YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Sweeney

lines on the record: 296
first: 2025-04-30
most recent: 2025-04-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Humans talking to humans and being together in a world, real, the real world or a virtual world is a naturally empathetic medium which naturally leads to bonding. And the conflict sometimes occurs. It's just generally so much more promoting of our social norms and good interactions between people and positivity promoting, whereas kind of the typing angry messages thing at each other as a self-reinforcing negative dynamic that's negative. And I think you look at social media and you look at gaming that is increasingly social. And I couldn't see a bigger divide between any two medium, as I see there in terms of the actual social dynamics. One super positive, one super toxic at times.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see two contrasting worlds that have been brought about in the digital age. One is the world of social networks and people typing at each other and just massive negativity in politics. You know, hucksterism and engagement, curation by engagement, often promoting negativity and toxicity. That's a harsh world. I think it's a step backwards in many ways. I think the foundation of the world is actually a little bit shaky because of just the social dynamic that those platforms have brought on. But I compare that with the good-spiritedness of what's happening online when you're connected to real people, like actually playing Fortnite. playing Fortnite fil squads with people you've never met before never talked to and just judging what you know human connections develop there and whether they're positive i found those to be really really excellent and endearing i think the lesson from all of that is that”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And from experience. And that means accepting a game that it's a live experience and it's also an experiment and it's going to continually be improving. And at any time, there's some things that some people don't like and you learn from it and you improve it and you move on.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We certainly do. Everybody's often working very much till the last minute to make something excellent, and it's really hard with these fast delivery time frames because Really have to get a lot of stuff up and running before you can judge a new fortnight season holistically. You know, it's not until the last month or so that you really know what you've built and you really understand it. And if any late breaking problems emerge and like balance or anything else, it's usually towards the end and that usually leads to a rapid push to fix it. And then other lessons you can only learn live.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kipping a game is easy if you don't have a high quality standard. You also won't have much success. We've seen from Rockstar is they take a long time, but they ship amazing games and it's worth it in the end, right? A bad game is bad forever. A late good game eventually is released and is good.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making games is very hard, and especially when you're pushing the boundaries of something. With Grand Theft Auto, it's just that realism and feeling that you're in this huge city and anything can happen and it's all living and breathing and you're just a part of it. The level with which rock star has brought quality to that genre is astonishing. And when you're building something at a level of quality and detail that's never been achieved before, you can't predict how long it will take. Whatever problems you're solving today to get to the next iteration of quality on it, you don't know what new problems that will unlock and often you fix one thing and make it super realistic and that just highlights the unrealism of other things that you need to fix. I think the thing that always comes to mind is that”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the positivity of the interactions there among every kind of person you might ever meet online were really quite impressive and completely unlike what you would see in a game like Call of Duty where it's always, you know, everybody's got to be an edge lord.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The game is going as I play fill squads, a match made with three other random players and play a game together. Sometimes they have voice chat, sometimes they don't. And back when our matchmaking regions were bigger, I learned a little bit of battlefield Spanish so I could speak with the people who were down.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm not the secret holder. I'm not on the design team I experienced Fortnite as a player, but it really is a lot of that. And a good spiritedness as well. Because even when you're eliminating in Fortnite, there's not like blood spurts and there's not jibs. You're just teleported out of the simulation. And often you end up losing the game in a way that's hilarious enough that you actually are laughing at it or you're respect to that player who just won because that was clever. And it creates a very different dynamic than these other games where players tend to be very positive towards each other. One of the things I like to do in Fortnite just to kind of gauge.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. These who are all game design decisions that the designers make have a profound impact on what players think of the game and see in the game. Fortnite, Battle Royale always had a sense of mystery to it. You're on this island, but you're not sure exactly what's happening here. There are all these houses. They're abandoned. Why?”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, the best games have a soul. You can really sense it. Call of Duty has a very different soul than Fortnite. It just kind of exudes not only in what you see in the game, but also in how players interact with it and interact with each other online. That's a really fascinating thing I wish would be studied more.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Civilization, it's just mind boggling. They were built a game with that depth that can evolve, so dependent on your actions”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technological capabilities and creatives, people use that. And hopefully empowered by higher productivity tools and so on that will see more and more cool things emerge that we'd never dreamed possible. And the idea of a world simulator is actually really interesting there. It's been tried a lot. Usually it's extremely slow and expensive to create, but over time, maybe we'll get better at that, and that will be a thing too”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like there's an entire ecology simulator in there. I have a high school classmate that got into studying river ecology, and he was commenting on this is one of the very few games that's hydrologically sound. The way, like they actually went to the effort of shaping the rivers Like erosion dynamics and so on is the attention to detail. And there's something there that's big. And it's been funny during the industry. I last designed a game in 1992. I'm not a game designer. I have a very open-minded hear that the best game genre that will ever exist has not yet been invented. And as we get more.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most impressed with the games of. What appears to be a full living, breathing world. Games that give you the sense that you're just a part of it and there's a lot more happening and there's always more and more. Gives you the sense that you could go anywhere and do anything. Even though these games really do have finite limitations and there are places you can't go, really creating that sense of wonder is just a magical thing. Soda Breath of the Wild.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they're just really good single player and small scale games that people are taking a break from their big games for. And the trend there is going to be towards efficiently developing those games. You can't build one of those games with a $300 million budget, but if you can do it with a $40 million budget, you can make a lot of money. So I think that's the main reshaping going on, and I think that it creates a rather bleak outlook for a lot of the category of single player games that don't have a huge audience to reach. But this is just one of the really trends of restructuring the business around the technology and changes of the day.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Internally, and tens of thousands contributing to Fortnite as independent creators, you know, there are just things that can happen with that level of investment that can't happen in a smaller game. And so there's somewhat of an increasing win or take-all dynamic where the biggest games reinvest more to make their games more fun, to gain fun at a faster rate than other games. And the industry is changing around that. And so I think the lesson for the game industry now is that there are really two big opportunities being pursued. There's big games or games that have the potential to be really big multiplayer experiences that keep players around indefinitely for very long periods of time.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Western players had really seen that type of thing done before, and it was awesome, and it did well. But most players play it for a while and move back on. And that can be lucrative, but a business that's playing that kind of games, it's going to have to build a new one every few years and build a business around that while the other games continue to create users. But when you have a large number of gamers migrating to a small number of games, the effect of that is increasing revenue for those games, increasing reinvestment. And there are things that Epic can do with a team of thousands of people building Fortnite.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roblox is bigger than ever, and this trend is players consolidating into multiplayer experiences that play together. And we're seeing another trend overlaid with it, which is an awesome single-player game comes out, or small and multiplayer game comes out. People often, well, they treat it as a vacation. They'll go off and play that game for a while, then come back. Think Wukong was an awesome example of that wonderful game from a brilliant team in China, they made a game that's like”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think Matthew Boss's analysis of this over the years has really documented the trend towards, you know, you can call it the metaverse, or you can call it large-scale multiplayer social gaming. He's really documented this trend. And over the past year or so, it's taken a really, really strong turn towards increasing rate of change, increasing numbers of players coming to Fortnite. We hit an all-time high of 110 million monthly active users about a year ago. And another. Like close to peak this time.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What players are doing increasingly is playing A game they like and accept together with their friends, even if it's not the game that every one of them might be preferring to play themselves. Like if you have, and that's certainly the case in different Fortnite groups I play with from time to time. It's like one player might have been preferring to play COD, one might have been preferring League of Legends, somebody else swimming completely around. But it's just so fun to play together. We're doing that. And that means that there's really strong Metcalfe law effect in which games which are able to attract a large percentage of your friends are more able to attract you. And not only attract, but also retain.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Together with your friends and it really socially engaging way with voice chat is just way more fun than playing a solitary game for the most part. And there are exceptions to debt, but I think we're seeing much, much more playtime shifting towards games you're playing together with your friends. And not just random internet strangers who happen to play that game too, but people actually know in the real world. And that's certainly been the case with me and with almost everybody I know who's playing Fortnite or similar games. And that has really significant effects in reshaping the whole game business because a single player game, if you have 20 people with 20 different opinions of which game to play, each one might buy a different single player game. But in a multiplayer game, if there are 20 games out and each one might have their own completely individual preference, and each one were independently choosing which game to play, each one might buy a different game. But they're all realizing that they want to play together.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just didn't deliver fun, or they didn't deliver fun in a manner that was nearly competitive what the other sources of fun just in people's lives. And so, you know, at a basic level, we don't need a terribly complicated theory to explain a lot that malaise in the game industry. There's been a degradation of the capabilities of a lot of publishers, partly because of competition for talent, companies like really vibrant game businesses like Epic or Riot or others are hiring the best developers and accumulating them in big tech companies are hiring the best game developers because there's super talent there. And so in some cases, companies aren't competing robustly or getting worse. They're making games that are less fun. And I think everything else that's happened is kind of a sideshow to that. There's always political drama and so on. But I think they just the core is a failure to deliver fun. And, you know, the nature of fun is changing. It turns out that playing a game.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one constant in gaming that I think the industry manages to lose sight of from time to time, astonishingly, and that's fun. People play games for fun Whole job is to deliver fun. And when you look above the games that failed recently,”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely not. An apple's costs are similar. Apple runs an even more efficient and lean operation than Google. So their costs are also likely in the range of 6%, all in. They mark it up from 6% to 30%. Like only a monopoly can do that. Look at competitive businesses. They have a margin of a few percentage. The numbers there are strikingly supportive of just outright anti-competitive market distortions.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“H-U-G. Hold developers close. And that was one of the major pieces of evidence on which the jury found their practices to be illegal and anti-competitive. And one more data point on that, you know, we talk about 30% and it's always a lot of people defending STEM. Well, of course, they have more costs because they have more features than Epic. We have data on that that's very detailed. The all-in cost of operating the Google Play Store, stocking it, maintaining it, the software, the entire ecosystem is around 6% of revenue. So, you know, in a competitive market, what a company whose cost is 6% people to charge 30%.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. One more bit on that exclusivity point is that when we told Google that we were going to launch Fortnite outside of Google Play and go into competition with him. Viewed exclusivity as such a powerful competitive force that they went around to the top thirty publishers and paid out hundreds of millions of dollars. To them in order to agree not to do exclusive deals with competitors. And that was called Project Hug.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“18% more of the revenue. I think there's a real power to incumbents. It's very hard to overcome through just being there and being as good.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the mechanism that drives users away from the incumbent store to the store that offers a better deal? If basically developers are fearful of competing on price to restores, what can possibly be done to get a dominant store with something like 90% of revenue share among multi-publisher stores? So that much, much smaller store can compete. I think some answers required there. A better UI is great. Steam is super polished. Epic Game Store and time will hopefully be as polished. How does that overcome the fact that your entire library over the past 15 years is there? If developers have been afraid to exercise their own economic interests, because it's no developer's interest to sell an epic and get 12, you know.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's the conundrum the exercise of soft power by all of the competing stores who Has made it intractable for almost any developer to offer a better price through the Epic Games tour than through Steam. You can imagine that if the effect of Epic revenue sharing 12% to developers was that games just cost 22% less on Epic games. Sorry, 18% less on Epic Game Store, that would actually start to reshape consumer behavior significantly. People would start coming here for the better deals. I feel like Steam giving developers nasty phone calls and so on when they propose to do that prevents developers from passing on savings to consumers.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seeking to compete, especially underdogs seeking to compete, have to offer some unique value, have to offer something that's not available through the competitors. And I get that Steam users, they just prefer using Steam and buying games on Steam to have their library in one place don't like this, but you're never going to have competition for better deals if you don't support the competitive mechanisms that allow competitors to come about. I think if Valve were forced through Epic Game Store's success to compete with Epic Game Store, then developers would be getting a better deal. Consumers would be getting a better deal. And these 30% fees would be driven down quite a lot towards the actual costs that are required to support the stores.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As it would have done on Steam because the players who wanted Borderlands wanted borderlands and they came and got it. Whereas a lot of other games, you know, some smaller games especially that didn't have a dedicated audience that was absolutely going to play the game typically benefited from exposure on Steam. They were reaching an audience that wouldn't have reached organically. And so some of them, in the end, they conclude that they did worse by being on the Epic Games tour exclusively in terms of reaching fewer customers. And so we had this limited time exclusives when they ran out. They put their games on Steam and lots of data was gathered to understand what worked. And so this worked well for some games, didn't work for other games. But companies...”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tried to pursue this, but very quickly, every developer told us that they wouldn't agree to better pricing because if they did, then Steam would stop giving them marketing featuring and benefits. And the console makers will be mad and all their relationships would be harmed. So there's an undercurrent of powerful platforms and ecosystems encouraging developers not to compete on price. So not being able to compete on price, we decided to compete on supply by doing exclusive deals. And we signed a lot of them. Paid developers lots and lots of money. I think we distribute over a billion dollars in net expenditures to developers beyond the money, the revenue we actually made from games in order to get a whole lot of exclusive games. Some are successful, some weren't. Borderlands did awesomely on the Epic Games tour, and Gearbox felt that it did just as well through Epic.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to point out to the jury in the trial the benefits of exclusives. Like imagine a Nistor popping up. Store has a big sign outside of it. We're the nest store We have everything that the other store has, and it's at the same price. Are you going to go to the new store? No. Nobody's going to switch from Steam if Steam has all of the same games as the competing store and everything's priced just the same. And so we looked at initially two ways of competing with Steam strongly. We wanted to sell games at a better price than Steam by agreeing on the amount of money. We pay each game developer if the game's going to sell for $50 and we take 12%, we'd actually lower the price and potentially even lose some money to offer a better deal.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rightfully up to them to decide how to distribute it, and to make the decisions about their business. It's their game. If they want to distribute it through Steam, they can. If they want to distribute it through Epic exclusively, they can if they want to distribute it through both, then they could do that as well. And if we pay them money or other things of value in exchange for them coming exclusively to the Epic Games tour, I think that's their right. And this isn't an example of Epic an underdog with a tiny fraction of Steen's market share working to proactively compete with Steam by offering a better supply of games. And some consumers who prefer Steam might prefer that the game be on Steam, but the developer in each case is decided that they believe they would benefit more by doing this exclusive deal in exchange for benefits than by being on Steam. One of the key exhibits in the Epic Google trial was its opening exhibit, which was a”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's back up and talk about the principle was at work here. Apple forcing other companies to use their payment service is a cursive decision by Apple. Apple convinced other developers to use their payment service by offering benefits or a better deal or funding or any other positive incentive, then that would be perfectly fine. One is Preventing competition, and the other is actual competition. EPIC has never forced any developer into any sort of exclusivity relationship. Rather, we've offered developers payment or incentives or marketing or any number of things of value to them in exchange for coming to our store exclusively. And it's their game.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Email I sent to the senior Apple Management and been like, huh, there's an issue here. We should have a discussion. We should reconsider this. We should listen. And, you know, they didn't. And that's why we're in the midst of a five-year battle with Apple. And hopefully still the early days of a 15-plus year partnership with Sony.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Historic reasons got stuck with a policy that no longer made sense for the future and following a serious discussion with a close partner right at it and did an awesome thing and now Sony is much better off and Epic's better off and all game developers are better off and Nicole Constantinople industry I think is a lot stronger now than it would have been if you know these silos had continued playing out and despite the kind of potential concern that like maybe blocking platform play with Xbox Gave Sony Advantage you know Sony's actually grown in market share relative to Xbox since that time and so you can't say that anything but good goodness came of that that time I think a better version of Apple would have received”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. Yeah, that was an interesting time. Sony had her long running policy preventing cross platform play. And we had a long series of conversations which got pretty harsh towards the end. But Sonya ultimately came around and they opened up PlayStation and through a series of private conversations they did the right thing. And not only that, our partnership with Sony has increased since that argument back in 2018. And we've gotten closer and closer and done ever more things with Sony brand IP, like the characters from God of War and other games coming into Fortnite and all kinds of crossovers, massive unreal engine adoption and Sony for making games, for making movies at Sony Pictures, music partnerships with Sony music. It's been an absolutely wonderful relationship. I think that stands as an awesome example of a company that, because of”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The future trend is in that direction. I wish Velvet opened up SteamWorks to just work on all platforms. They could have easily done it. We did it. But they seem to be using it as a lever to keep people locked into this DMPC game store. And, you know, that's going to be a long-running battle because there's always a very toxic group of Steam users who, like they even created an entire subreddit dedicated to criticizing Epic on our store. And they create basically harassment campaigns at times against developers who use Epic Online services. Developers do that so they can connect their players across platforms and have friends across platform and voice across platforms. But, you know, suddenly it's trying to be turned into a negative.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Services and the social systems that we built for Fortnite opened up to all developers to have cross-cut platform social features be super easy and free for all developers. This is not something we're trying to gatekeep or rentseek on or lock people into. It's just a way that we're making social gaming easier for everybody. As more and more games follow the Fortnite approach of being Won-Ti platform, especially multiplayer games, Metcalf's law is a very real phenomena in the industry. It's the thing that's upending Some games and causing growth in other games. It is the number one trend for pervading the world of gaming today. And it says that, you know, your game is quadratically more valuable the more percentage of a user's real world friends they can connect to. Your game vastly benefits by connecting all of its players together and not segregating them off into different online platform populations and so on. And so, you know,”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Fortnite on PC, now on Android and It's a forever facet of the industry, and we are never losing heart in it. And when you think at some point, I really feel that the benefits of the Epic Games approach are going to outweigh the benefits of the Steam approach, especially as gaming becomes multi-platform. One of the things that really sucks for all gamers is that you have a lot of friends in the real world. Everyone has different platforms. Your Steam friends aren't connected to your Xbox friends, and they're not connected to your PlayStation friends or your Nintendo friends. And so you're very much bottling up PC gaming into kind of a hard core group of PC-only folks and making all the other aspects of it difficult. You know, a lot of games have flocked towards Discord, which is a mess in itself because now your Steam name is not your Discord name and that's not your PlayStation name and so now you have two people in a game and they have four different identities and that's US aim for that is with Epic Online.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the criticisms of Epic Game Store from the beginning was you don't have all of the features of Steam, but we very much don't want to have all of these features of Steam. Like Steam has forums to your game. And we decide we don't want to create forums. And our partners, when we talk to them, generally didn't want us to create epic game store forums for their games because there's already channels that they prefer to them. There's social media and a number of platforms and there's Reddit and there's lots of places for gamers to discuss their game. And they preferred those discussions to be there. And so it's very much not our goal to mimic everything of Steam. But we do want to have all the convenience features that makes it easy and fun to use as Steam. So there's a long journey ahead, but we continue to reinvest and we're working to build a multi-billion dollar business there and think we'll succeed already at the Epic Games store supports an immense amount of Epic Games comp.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think one thing we had to, it took us a while to realize it's not in uniform, depending on your proximity to a CDN and the size of your game collection. It can be either awesome or really clonky. And the users for whom it's really clonky are the people, I think, or a large part of the complaints.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish we'd gotten better at addressing quality of life features and prioritize them above all of the other features. Because Steam has 15 years of built up work by many of the best programmers in the whole industry working on that. A much larger team working on Steam and a lot more time working on it. And so we've had to make a lot of prioritization decisions about what do we support with the Epic Game Store and when. A lot of the time it's been supporting commercial features like merchandising, offering multiple versions of a game for sale and offering upgrades from the regular edition, the deluxe edition and other things that partners work. And other priorities have been quality of life and launch or load times and other things. And we've not put enough emphasis on the quality of life features. We've recognized this very clearly multiple times when we've gone through multiple refactorings. But that's definitely been a disappointment to us and to a lot of users.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah. I think. One of the reasons that people characterize the Epic Games launcher is clunky is because the Epic Games launcher is clunky. And we need to improve this. There's a lot of work going on there.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apple II included a listing for all of the ROMs, the source code to the ROMs, so you could understand exactly what was happening there and you could learn from it. It included a hardware schematic of the entire computer so you could learn how to make a peripheral and plug it in in an open ecosystem. And that's the awesome Apple. That company would be the best company in the world again. I think the current one. Just on the wrong side of history and needs to change.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. Competition makes everybody better. You have a monopoly that's forced to compete. Suddenly, the monopoly's products get much better. The offerings to consumers get much better. You see so many areas where Apple could be the best. But what they have is just really, really lousy, and it's this old guard of leadership who is clinging to these old policies, turning themselves into the enemy of every developer, every regulator. And I think it's ultimately massively to their detriment. And I can't wait for a new generation to come in and paint a bright path to the future. Epic was an awesome partner to Apple for more than a decade of demos and partnership and technology usage together. And we did amazing things together. Love nothing more than to have that Apple bring back Steve Wozniak's original views. The Apple II was such an amazing thing. It's completely open platform. The manual to the”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even where the DMA law requires Apple to allow competing stores, they say a store can only be a store. You can't build a store into Facebook. You can't build a social network into a store. A store must only be a store because a store that's more than a store might be able to compete with us more effectively. It's just a giant, you know, to use the Soviet term. It's a defense in-depth strategy where they've constructed a massive series of barriers. Each are fatal to any attempt to compete so that even if one barrier is overcome, the others remain in place and shut down the whole scheme. And that's playing out in Europe where Apple's enabled us to launch the Epic Game Store, but has made it so difficult and uncompetitive both for Epic and for clients who we want to do business with that it has no chance of success until the European Union starts to really enforce the DMA law and impose harsh and serious penalties on Apple to force compliance.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Limited data storage capabilities and 3D graphics capabilities on the iOS web APIs. So APIs you can access from web apps running within a web browser. And that's to incentivally cripple those apps to ensure that they can't possibly compete with native apps by depriving web apps of those features they prevent web apps from being competing with native apps. Well, Apple If they treat the metaverse the way they treat the web, they'll say you can only use Apple's metaverse engine, unreal engine is disallowed. And then they can impose all of their own limitations on the metaverse to force all commerce through Apple or force it to be so uncompetitive and lousy that it can't compete. And they have this giant array of these anti-competitive techniques they use to disadvantage other app developers, saying only Apple can build certain kinds of apps or only Apple can integrate certain features in Europe.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source