the whole world.
All signs point to there being many virtual and augmented reality competitors, and not just a single, dominant company.
I believe Microsoft has every right to operate a PC app store and to curate it how they choose.
Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10 as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce.
Within our lifetimes, we will be able to push out enough computational power to simulate reality.
I welcome Microsoft having a store on Windows; what I've always resisted was a push to close down Windows to competing stores.
Fortnite, because of its visual style, it's widely acceptable to just about everyone. It's open up to a much wider audience than a realistic, military-style simulation.
I have immense respect for Unity because they played a key role in establishing this indie revolution, empowering a huge number of people to get into game development.
I believe AR is going to be the primary platform of the future for both work and entertainment.
We're not just limited by technology but by our ideas and our experimentation and how quickly we can try things.
Onstage at Build, Phil Spencer said the Xbox is an open platform - which surprises me, because you have to get your game concept approved before you start developing it. Then you have to get every update approved. Microsoft has absolute control.
It's a big and growing problem, the amount of power possessed by Google and Facebook. President Eisenhower said it about the military-industrial complex. They pose a grave threat to our democracy.
It's awesome to see other games picking up on battle royale, adding their unique spin to it, and advancing the state of the industry.
On open platforms like PC, Mac, and Android, Epic's goal is to bring its games directly to customers.
The great thing about VR is that the input is going to be so drastically better than mouse input or games with touch controls on smartphones. It'll make it much easier to build stuff and express yourself freely.
As soon as a critical mass of people in the world gained access to devices with high-end graphics and Internet connectivity, the rise of games like 'Fortnite' became inevitable.
My experience with Epic is handing off more and more power to the point where I can just sit back and look at our strategy or technology. I provide guidance without being responsible for any particular part of the company.
We are a game developer ourselves, and we built everything we need for our games. We share everything we built, including our game engine.
I've personally unsubscribed from Netflix twice because I've been frustrated with changes in their catalog.
At Epic, we succeed when developers succeed.
I would play games long enough to discover what games were doing and how they were doing it. And then I'd spend the rest of my time building.
