Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has discussed the future of gaming, which he believes is steering towards multiplayer experiences with friends.
For better and worse, the impact of Fortnite on the games industry cannot be understated, with many developers now trying to replicate its success with their own live service experiments – most of which have failed to reach the same heights.
During a presentation at Unreal Fest in Seattle, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney outlined the ongoing success of Fortnite, which hit ‘new records in concurrency’ last Christmas with 110 million monthly active users. He also described Epic Games overall as ‘financially sound’, which comes a year after the company laid off 830 people.
Sweeney suggests this success comes amidst a ‘generational change’ for the industry, which is seeing many high budget games failing to hit expectations.
Why are so many recent video games flopping?
‘One of the manifestations [of that change] we’re seeing right now is a lot of games are released with high budgets, and they’re not selling nearly as well as expected, whereas other games are going incredibly strong,’ Sweeney said.
‘What we’re seeing here is a real trend where players are gravitating towards the really big games where they can play with more of their friends.’
Sweeney states that the value of a game is growing ‘in proportion to the number of friends you can connect to’, whether chatting together online, attending virtual concerts, or doing ‘other kinds of cool, virtual things online’.
It’s not clear what specific games Sweeney might be thinking of. The most high profile flop of recent months is live service title Concord, which seems to undermine his point, although the single-player only Star Wars Outlaws has also underperformed.
Why is Fortnite so successful?
He goes on to highlight this as being under the ‘metaverse’ umbrella. ‘And we’re not all in agreement on what this means,’ Sweeney added. ‘Some people, when they hear the word ‘metaverse’, they think of what Facebook is doing with VR and now AR. Some people use metaverse to describe everything they don’t like about the current Fortnite season.’
Seven years after Fortnite launched in 2017, Sweeney attributes the game’s continued success to the consistent updates and collaborations with ‘all the world’s brands’, naming ‘Disney and Star Wars and others’ that are ‘all coming together to create a world class entertainment experience that’s ever-evolving and live’.
‘That’s really what we think the future of gaming is about,’ he added.
While Sweeney is bound to champion Fortnite’s model as the future of the games industry, it’s hard to argue against its dominance. We’ve already seen how a handful of live service titles, including Fortnite, are responsible for the vast majority of overall time spent playing games in recent years, and these are all designed around being social with friends.
As we’ve seen with the amount of online games being shut down after mere weeks, it’s become increasingly difficult to land a success in the live service space, against the likes of Roblox, Minecraft, League Of Legends… and Fortnite.
The big question is whether these slim odds will deter developers from chasing the potential profits, or if they will continue to throw projects against the wall until one sticks.
Within the past year, PlayStation has seen huge success with Helldivers 2 and suffered one of its worst failures with Concord, but with many cancelled projects in tow, there’s perhaps reason to believe that companies are starting to see how risky the gamble is.
When is Unreal Engine 6 coming out?
Elsewhere at Unreal Fest, Epic Games acknowledged that is already planning ‘the foundation’ of Unreal Engine 6 – even though it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of Unreal Engine 5’s capabilities in current games.
This comes as Epic Games continues to bebullish with other companies over access to Fortnite. After the company sued Apple in 2021, Epic is now going after Samsung and Google for allegedly ‘colluding to block competition in app distribution’.
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