Interview: Tim Sweeney and Saxs Persson on What’s Holding Back True Next-Gen Gaming

The pair is fresh off Epic’s State of Unreal presentation, which last week saw the company unveil Unreal Engine 5.2 while rolling out new creation tools and revenue sharing for Fortnite players.

Speaking with IGN in an interview conducted during the Game Developers Conference [GDC], they talked about the potential of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite [UEFN] toolset, which they liken to an evolution of the modding scene that has birthed a host of new genres over the years. They also reflected on state of gaming tech in 2023, which is so heavily driven by Epic’s Unreal Engine.

Looking toward the future

Both are planning ahead, as they so often do, with Sweeney regularly bringing up the concept of the metaverse – a term that tends to serve a punchline in gaming circles, but makes more sense when paired with Fortnite’s flourishing ecosystem. Epic’s latest developments, which empower Fortnite’s creators while giving them a share of revenue, are intended to make good on the common sentiment that Epic’s battle royale is the real metaverse, though Persson cautions against calling it a “platform.”

“It’s not a technology platform; it’s a place people go to get entertained and we need to entertain them, and more and more of them. That’s the challenge: how do we find a way for people that don’t care about shooters? They should be welcome too…The real challenge for us is, in the maturation of Fortnite, is to embrace that we are much broader than just the day one shooter that was launched,” Persson says.

Epic recently announced a new revenue-sharing plan, setting aside 40% of the game’s net revenue for creators. Payments are based on overall engagement with custom islands and other creations. It’s a major change that seeks to push Fortnite further beyond the bounds of the battle royale genre.

But even as Epic looks to grow Fortnite’s ecosystem, fans are looking back with growing nostalgia for the original battle royale. When the UEFN tools became available, players immediately scrambled to remake the original Fortnite Battle Royale as it existed in 2018. Asked for his reaction to this development, Sweeney said “we have nostalgia for it too,” but that for him it “immediately highlighted a topic about intellectual property.”

“You can’t just remake a Call of Duty map. And we were digging into what was happening with Fortnite Chapter One map, and we decided that was a really cool thing to happen because it was for Fortnite, so we gave permission to do it on a non-monetized basis. But I think the real innovations here have got to be an original new work, right?” Sweeney said. “Because some of these things… Works of nostalgia are cool, but most of the time they’re going to be other people’s work and they’re likely not going to give permission. And we really urge everybody to think about what can we really do to create news genres or games and really very original things”

Persson added that “nostalgia is often the first thing that comes to people’s mind when you get capabilities,” but that Epic “wants people to make their own [stories and characters].”

What they really want is something like what happened with Defense of the Ancients, better-known as DOTA, which was popularized by Warcraft 3’s map editor scene, or PlayerUnknown’s Battleground [PUBG], which sprang out of Arma 3. In fact, Sweeney says he recently ran into PUBG creator Brendan Greene at GDC, whom he credits with “really reinvigorating shooters.”

The problem, Sweeney claims, was that map developers on platforms like Warcraft 3 couldn’t easily profit on their creations, leading them to create standalone games elsewhere. It’s a problem that he claims Fortnite’s newly updated revenue-sharing system will solve.

“The tragic thing that happened there was, in order to succeed on their own scale, they had to leave their own ecosystem behind and build a new one. That’s a failure we don’t want to have in our system. We would love to be able to grow Fortnite and the financial opportunities for all creators, to the point where if you build a really successful game, you don’t have to leave and build it as a standalone game in Unreal Engine,” Sweeney says. “Now, you’ll be able to, and we’ll support you in doing that if that’s what you want. We really want the best opportunity to stay in this as we build the open metaverse together.”

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