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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, 10 million people, you have less than 10 million pixels on your screen. So, why is the Nyquist sampling theorem say? It says that you don't need full overhead for every player. You need to render the players you're around you in some approximation of everything else”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. We've had Fortnite events that have attracted 15 million concurrent users. But the fact that they're all divided up into servers with 100 players each for those events isn't really a positive. It's just a limitation of the technology. Tracing back to Onre Engine 1 and its single threading decisions. If we could build a concert where all the concert participants potentially tens of millions of them could participate together simultaneously and see that there's that massive a crowd and they could all do interesting things and interact with each other, that would be way cooler.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First is a programming language that we're building for large scale simulation programming. It's designed to make it easy to write code that can scale up to not only you building a Fortnite Island, but you building modules or components that can be used by millions of other programmers and coexist in a huge environment and also can scale up to a huge scale simulation. Some games will be small. Better royale might might find that 100 players is actually optimal. It might be the 1,000-player version of Battle Royale would be worth, but I bet there are 1,000 million and tens of million player experiences. They're even better than that that will yet be discovered.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Foundations for that, the kinds of code you would need to right now to make that happen are just not practical. And so we're investing, massively in building new programming language technologies around verse and our proposed standards for future metaverse programming that we hope will solve those kinds of problems and make that kind of world possible”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is putting more and more of people's work together in a seamless, continuous play space if for a games where that makes sense. You can imagine a game taking place in an environment the size of a continent or earth in which you can go from place to place and see different areas which are maintained by different people. So you go into different spaces, the game rules are customized according to that and you can go from experience to experience. And instead of having just one company's authorship ever present wherever you are, you'd see you'd be driving a car built by one person carrying weapons built by 20 other people and taking place in a simulation and an environment that's built by thousands of other people and working for separate companies or their own entrepreneurs or indies or enthusiasts all working together simultaneously. And we totally lack the program.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only became possible back then. You couldn't have built one 20 years ago because you just couldn't have rendered an environment that's as large as a BR game with that many players with that level of interaction and performance. It was just not possible to run it. So you got a certain level of technical capabilities and a genre came out that proved to be by far the best shooter genre ever invented. But I think there are numerous, numerous more genres, some of which are better than any of the existing ones that will be invented as we get more and more capabilities. You know, some of the capabilities we're lacking now are the ability to build environments and game simulations that span more than work than a single company can possibly create. And you see kind of the birth of that idea in Fortnite and Roblox where there are tens of thousands of creators each voting content and users are playing meaningful amounts of it all. And so there's an ecosystem that scaled larger than company. But it's still very much. You go into one island and you play that creator's work. The other direction of its scale.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The highest detail of Fortnite updates amount to about 60 gigabytes of data. And that's just a small part of what exists in the Fortnite creative economy. And if you look at what this might be in a decade as standards emerge, you might have exabytes of data out there. Fortnite Better Oriel is, I don't think the Ottoman manifestation of gameplay that will ever be invented. What we've seen time and time again is that as we gain more technical capabilities, graphics gets more capable, CPUs become more performant, web services become ever more scalable. We see new genres of games that emerge that weren't possible before. And, you know, Doom ushered in the era of Deathmatch, the first time 3D multiplayer game was even possible at all. You know, the early Battle Royale games starting about 10 years or 15 years ago.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Code and content that somebody accompany has prepared, and they release it and it stays exactly what it is until they release a new version and it's upgraded from. But the metaverse needs to be a composite of code and content built by millions of different people that could potentially form a seamless world together.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 2DC engraph, or the 2D layout of controls and objects on the webpage, but that's just static data. It's just non-moving, non-animating web page. And then you have the JavaScript programming language, which is used to manipulate that, to display things to the user, and to implement anything you could implement in code. So it's a little programming language that runs in your web browser. And the metaverse needs something that performs that similar role. But the metaverse and 3D gaming in general needs something that's rather more powerful, more safe, more scalable, and more capable than JavaScript. Because the metaverse is actually more difficult technical problem than a web page. A web page like an app is just a single bundle of”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They make in their emotes, but we're still missing a bunch of pieces. The biggest missing piece is the programming language that at the center of standardizing the metaverse. Now, if you look at the web, the web is a combination of a bunch of different technologies. The two biggest ones are HTML, which describes”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The web has PNG files for 2D images and MP3 files for audio. And 3D has the Pixar USD file format, the universal scene description, which is a description of the scene graph, the entire set of objects in the scene and all of their parameters so that the engine that supports those features could import that and then render the same scene. As the engine they came from, large parts of this work across Unreal Engine and Unity and Blender and all of these 3D packages of different sorts. And there's the GOTF texture format, which stores textures and geometry and other low-level data for 3D objects. When you see a Fortnite character, that file format together with the image file formats can store their static appearance, the shape of their body, even their animations and their different poses and the appearance of them, the different standard file formats could store all the sound.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need to love different things. The one area where the standards bias have been very successful in creating working standards implemented by all the major engines today is in low-level file formats for data interchange.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just a way of denoting money or value exchange. You can do that with money, or you can do it with NFTs or whatever. But there's nothing about this future digital economy that fundamentally requires cryptocurrency or whatever. What you need is interoperability. Interoperability can happen through a blockchain. It can happen through a database. It can happen through standards bodies with defining standards and protocols. And we've been doing it for hundreds of years since the railroads were standardized. And, you know, it's not something that totally requires a novel technological solution.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“600 to 800 million people playing that kind of game every month. So, like, you know, that's real and that's happening and it's very much underway. VR has a much smaller audience. I don't think you need VR to have anything like this. VR is hardware that may or may not enhance the experience for some usage cases. For some, it will probably be better. And for some it will probably be worse. But certainly there's not any set of battle royale players flocking to VR. And the other thing is NFT is like trying to equate digital or cryptocurrency to the metaverse. It's like, well, you know.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. You don't need like an alternate currency system. Unfortunately, a bunch of ideas have been conflated because people are trying to hype up different things. But this idea of large-scale multiplayer social gaming, that notion of the metaverse, you know, there's...”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of intuitive, actually. Like, you're not seeing other players if you see anything, like you're seeing their butt as you're trying to catch up to them, jumping from object to object, and they're above you. And so, you know, it wasn't a mode that showed off outfits very much, but you can determine the economic correlation between a game mode and spending.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this can be done. We did a lot of analysis of the Fortnite economy and found that Some fortnight experiences lead to or correlate with higher spending than others. And Bet Orele is relatively strong in that area because you see your character from behind and see all of your other characters from the front. And you have lots of opportunities to really see who you are and to emote and to interact with other players. And a lot of games have that characteristic. One funny anomaly stood out. There was this game that was one of the big breakthroughs in Fortnite Only Up. Game where you just climbing up by following paths of stacks of objects and things. It was just stupid fun. Everybody loved. Found people weren't spending a lot of money on outfits when they were playing Only Up.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the really critical things we aim to do in designing that is ensure it's a creator economy that could scale to other companies, other ecosystems. And say, you know, right now we have many industry standards bodies. One standardized game ratings, age ratings of games, another standardized file formats for the web, another standardizing file formats for 3D like Chronos groups and the metaverse standards form. If we had a standards body standardize what our portable outfits and games, game outfits that you could buy in one game that work in another what are their dimensions and what are their capabilities and what can you do and what can't you do and so on? Then you could have an item economy where every game agrees to respect each other's item purchases of that sort. And revenue is shared between ecosystems as well.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you have all the revenue in this item shop economy and all of the engagement in this engagement economy. And the thing that magically makes the Fortnite creator economy works is revenue sharing, item shop spending, according to sources of engagement by engagement. If you buy an item and you've played 40% of your time in Battle Oreo and 60% of your time in these user modes, the amount you spent, the portion of that that's profit can be separated out and paid out to all the different creators who participate in that economy. And that's why Fortnite scaled up to a $400 million crater economy so far and is growing.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the item shop only exists because of the sources of engagement. If you weren't playing Battle Royale, trust me, nobody would want to buy a Fortnite outfit. If you weren't playing any Fortnite games, why would you buy a Fortnite outfits?”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On your chosen car cosmetic. And now you have a cool car. It's identifiable as yours. We realized early on with Fortnite that the key to making Fortnite work as a creator economy was to open up the revenue from the item shop to all those sources of engagement. They're two big things happening in Fortnite that make it work as a product and as a business. One is the game modes Fortnite Battle Royale and all of the user modes and everything else are sources of engagement. People play there because it's super fun. And because they're playing there, they're willing to buy cool stuff to make their character look cooler. And so you have all these sources of engagement, but the sources of engagement don't make money directly. You can't spend money in Fortnite Battle Royale to buy a game item. Everything's, you know, the gameplay is not paid to win and it's all just a game. So we make money from the item shop.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every game's going to have its own gameplay rules, and a lot of games are going to have stuff that only works in them. But there's a huge set of games that have in common, the idea of a cosmetic system that does not affect gameplay outcomes, but is purely cool looks and cool appearances. Most of the major multiplayer games have them. And if you look at games, you could probably bundle together about 70% of them and say they're similar enough that they could actually interoperate, that you could own an outfit in Fortnite, own an outfit in Roblox, and own the same outfit and maybe Call of Duty and maybe 100 or 200 other games and actually expect they would work together. And you find other kinds of items are probably under operable too. Like Fortnite has car outfits, so you can buy different appearances of a car. And when you find a physical car in the world a Fortnite, if you're the first person to get into it in that session, boom, it takes”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Historical artifact. We're left in the world where people can't seamlessly move from games to games, bringing their friends and their stuff. So the solution to this is to federate and connect all of the systems together. All of the players on all the different platforms can be recognized by their name and put the at sign in it so your Xbox names and your Fortnite or Epic names and your Steam names can all live together and interoperate together in a single space. So unifying the social ecosystems is one thing that needs to happen. The next and bigger challenge is to unify the economies too. Now I'm not talking about like a sword you have in World Warcraft should work in Fortnite. Every game”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of duty. It's another isolated place. And same with World of Warcraft and same with League of Legends. And every other place you go is its own unique place, different friends, different account names, different people, and there's no social cohesion between them at all. And long time ago, consoles set out to solve this problem by creating their console-wide friend system in account. Your friend on PlayStation in one game is your friend's on PlayStation in another game, but only on PlayStation if you're on Xbox, you can't see PlayStation friends. And so you have two basically orthogonal and cross-cutting divisions of the world into fiefdoms. Which were not created with bad intentions, but arose and are, you know, separated, isolated islands. One is the platforms and their social services, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Steam, Epic, if you add it to the list. And the other is these different games people play. And, you know, because of this weird...”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fortnite is an awesome thing. You go into Fortnite, there's a hundred million monthly active users there, a huge number of your own friends are there. You can play with them, go from experience to experience seamlessly without leaving the app. There are 100,000 different islands you can play on, and some of them are really awesome. And they're constant new ones coming out and constant things to do. If you want to play Roblox, all right, you quit all of the Fortnite app, you launch the Roblox app, different program, different friend system, different account names, your username in Fortnite and your username and robots are different names and they're not connected to each other. So you have to remake all of your friends and then find different things to play. And now the controls are different, so you have to relearn how the joystick, mouse, keyboard controller works in that experience, and you have to go from place to place, and you buy some stuff in Fortnite, and it's really cool, and you can use it anywhere in Fortnite, and then you go in Roblox and you don't have that stuff. You have to buy different stuff. And that stuff only works in Roblox. And same with call.”
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. We're a company that can start working on a project knowing that we won't reach fruition or make any money from it at all for three years, four years, five years. We're totally okay with that. And that's the cycle that's fueled our growth over time. It's constantly investing in the future and being a serious company that's doing serious R&D side by side with shipping and maintaining products and earning money from them.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growing to be a future technology powerhouse, and we think the 3D space, and if future real-time 3D simulations is going to be one of the major facets of technology for humanity, and we're all in investing in that.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fortnite makes billions of dollars a year. And that's the majority of Epic's revenue. Do we have a robust business around Unreal Engine licensing, Rocket League and Fall Guys, and some other tools like the Fab Content Marketplace? But the majority of it is Fortnite because we've chosen to reinvest heavily in building what we think is the future of technology. We're spending more every year than we're making. And for a bit of time, we're spending over a billion dollars a year more than we were making, and we found that to be unsustainable, and we went through some painful layoffs at that time. And then we stabilized, and now we're spending several hundred million dollars a year more than we're making, which we can very well afford to do because we have billions of dollars in the bank thanks to a combination of the profits we made when we were a very small company with a very big game because of investment we've raised. We're not an oil pumping oil out of the ground where we discovered oil.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are able to just call up Amazon and say we need more. And there was a period of time there where Fortnite was undergoing this exponential growth and we'd find like one week we ran out of servers in Brazil during a heavy weekend of play. Next week we had an even heavier weekend of play and there were servers to handle it. Like somebody at Amazon had dropshipped millions of dollars of server hardware into Brazil and turned it on just in time for Fortnite to need it. And there are a lot of unsung heroes in that story, many of whom we've never heard of.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The trend nowadays for building online services is microservices. There's not one big server that handles all the interactions with Fortnite. There's game servers running 100 player game instances for each Patteroyale session. And then there's an account server and many instances of it all talking to a shared database. And there's hundreds of different microservices talking to each other. And so scaling is a matter of identifying what are the bottlenecks in that system and making sure that each one can scale and has enough redundancy to be able to handle the loading. Thank God for Amazon Web Services and Cloud Hosting because Epic went to 15 million concurrent users without buying any server hardware.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's immense, but they'd done such an awesome job of building the foundations that it was tractable. It was doable. If they hadn't done that, then the company would have died. Fortnite just wouldn't have been playable and the whole thing would have failed.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since 2012, we've been building online back-end systems to support player accounts and login. And all of the different systems there need to make a multiplayer game. And we'd been boning them to be scalable. And by some miracle, we built them stable enough that they were able to scale up. So the online team was responsible for patching that code, spent a year of intense work getting it to scale from like 40,000 concurrent users to 15 million concurrent users.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ship it. And that put Epic on an exponential growth curve where we went from 300 employees to 2,000 employees and went from about $100 million in revenue to billions of dollars in revenue and became the center of the gaming world at the time.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at different points, it evolved towards being kind of like a light MMO like Destiny with rather complex RPG and stat systems. And that evolved into kind of an UMO-like tower defense game. IMO only in that persistence of items and stats, which became Fortnite Save the World mode, which we launched in early 2017, and it was a moderate success. It paid its budget and we come out ahead. And then at the same time, The Battle Royale genre was booming. PubG had just come out. Tons of people at Epic were playing. They're like, oh, this would be so cool if it had Fortnite building. And so we assembled a team in a war room, you know, like 30 people in one big room. And they worked insanely hard for four weeks to build Battle Royale. So the nice thing is all the content for Fortnite had been built over the previous seven years. They had a huge library of content, but no gameplay of the type they wanted. So they had to build it all in that four weeks.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come to Epit because they want to work with the best people in the world and they artists bring a lot of different personal art aspirations and style capabilities and many of them are very multi talented and British photoreal content or highly stylized content and a lot of the best artists on Fortnite were a lot of the best artists on Gears of War to change styles but continue doing awesome work. We'd realize that Fortnite could be really mainstream and it could be a game people play for a long time and so having a more visually pleasing art style that's not as stressful as like a Call of Duty game where you're constantly like pixel hunting in a dark scene for somebody's rifle scope That was the goal so you know a few of the artists got through and defined new art style and we moved to it”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, the longer you could go, the more elaborate forts you could build, and the more survival waves you could withstand, and it would get cooler and cooler with time. And that game was in development for a very long time. We always saw the potential, just the building aspect of it was incredibly fun. But we made different pivots at different times. At one point, we moved to the current Fortnite Arts style away from kind of more of a realistic style, made it more in the Pixar vein of cool stylized characters. What was that description?”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fortnite has humble beginnings. In 2011, we just In the final days of finishing one of the Gears of Four games Want to explore ideas for new games. We had general idea that we would like to build some smaller games, online games, or to learn more about that space and not just have one single massive game in production at all times and only one. And so everybody in the company was given a week to form a team and work with whichever co-workers they wanted and build a game, using Unreal Engine. So you can actually build something pretty interesting in a week. And one of the teams built the very first version of what became Fortnite. The very first version of it had a different art style, but it had the idea at the core that you were going to build forts by day using this building system. Then Knight would come and you'd defend the forts against zombies.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think every game that has Huge number of players who play together socially as part of their entertainment lives. I think it's really getting at the core essence of the aspiration for the metaverse. And we're still in the very early days of it. I was on the internet in 1992 or so, and it was a pretty bare bones thing. I think when we look back at the state of gaming today, we'll realize that we, there's a lot further to go to get to the ultimate version of it. But I think it's all on track. And I think it was the time we released Fortnite Battle Royal and started playing together, all the people at EPIC and squads and experiencing that world that we realized that this trend was afoot and that we needed everything we could to give to bring in other creators so that anybody could pile on to the work we were doing by creating their own worlds through Fortnite Creative and UEFN.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The metaverse is an idea whose Christ goes up and down depending on who says what on what day. And some have an ability to drive it way down by opening their mouths. But ultimately, this is about multiplayer social gaming experiences. You and your friends getting together in a 3D world and having fun together in any way you want. You know, if you're playing Fortnite Battle Royale, in my view, that is capturing the essence of the metaverse. And it's especially in Fortnite. When we got Sony on board so that all players on all platforms in Fortnite could play together, could voice chat together, and could be part of a single game experience. It really took on a new nature, which was not just like a multiplayer game with heritage from Doom, but also a true social experience between you and your friends. And yeah, Fortnite Battle Royale is just one manifestation of that, another one is like Requim VR where you're standing around in VR with friends playing billiards or shooting hoops and or doing other light interviews.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too big or being too much and not trying to provide an alternate to reality, but to just provide a fun source of entertainment like the many other things that people do for fun.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I think the thing to appreciate is like game developers have just generally been on the good spirited side of things. If you look at the worst things that people do in popular video games today, it's like what Uraba Bank and GTA? It's clearly fictional and aw and fun and not serious and over the top. I think as things get more realistic, especially simulation of humans, yeah, there are some hard questions that will have to be answered there. But I think The thing that all games all person need to remember is we're here to make people's lives better by entertaining them, providing them with fun and a diversion from other things and being a part of their lives and not trying to”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, as a game developer ourselves, Epic doesn't aspire to that. We make fun games. The ultimate manifestation that we found is fun games that people play together to have fun in between work and the other things in their real lives. But as the simulations get more and more realistic and the capabilities become more and more real, I think we have to ask ourselves some hard questions about how should humanity operate in that space? What are the limits that we should go to and what are the limits we should set?”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is funny in that area, we know nothing more than cavemen knew whatsoever. We know the laws of quantum mechanics and we have computers that maybe soon more advanced than we are, but we just don't have any answers to the fundamental questions about... Life, the universe, and everything.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be interesting, but I think it's ultimately a theological question, and because it's no longer cool to deal with theology as part of science, there's not been much work on that. You can't publish results on those topics in a respected physics journal. So I think it's kind of been set aside. But it's interesting to note that the laws of quantum mechanics themselves have a place for God or souls or whatever external source of input you might want to attach to such a thing and that there's this idea of quantum wave function collapse that when we look at a quantum system evolving and perfect superposition of many possibilities and you go to observe it you actually just see a specific possibility in the multi-slit experiment the light ultimately ends up being observed going through one slit or the other and that's a place where there's this random number being injected and everything around us trillions of trillions of trillions of”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the whole idea of nested simulations, perhaps given a sufficiently advanced technology, is kind of mooded such that if you wanted to simulate another reality, you're kind of just actually creating the reality. You're doing quantum mechanical operations that would produce the same result anyway, and you're running them at full performance. So it's not really a nested simulation. It's just another thing that's happening in the universe.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of physics, then all possible evolutions of dynamical systems under those equations kind of have a physical reality. So we just are kind of a manifestation of laws of math rather than needing an actual universe around us. I don't know. I like dabbling and that philosophy. And as we get CAI becoming smarter and smarter and we get closer and closer to really capturing the full laws of physics, these questions become quite a lot more compelling.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think that these questions are necessarily unanswerable. I think I'd like to see more actual effort to ascertain what is the underlying mechanism of the universe. And I don't think we're here for no reason at all. I think the world's a pretty cool place. And the fact that we can exist and the laws of physics and especially a standard model of physics and all the parameters that lead to these atoms and life evolving and the presence of thermodynamic gradients, that's really cool. And I think it's a worthy field to study more about that holistically. I don't know. The question of are we living in a simulation ourselves always boils down to, well, if we are living in a simulation, what are they living in? Because at some point there has to be some base reality. Or, you know, one of the philosophical theories that was put forth seriously was that there is no physical reality. If you have a system of equations such as the law,”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was asked about this about 10 years ago, and I said that even if you gave us an infinite amount of computing power, we couldn't simulate realistic humans because we simply don't have the algorithms. We have no idea how to simulate human intelligence. And that was absolutely the case then, but it's not really true anymore. What we're seeing with generative text AI is not only at a level that you could say that it's actually doing a pretty good job of simulating human, at least humans at the text level, not at the emotional level yet, but at least at the level of words spoken and find more and more ways of training on more and more scenarios that you might have a very, very compelling human simulation going on in the next five years even. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I think the arc of the technology is inextricably heading in that way, and it's heading in a shocking, shocking rate.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to get shockingly close over the coming years, certainly less than 20 years. If you look at the progress, what areas where we have achieved total photorealism and what areas where we fall short, we're getting very close in all non-human interactions you see in the world walking through jungle or a city, all the lighting. It's very close and that might be just a few years away, but then all of the problems involve humans, human dialogue and intent have a much, much, much higher bar that they need to meet to satisfy our brains and convince us that they're realistic or real. And yeah, I think that's going to be the primary challenge of graphics development and simulation development over the coming decade.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The topic of boilerplate code is an interesting one because the mere distance of boilerplate code is a failure of programming language and of the idea of creating software modules, right? USAI to create a sorting function. Great. Now you have another sorting function that might be buggy alongside the million others that different people have written. It would be better to have a sorting function that's been written and tested and optimized and everybody relies on it. More modular software, I think, will actually reduce the opportunity of AI because people doing programming will largely be solving unique problems. They're actually hard problems in themselves and not just connecting other widgets.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source