
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney changed video game industry - doppp
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article238221784.html
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dleslie
Fortnite doesn't do anything particularly new; but it does a lot of existing
things well, and combines some that haven't been combined well in the past.

I'd like to stake out two wins that define Fortnite's success, to me:

1\. It's on every platform that matters, with crossplay.

That's hitherto largely unheard of for games; which is mostly a result of
budget restrictions, middleware licensing, and partner contract limitations.

2\. Its store combines time-limited access, games of chance, and vanity. You
have to keep playing and keep spending in order to look how you want, and how
you want to look is coerced to be ever changing by the continual churn of the
store.

~~~
Mirioron
While Fortnite might not do anything new as a business, as a game, on the
technical side, it does offer new stuff. Fortnite supports large worlds with
lots of players in fast-paced multiplayer. To make matters even more
complicated, the players can build large structures in real time. The game
also features a large amount of interactable objects with no loading screens.
You could say that games like Minecraft do that, but those are graphically
much simpler.

~~~
cdubzzz
I haven’t played Fortnite, but this sounds (at least partially) like
Battlefield 2 about 15 years ago — huge 64 player maps with fast paced action.
I remember at the time being amazed that I could fly jets and helicopters,
drive tanks, or just scurry around on foot all in one game. I played many,
many hours of that.

The base game did not have building or many interactive objects but there were
a couple of custom mods that did.

~~~
Mirioron
I get where you're coming from and it is an evolution in it, but Fortnite does
have more players per map. And the map is a lot bigger. The interactable
objects and building is what make it quite different technically.

With games where building stuff is just tacked on, you'll find that
performance drops _very_ quickly after just a few hundred objects are placed.
This limits building significantly. The interactive objects point is also
something that wasn't too common until recently (past few years). Skyrim had
loading screens to go indoors so that they could have a lot of interactable
objects indoors. If you went and put the objects from a few houses together
then the game's performance dropped significantly.

~~~
mattmanser
You are a bit out-of-touch in games if you're comparing a 9 year old game like
Skyrim when saying Fortnite is revolutionary.

You missed the Day-Z mod for Arma 3 (released 2013), H1Z1 popularised the
battle royale genre before shooting itself in the foot, and of course PUBG
picking up the baton.

As for building in multiplayer you've got years of work before, putting aside
Minecraft, you've got 7 Days to Die, Rust, Arc Survival:Evolved.

Fortnite's not even got particularly complicated building compared to many of
those other games.

The article is total dross, Epic took an existing genre and slapped Valve's
already proven monetization strategy on it. Other companies were already
copying Valve before Epic. Both DOTA + TF2 have been free and make money from
hats for over a decade! There's been jokes about it for years[1].

I'm not saying that Fortnite's not good, I'm not saying it's not a massive
success, but revolutionary or innovative it was not. This puff piece is
obviously written by a someone who hasn't got a clue about games.

You can even argue that they took a failed game's assets and cobbled together
a battle-royale shooter and, almost accidentally, became massively successful.
Right place, right time. Overwatch did much the same thing. Several other
companies failed doing exactly the same thing (e.g. Battleborn, H1Z1)

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/12kirq/valve_market...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/12kirq/valve_marketing_approach/)

~~~
sushid
Valve itself hasn’t figured out it’s money making strategy in games so I’m not
sure why you’re patting them on the back for supposedly cracking the code that
Epic supposedly copied (see: Artifact). They’ve had to also backtrack on their
item auctioning ambitions due to money laundering issues with CSGO keys.

And games like League (not sure of Dota 2) and TF2 actually give you a slight
advantage if you’re willing to pay. In TF2 different items will allow you to
perform different attacks if you pay for them and MOBAs allow you to always
play certain heroes if you pay for them. This is simply NOT the case with
Fortnite and is more similar to Overwatch or CSGO in that regard.

In-game purchases are also different than standard loot boxes seen in other
games as others have already mentioned. I won’t repeat myself but the key
takeaway is 1) the game is 3rd person view so the perceived value of the
cosmetic items is higher to the purchaser and 2) they’re NOT loot boxes.

I can really go on about their battle pass implementation vs the industry
standard expansion packs or season passes (that games like COD MW or Apex have
copied) or how they continue to innovate and significantly change the gameplay
but your mind seems to have been made.

If someone comes in and combines the traits other games have but does it
better than all of the rest while continuing to innovate, it is really just
copying someone else’s strategy? Games like Arma 3 required mods and ones that
“borrowed” the gameplay like PUBG and H1Z1 are clunky as hell to play and go
for realism vs cartoon violence that Fortnite favors. Those three games are
essentially interchangeable unlike Fortnite, which runs really well on
everything but really just the Switch.

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hotwire
Thanks for ZZT Tim. That game changed my life when I was starting high school
in the mid 90s; it was one of the ways I learnt to really have fun with
computers as well as to program and make my own games.

Also, Unreal Tournament still holds a very fond place in my heart. I don't
play games these days, but on the very rare occasion I feel like it, that's
one of my major go-tos, just for the nostalgia of Facing-Worlds ;)

~~~
caseyamcl
Seconded re ZZT. I remember learning HTML so that I could build my first
website, which was a ZZT fan website (there were more). That game literally
launched my career as a programmer.

My brother and I would sit at the computer for hours building elaborate 8-bit
worlds fueled mainly by our imaginations.

When I was 8 years old, I remember participating in a contest for which Tim
Sweeney wrote me a personal letter. I’ve saved the letter. Here’s the link if
you’re interested:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/12o0qgg2y1uzd30/1990-91%20album%20...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/12o0qgg2y1uzd30/1990-91%20album%2090.JPG?dl=0)

Thanks, Tim! It’s not every CEO who goes out of his way to encourage a kid.
You inspired me.

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cloudking
Fortnite is similar to the multiverse in Ready Player One. There have been
multiple cross-over events in game, such as:

1) Live DJ show
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/47118989](https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/47118989)

2) Avengers Endgame promo
[https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516452/fortnite-
avenger...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516452/fortnite-avengers-end-
game-marvel-superheroes-crossover-event-infinity-war)

3) Star Wars exclusive trailer [https://www.wired.com/story/fortnite-star-
wars/](https://www.wired.com/story/fortnite-star-wars/)

It's proving it is more than just a battle royale shooter..

~~~
smackay
I think the human race will rue the day it took the first step down the path
to a metaverse. Fortnite has already show millions of parents how it's
impossible to get their kids to disengage from a game which carries a high
social cost of not being involved. The incentives are weighed heavily against
individual choice and that can only lead to new forms of slavery.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
Just another darwinian filter. People who overinvest in the metaverse will
select themselves out of the gene pool.

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wyldfire
> Sweeney isn’t quick to take all the credit for the mostly positive attention
> “Fortnite” has attracted, telling The Wall Street Journal his employees
> designed and programmed the game, not himself. Whatever his role, however,
> Epic has grown leaps and bounds under his leadership.

If it was his decision to make it free-to-play-but-not-pay-to-win, then a good
deal of credit is his.

~~~
nolok
A more important decision was to take Fortnite, the paid co-op against zombie
game, and add a free battle royale mode to it

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coderunner
Tim Sweeney has been extremely kind and generous with his time in all my
interactions with him dating back about 10 years ago. I wish him all the
success in the world.

Him and Epic are getting a lot of hate on Reddit because of the exclusivity
deals, but as a developer, I appreciate Epic trying to get the dev/store
revenue split more generous for developers. Valve does the standard 70/30, and
Epic is doing 88/12 I believe.

~~~
politelemon
It isn't just the exclusivity deals, but the manner in which those deals are
brought about, often with release promises broken, releases yanked and backers
being outright lied to; I do not wish any success to such a business. As a
gamer I don't like what the PC gaming landscape is turning into with Epic
Games at the forefront of it. As a developer I would expect to consider a
wider scope than a revenue split, a big part of which is an ecosystem,
platform and tooling.

~~~
coderunner
All the extras like platform and tooling is nice, but don't mean anything if
you can't support yourself as a dev. Better revenue sharing for devs is one
thing that can make a big difference, provided the user base is there. Either
it'll be there on Epic one day or Valve will match the revenue share of Epic
or both. I'm all for having a competitive option in this space.

I don't think it's entirely Epic's fault about the releases being yanked from
Steam or crowd sourced titles making changes. The developers had to sign the
contract with Epic and Valve decided that they're too big to fail (which they
might be by now) so they didn't try anything to counter.

The one thing that does suck from the gamer perspective is having to use
multiple stores. As a dev and gamer I'm okay with this however as it helps the
dev community at large in the long run if a viable store contender ever
arrives.

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archie2
Personally, I think the best thing to come out of Fortnite is the revenue
stream making it feasible for Epic to create its own game store and compete
with Valve/Steam.

Steam had been pretty stagnant for years until EGS came along and started
poaching exclusives (opinions of this tactic aside) and got them to finally
improve their platform.

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thrower123
The main thing that Epic appears to be doing is taking a big pile of Chinese
money and using it to bribe users with free games as a carrot to go along with
their stick of exclusivity agreements.

Even that isn't really novel; EA's Origin store did the same thing, until they
gave up on trying.

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nottorp
Damage control campaign to restore some of his rep after the Tencent deal?

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cosmiccatnap
Change doesn't always mean for the better... I think there is a desire to hate
on steam and people point to fortnite as the creator of the epic store but
steam has provided a reliable and secure platform for literally a decade plus
while the epic store has had multiple breaches just this year alone and
crashes quite often. The game itself is ok, it exists only because pubg
couldn't fix their game though, that and the ability to play it across systems
at any age, but to say it's a great game is kind of like saying McDonald's is
a great resturant in that it's biggest appeal is that it's cheap, everywhere,
and consistent...but that does not make it a great game in ant sense it just
makes it a convenient game with market appeal and a payment system that works
by getting thousands off of a hand full of people with expendable incomes or a
serious problem.

Tl;DR he did alot of things but I don't really think he changed the game
industry any more than league of legends or pubg.

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shmerl
What's going on with parallelized Vulkan renderer in UE? The Trello item was
"archived": [https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-
linux](https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux)

Surprising that Google didn't back that effort with the whole Stadia push.

And there is still no Linux support in Epic store.

~~~
philliphaydon
Epic store is currently the turd of all game clients. I have a 1gbit
connection and can download a 70gb game in 10m on steam. It took me 3 hours to
download borderlands 3. I then copied it to my wife’s computer and epic...
REDOWNLOADED ALL 63gb AGAIN... over 3 hours...

I wish epic game store didn’t exist.

~~~
yedpodtrzitko
I can remember how Steam was getting shit in its early versions too. But if
they would wait with the release until the product would be complete/perfect,
they would never ship it. So taking the approach of Minimum Viable Product +
adding features as they go feels reasonable to me, even for the price of
imperfection (a temporarily one, hopefully).

~~~
sudosysgen
When steam came out, there wasn't scalable cloud infrastructure, they didn't
have literally billions of dollars, are there weren't any real expectations.
Epic games pretty much has no excuse.

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moksly
I don’t like arena games, but they have been popular for a while. From what
you can’t avoid picking up from general gaming media, it’s a genre that has
been plagued by companies who offered horrible support and user experienced.

It seems like Epic took the best bits of a popular formula and added a decent
customer experience to it. Which, if I’m right, is a really nice message.

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jokoon
I wish PUBG would not be so slow.

~~~
spats1990
I know exactly what you mean, but it's okay. I don't know if there will be a
game to fulfil people's dreams of "exactly like pubg but better" for a long
time, if ever. Because it was made mostly by people who I believe had never
made an FPS/shooter before, it has a lot of problems, but the people were also
able to make exactly what they wanted. A lot of the things about pubg that
people think are bad, like how "sluggish" movement feels compared to say,
csgo, were deliberate design decisions. It takes a really long time to get
anywhere near competent even if you're already used to big multiplayer FPSs.
E.g. you have to pick up a weapon then pick up ammo then load it. Anyone who
wants to clone PUBG will most likely end up making something with a less
brutal learning curve because it takes so much time and resources to make such
a thing. In short I think such an idiosyncratic, buggy game with such brutally
unforgiving gameplay, massive maps, and realistic bullet physics/weapons
becoming a hit was a one off. I tried Apex Legends but it is nothing like pubg
really. Even since I was a kid, I haven't played anything that sucked me in
like PUBG did in 2017. It's so realistic, variable, and engrossing, and it
doesn't hold the player's hand at all. Just my opinion.

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tracerbulletx
Agreed, but because of Unreal Engine's licensing model change.

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fredsanford
I stopped reading about 3 paragraphs in when my spidey sense detected a press
release...

FWIW

