Epic Games has reached a proposed settlement with a former contractor who it accused in March of being notorious Fortnite leaker AdiraFN. The agreement will see the defendant permanently barred from "possessing, accessing, using, or disclosing any of Epic’s confidential or trade secret information," or helping anyone else do the same.

Epic filed the action in March, alleging that AdiraFN, who had revealed information on numerous Fortnite collaborations before they were announced, was in fact former Fortnite contractor Hayden Cohen. Cohen had signed an NDA as required by the terms of his agreement, but then did exactly the opposite of what he promised to do and, Epic alleged, "repeatedly misappropriated Epic's trade secret information and broadcasted it publicly through his anonymous social media accounts on X (formerly Twitter) and Discord."

Epic confirmed the proposed settlement in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "We took legal action against the former contractor who repeatedly leaked confidential partner IP and trade secrets that they received while working with Epic," Epic Games director of corporate communications Natalie Munoz said. "We’ve asked the court to approve the stipulated injunction to ensure they cannot publish or share Epic's confidential information again."

As noted by Game File, the proposed settlement notes only the injunction against Cohen, and makes no mention of any monetary penalty, even though Epic's initial complaint sought "compensatory damages, including actual loss and unjust enrichment," plus legal fees and other expenses. Epic has previously pursued and won financial awards against Fortnite cheaters, but Munoz said the company had nothing further to share. The proposed settlement must now be approved by a judge.

Former Unreal Engine director and longtime Epic engineer Nicholas Penwarden is stepping away from the company after 15 years.

"I'm proud of the part I was able to play in Unreal Engine's evolution from UE3 to where it stands today," the Epic veteran wrote in a post yesterday on LinkedIn "It's remarkable to see how far the engine has come, how much the community has grown, and all the incredible games and experiences developers have created with it."

Penwarden has been one of the faces of Unreal Engine for a while, popping up every now and then to give talks and take questions on the technical particulars of its tools and tout just how many complicated triangles devs will be able to insert into, well, whatever they like. In his time at Tim Sweeney's house, he's been an engine and graphics programmer on UE4, director of engineering on UE as a whole, VP of engineering, and engineering fellow.

He is not the only Unreal Engine bigwig to hang up his spurs in recent months. UE lost its former "chief evangelist", Sjoerd De Jong, when he left the company a few weeks ago after a 12-year stint.

"The games industry has always been an industry where change is relentless and inevitable, but it feels like we are reaching a pivotal point now and a potent mix of things," De Jong wrote.

Penwarden did not write anything quite so ominous. "Most of all, I'm proud of the team we built: the most talented, passionate, and extraordinary group of engine and game developers I could have hoped to work alongside. I wish Epic and the team all the best, and I look forward to seeing what they build next!" he concluded.

Nevertheless, it's another high-level departure from an Unreal Engine old-hand, just as Epic gears up for its 2027 release of Unreal Engine 6. Rather than focusing on new graphical achievements, Epic is positioning UE6 as a unifying force for game developers that will enable "content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games."

At Unreal Fest in Chicago last week, Epic unveiled its masterplan for Unreal Engine 6. Rather than the usual talk of fancy new rendering features, the company is pitching the next version of its industry-standard game engine as a great unifier that will enable "content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines" and speed up development with AI integration.

After his closing keynote, in which he outlined his hands-across-the-digital-ocean vision, I spoke with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to get more clarity and insight into Epic's vision for the future of gaming.

This interview has been edited for length, and arranged by topic.

Epic's vision for "Team Open"

In his Unreal Fest closing remarks (embedded below), Sweeney said that Unreal Engine developers can take on the likes of Roblox by connecting their games' social systems and economies. We started our conversation there.

PC Gamer: I understand your diagnosis of the games industry's problem, that it can't keep putting out $400 million AAA games that flame out, but I'm less certain about your "Team Open" solution, where games and their economies are interconnected. It reminded me a little of the blockchain promise, with people saying you'd be able to take a sword from a Ubisoft game into an EA game. But nobody actually wants that, it doesn't solve a problem for the player. What does games-within-games and an interconnected system deliver for the player?

Tim Sweeney: Well, the main benefits are for the player. Let's start with social. It's a lot more broken than most people realize. If you're only playing one game with your friends all the time, then A) you're in a situation that works fine, and B) you've self-selected friends that happen to work with that platform and social ecosystem. In the old days, before Sony and Microsoft talked to each other, that was you playing with all people on the same console platform, and today it's across consoles.

But if you go from Fortnite to Apex Legends, you can't bring your existing friend connections over, if they're across platforms. Right now, there's different completely separated social ecosystems on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Steam on PC, and then bespoke developers' social ecosystems. Epic has one, and it's awesome, and it's open to third-party developers. Most publishers have their own. EA has one, and Activision has one, and so on.

It makes it really, really hard to switch from one game to another. So, when a new publisher comes out with a game and you go play it, your friends are several steps away from it. If it's a paid game, you have to buy the game. If it's a free game, you can just download it, but now you have to find them. You have to message them somewhere else and say, 'Hey, here's my name on Epic. It's not my name on, you know, EA's system.' And there's just a massive amount of friction there. The whole engine of growth of social in the world today, looking at social networks and games, is around users being easily able to connect with their friends, and that's broken. So, call number one is for all of the major publishers and platform operators to get together and connect our systems.

But do you think that's realistic? Microsoft and Sony each want to carve out their own world. They don't want to share. How do you dissolve that friction?

I think you will find that the attitudes that they had, where they each wanted to conquer the world on their own in good times, is replaced by a more pragmatic attitude in these darker times in the whole game industry, in which everybody should come to the realization that the value of connecting is higher for everybody than remaining separate.

It's now clear that nobody's going to end up with an absolute monopoly over gaming. Sony is not going to have one, Microsoft's not going to have one, Valve's not going to have one, Apple's not going to have one, Google is not going to have one. So the thesis to connect becomes ever stronger, and in these down times when companies are going through this massive turmoil, they would much rather connect than downsize their companies ever further.

[Above: Tim Sweeney's closing remarks at Unreal Fest 2026.]

So is it less about games sharing content, and more an infrastructure issue?

Well, there are two levels. The low level social substrate is actually the easier problem. It turns out all these social ecosystems use the exact same low-level protocol for voice chat, and most of them use the same protocol for text chat, and so we have different servers with different names for our players, but you know that the tech industry had this problem in the 1980s, if you're old enough to remember it.

I actually am, I turn 50 this year.

Yeah, so every company had their own email system—employees could talk to each other, and you know, they're tech companies with computers back then, this newfangled technology, but they couldn't talk across companies, and so they got together and decided on a standard for email address formats. They decided to put an at sign at the end of their names, and then the domain name, and that's what we need in gaming. We need Tim@Epic to be a person who's distinct from Tim@Xbox and Tim@Sony and Tim@Steam and Tim at everywhere else.

Can I be Tim2@Xbox? If you take Tim1.

[Laughs.] And these problems are solvable, they're solvable technically, because we're very close to having the technical standards we need for it, and they're also solvable from the point of view of safety and moderation.

When the game industry was under pressure from Congress to ensure that kids weren't accessing games meant for adults, the ratings bodies were formed, and ESRB, and a bunch of others internationally each got together and set standards for game ratings, and the same thing can happen for social ecosystems in order to ensure that there's a way for everybody to connect and the players to all be safe.

The Valve question

Later in our discussion, we returned to the topic of Epic's plan to recruit Unreal Engine developers and platform holders into "Team Open."

PC Gamer: Are you currently speaking to other major industry players, and have they expressed interest in coming on this journey with you?

Tim Sweeney: Well, I can't make any announcements, but we've pitched this from time to time over the past few years, and recently, with all the challenges in the industry, there's shockingly more interest now than there has ever been in the past. I think there's enough momentum that enough companies could get together and see that every one of them will be more profitable and better off, and every game developer participating will be able to make better games that are better for players if we do this, so I think we're hitting a point where the industry's in enough pain that a solution like this is is a positive for everyone. I think that's what it takes.

Is there a version of Team Open where it's you and Valve together, and you've agreed on a set of standards? I'm sure you'd have your differences still, but could you ever see them coming aboard with something like this?

Oh, absolutely. We want nothing more than to interoperate with every company willing and to connect all the gamers.

But do you think Valve can be convinced of that? They've got a nice thing going.

We'll see. They have a nice thing going on on PC, but they reach what percentage of the PC audience? You know, they don't reach any of the Fortnite [audience], they don't have Fortnite and Riot's games and Genshin Impact, and many of the top games in the industry on Steam.

They're missing out on a lot of opportunity that I think they could have if they took the more forward-looking, open view that Epic has taken, and Microsoft has taken. Microsoft Store charges 12%—really good deal. Google's now giving all developers a better deal, and has some really cool things coming for the future.

So, I think there really is the opportunity to form Team Open. Steam's got a pretty sweet business—a lot of gamers love Steam—but imagine if you could have Steam on all of the platforms? What if you could have it on iPhone, what if you could have it on Android? What if they carried a lot of games?

What people love about Steam, I think, is the convenience and ubiquity of it. They built up a big platform over a long period of time. When you use your own platform, because I know you guys have been talking about the redesign and the new features, what are your own frustrations or things that you think are most critical to get to that same level of ubiquity and convenience?

Oh, with the Epic Game Store?

Yeah, when you're on it and clicking around, what bugs you, Tim Sweeney?

Oh, the slowness of the thing is a source of frustration. As we talked about in the show, we're working on a complete revamp of it, the program that runs on your machine to make it much, much snappier and more efficient. I've been fooling around with it, it's starting to feel really good.

Also, having much better social features. Steam really got this right on PC, in which you can start a chat with some friends in the Steam client, you can go play a game together, you all start up into the game, your voice chat continues uninterrupted from place to place, and so having that across our store, all of our first party games, and more and more third party games, that are distributed by the store, is going to be a big thing.

But the Epic Games infrastructure has a superpower that Steam and others—Xbox, PlayStation, Switch—don't have, which is that all of our players can talk to each other across all platforms when you're in any of our products on any of those platforms. So you can have a PC player on our launcher together with a console player who's in Fortnite, together with a mobile player who's got the Epic Games app installed—we have an app that's like the Steamworks app for PC, for mobile devices—and it's a magical experience. You can really easily connect up with all of your friends across all platforms and get in a game. Just imagine how much better this would be if it worked universally across all games and ecosystems. I think everybody would benefit.

I wouldn't have to maintain such a big OnePassword account, that's for sure.

Yeah, every company wanting to become its own mini gatekeeper has played out. It's just annoying people now, and joining forces would be better than everybody trying to go their own way.

Public opposition to AI

During the Unreal Fest keynote, Epic demoed new AI integrations in Unreal Engine. While parts of the games industry herald AI as a boon for productivity, many gamers and developers remain fiercely negative about the tech's impact.

PC Gamer: A large cohort of gamers now react very negatively to any mention of AI being used for game development. Everyone was super excited about Crazy Taxi at the Microsoft showcase, but then 10 minutes later after the AI disclosure was noticed, the attitude completely flipped. Do you feel like you have a PR issue to solve with AI?

Tim Sweeney: Well, it's not a PR question, it's just a question of adoption of tools, because there's nothing like a prompt-to-game solution on the horizon that anybody expects will work. All we have right now is acceleration of programming using these coding assistant tools. They make programmers more productive for a lot of things—like it's a lot better. Instead of spending an hour hunting down a bug, Claude Code might spend an hour hunting it down for you, and then you spend five minutes fixing it.

I think what people really dislike is the creation of art assets, that they see as being piggybacked off other people's work without credit. That to me is the PR problem, the creative side of things. I know you said you can't prompt the game, but you can prompt the art assets.

It doesn't sound like a PR problem. You're not going to create good art by giving a computer a prompt and having it spit out a mesh. You're going to get good art by an awesome artist using all of the tools available to make it.

If you look at just say, 2021, a year before AI was plausibly helpful at anything at all, to make a mesh you would start in Blender or 3D Studio Max. You build out a rough 3D model, you start texturing it, and then if you like the shape of it, you would go in and add a lot of detail in the 3D modeling phase, and then refine the texture. And you'd have a really elaborate creation process, and then you'd hand it off to a rigger who would do a whole lot of rigging work, and you'd spend an enormous amount of time creating an art asset.

Only a fraction of that time is the artist really injecting the creativity. A lot of it is just drudge work of moving polygons and vertices around to make the thing work. I think the main usage case that we've seen within Epic, and we're seeing developers actually find gainful, is using AI to reduce the drudge work. The software is still architected by software architects, and they're still writing the important parts of code, and artists are still coming up with a creative vision for characters, deciding between concepts.

And now you look at everything that we've gained in the industry since 2021 and there are a lot of really hopeful productivity-gaining tools, and building on other people's ideas has always been a part of it. Every concept artist in every game always looks to all kinds of references for inspiration. Every artist has their shelf full of art books which they're constantly looking through to see what directions they might be able to take things, as well as anatomy references and other things that they use to hone their work. The fact that they can use AI as another source of inspiration, we talked about our concept pipeline in a recent video we released, but some of the concepting inspiration will come from AI tools. The AI tools have learned from the same sources that artists have on their bookshelf.

[Above: Epic recently shared its art concepting process, which involves the use of AI image generators.]

The reason I say it's a PR problem is because I think that argument has not been successfully made to gamers. They regard it as, "The LLM was created by using an enormous trawl of stuff, permission was not asked for the trawl of stuff," therefore, they have a problem with it. Look at Larian, they had to immediately walk back the thing you're describing, which is using it to reduce drudge work and doing some early concepting. To me, perfectly acceptable, but that's not how it was received. That's why I think it's a PR problem.

I think it's impossible to reconcile the idea that developers shouldn't use productivity-improving tools with the state of the industry, where you have so many multi-hundred million dollar projects making multi-tens of millions of dollars in revenue. We've got to find greater means of efficiency.

It's unfortunate that so many of the AI companies operating early on had such shitty practices, you know, like one of them was found by a court to have gone off to a BitTorrent site and downloaded terabytes of data, that's ridiculous, they shouldn't do that. But the industry is, over time, coming up with better practices, and you're seeing efforts to use thoroughly licensed content bases for future AI models. Adobe is not my favorite company in the world, but they actually went through a process to ensure the provenance of AI training data, and that can be done. I think there are legitimate ways that will be done to make things better. [According to an official video, Epic artists use Nano Banana and GPT Image, which do not advertise stringent control over training data.]

But I think game developers must find ways to build better games more efficiently. Otherwise, the economics of it just collapse, and this has been the case in the whole history of game development. Fortunately, the game business started out really small. You had tens of millions of gamers, and with every generation, the hardware got more capable, the cost of making games went up, but also the player base doubled, tripled, quadrupled with a lot of these generations. If you look at the history from the 1980s to present, you really have a lot of doublings along that way. Now, everybody in the world plays games, and so the market is not going to grow. An opportunity for developers isn't going to grow by finding more gamers to come in and play games, it's got to be by building better games for the existing gamers. These tools help us with that.

The AAA challenge and Steam's AI disclosures

Here we discuss Sweeney's diagnosis of AAA game development's problems before returning to the topic of AI and his opposition to Steam's disclosure requirement.

PC Gamer: Do you think the AAA problem is resolvable in such a way that players continue to get the experiences they expect without the industry collapsing? I'm not quite sure how we get from the situation of Concord, which took hundreds of millions to develop and flopped immediately, to a healthy place just with more efficient tools.

Tim Sweeney: Well, let's set aside the one-off examples. Sometimes games fail just because they're not good games and didn't have what the market wanted. There's no accounting for that, and tools aren't going to help there, but the much larger structural problem in the business is that it's increasingly hard for developers to compete with the bigger games because of cost issues.

If you look at a game like Fortnite, we've been improving the game constantly with a large development team for nine years now. Epic has invested billions of dollars into building an awesome content base, not only for ourselves but for creators, too. Now imagine being a startup which has 100 people, investor funding, and you have to launch a game that can appeal to a gamer audience that also has Fortnite available.

So these tools are a great equalizer, and if gamers deny those developers access to the best tools that enable them to make the best games most efficiently, all of those companies will die, because they just can't compete. There will always be the exceptions. Once in a while, a small team comes along with an amazing creative breakthrough, and it succeeds. But overall, economically, it's not going to happen. If these teams can't use better tools more efficiently, then they're never going to be able to compete with the incumbents.

And by better tools, you're thinking of the Unreal Engine suite, or AI specifically?

Well, we've always aimed to build better tools, right? The productivity of game developers has gone up radically with a lot of the different generational changes we've gone through. At a given level of quality, we've been able to achieve an order of magnitude gains at different points in Unreal Engine history, like Nanite versus hand modeling of super high polygon geometry is a breakthrough.

I think it's a wonderful superpower now that you can go into an engine and tell it what you want, and have it do a large part of the work to get you to a starting point. You want to build a city, tell it to build you a city, tell it what kind of city you want, and then you get a starting point, and you can go and apply all of your design aesthetic to it to make it better. And you can then, instead of modeling out every window and every door to have it improve those parts of the content. I think that's a superpower. If it weren't for some AI companies ripping off people's content, I think we should be praising that as a tool for making it easier for people to create.

[The AI tools for which Unreal Engine integrations will be available are some of the same that have been accused of copyright infringement, such as Google's Gemini.]

As a kid, I was playing on the Amstrad CPC computer, and I remember thinking that games are going to keep looking better, because technology keeps getting better, and maybe the worlds would even look real someday. But even as a child, I wondered how anyone was possibly going to design all the flower pots and the telephones and the chairs in the real world. And I feel like we're here, and there's no answer yet. I mean, maybe AI and better tools are the answer the industry has come up with.

Yeah, but look at the suite of solutions we have to do that today. One is you can model it by hand, it's massively expensive. You might spend a million dollars modeling a flower pot to get the most detailed flower pot creatable by humanity, but you could also scan a flower pot with a very high resolution camera. You buy that camera once and then you scan a lot of objects, and you get a flower pot pretty economically, and it's just as perfect.

Or pay for a flower pot from a library.

Yeah, that's right. You go to a library, like the Fab Content site or the Unity Asset Store, and buy a flower pot there. And then there's a whole economy around creating content. That's nice, but it gives you a fixed set of objects, and scanning only works for things that already exist in the world—you can't scan an alien. And the content libraries only work for things that have been created. If you have a game with a really unique look and feel, you need unique content, and AI is a path to getting that with a degree of economy that makes it competitive with Fab or scanning or other things, but works for a larger category of objects.

The value is not in creating a perfect flower pot. It will be an absolute folly to spend a million dollars creating a flower pot, because the real value is in building the scene and building the game and building the narrative, and the gameplay, and making it awesome, and giving it a unique feel, and making something that appeals to gamers. So it's unfortunate we're in this situation. It's unfortunate that so many developers now are put into this position. If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you've got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game.

I think it's really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn't do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.

Scarlet Letters is a great description of that system.

If you look broadly across games, at one point we introduced car interoperability. You buy a car in Fortnite and it works in Rocket League, and for cars that we ported to Fortnite, since they're on different engines, UE3 and UE5, if you bought certain cars in Rocket League then you had them in Fortnite, that's really valuable to players. It means that now this purchase you make in one place is valuable elsewhere, and it's totally not for everything. And in particular, if you have an RPG around upgrading your swords, you don't want that to be interfered with by a game that gives you an AK, and now you're coming into this medieval game with an AK, that's not what this is about.

This is about recognizing that a large part of the digital economy, the majority of it now across all gaming, is buying things in games rather than buying games, and the value of buying these things is higher the more places they interoperate. And some of these things are gameplay affecting game-specific things, but an awful lot of them, the majority of Fortnite spending, for example, is on items which don't affect gameplay but have cosmetic appearance value. There's your outfit and your emotes, so you can do your cool dances, and they're your back wings, and now cars.

I know that Bungie wrestled with the transition between Destiny 1 and 2, where people were very upset about all their stuff being scattered to the wind.

Yeah, and that's unfortunate. You can understand how upgrading through different generations of technology they fell into that trap, whereas a game like Fortnite, operating continually, has avoided it. But I think the future would be much brighter for everybody if we could have an economy where everybody participates together.

What does all this mean for singleplayer games?

It might make sense to put Rocket League cars in Fortnite, but they'd feel a bit out of place in The Witcher 4. Here we discuss the limits of interconnectedness.

PC Gamer: In that interconnected Team Open world, is there still room for discrete experiences that aren't joined up with other games?

Tim Sweeney: I think you can always build a bespoke game that has a unique system and economy, especially for in-game items and things that are completely specific to that game design. Yeah, you don't want interoperability to mash up games that were not designed for it, but to the extent that games have cosmetic items, outfits, and emotes, and things like that, it would just be more valuable if they all worked everywhere

So, like a universal protocol.

Yeah, exactly that, and that's exactly what we're working to do with Unreal Engine 6. Essentially, we're moving all of the systems that we built over time from Fortnite up to the engine level, so that every team can use them. They can not only ship a game that supports Fortnite outfits and Fortnite account linking, and so on, but they can participate in the economy by having their own item shops and things participate, and having those things work in Fortnite.

Life is pretty good if you're Fortnite or Roblox right now. You have a huge player base, they've been playing for many years, they have confidence that the game's going to be around for the long term, and if they buy something, that it's going to be of lasting value to them. But it's so much harder for a new game that comes along. Imagine a new multiplayer game trying to fund itself by selling in-game items. Users are going to wonder, am I going to be here next week, next month, can I get my friends to play? Will my friends leave? It's going to be much harder to make those purchasing decisions, but if you know that that stuff will work everywhere, then new games become way, way more attractive, and they actually become a source of exclusive items that you can't get elsewhere.

But it wouldn't work everywhere, right? Some games would be more connected than others, so it wouldn't really be universal, like email is universal, it would be Balkanized.

Well, it doesn't have to be. I think the point is not every type of item makes sense in every game, but there's massive overlap. Like, just pick two random games and ask which of their things might interact properly, like Fortnite and Call of Duty. You might not want Peely and Call of Duty, so maybe not outfits. Emotes? Is there any reason that a dance in one place shouldn't work in the other?

The health of Fortnite and Epic

During our discussion, Sweeney also briefly touched on the current health of Fortnite. Epic laid off over 1,000 employees earlier this year, citing a decline in Fortnite's popularity as a cause.

PC Gamer: You said that Fortnite is in a good place, but it was this year that Epic had tough times with layoffs. Are you past that period now?

Tim Sweeney: Yeah, you know, we went through several Fortnite seasons that were good but not great, and when we see that, we see compounding losses of players. And then we had two Fortnite seasons that were really good, and we've seen compounding growth in players.

Qualitatively, you felt there have been seasons that were not great?

Yep. There's large game industry trends that are reshaping lots of things, but more than anything else, it's simply the quality and execution of the team and the game, and the fun that people are having in it, that determines the ups and downs.

And it's hard for every game developer. I feel like Epic having gone through a layoff that was incredibly painful, but most game developers have it worse right now, and that's the sad thing about the game industry. So, Epic, our history has always been to build games and tools, shape them by what we learn we need, and what we learn makes us most productive, and then to share them with the world, so everybody can do their best work with it. And that's what we're trying to do here, and we think the solutions are partly tools and technology, but also partly the infrastructure surrounding it, the social and economic interoperability, and we think that there are better days ahead if we can link these things up.

Sjoerd De Jong, an Unreal Engine expert from its early days who joined Epic Games full-time in 2014—first as "lead evangelist" and most recently as the senior director of an unannounced project—has left the company, he revealed last week in a LinkedIn post.

"After 27 years of Unreal Engine, and 12 years at Epic Games and Unreal Engine I have decided to move on. Last week was my last week at Epic," De Jong wrote. "This has been an awesome ride that has been truly life changing in so many ways. I didn't have an easy childhood or youth and things weren't going anywhere, but all of that changed entirely when I discovered Unreal Engine."

De Jong's history with Unreal goes back to when he was 15 years old, modding the original 1998 FPS. He was such a prominent map creator he was directly approached by Epic to work on Unreal Tournament 2004, where he designed levels like DM-Rankin and ONS-Torlan, the former of which was the most-played UT2004 map of all time according to server stats cataloged on the Unreal wiki. The portfolio on his website offers a bird's-eye overview of his other work on games like Killzone and The Ball.

While he worked at a variety of studios over the years, including Starbreeze and his own indie company, Teotl Studios, Unreal Engine has long been a passion and specialty—so much so that Epic Games dubbed De Jong the engine's "lead evangelist" when it hired him in 2014.

In the recent LinkedIn post, he talked about how much working with the engine's various incarnations at Epic changed his life: "Dozens of countries visited, hundreds of studios visited, hundreds of talks presented, tens of thousands of people met, and millions of developers supported every year."

As for why he's decided to leave Epic now, De Jong wrote that "this era has come to a close, and it is time to move forward."

"The games industry has always been an industry where change is relentless and inevitable, but it feels like we are reaching a pivotal point now and a potent mix of things," he wrote.

Epic recently unveiled its plans for Unreal Engine 6, which will merge Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and is focused on "enabling content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards," as well as generative AI integration.

Moving forward, De Jong says it would be strategic for him to "come to terms with where [the industry] is heading and to work out how to adapt and excel at solving the challenges and opportunities that we face."

If we did one of our weekly polls on which game platform/store is your favourite, I would be very surprised if anything other than a miniscule minority of readers selected the Epic Games Store. I barely ever use the thing and even I know it's not the most enjoyable experience. But that might not be the case for much longer, as there's a big update coming.

We first reported on plans for a technical overhaul of the Epic Games Store in February. Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison told us at the time that the improvement is "pretty profound."

New slides out of Unreal Fest, posted on X by Pirat_Nation, describe a complete redesign of the launcher, and the big claims are that the "ground-up rebuild" will lead to a "5x faster cold start (average)" and "6.5x faster systray restore to library (average)." In other words, much quicker to boot up, either from the system tray or cold.

I thankfully have a small enough library on the platform that it isn't too sluggish, but I've heard some real terror tales from colleagues with bigger libraries. Our Jacob (different Jacob) wrote about the phenomena back in 2023 when comparing to the Heroic Launcher.

I have no reason to doubt him, either, given the general difficulty I have using the app. For example, launching games on-press rather than displaying more info, and popping up a separate window for downloads.

Other changes shown on the slides include:

• Personalised game recommendations on the home page
• Quick-access categories for easier single-page browsing
• Product detail pages tailored to each player, "connecting players to the game's community, story, and their own progression"
• Patch notes on the game's storefront

We reported in February that there are plans to test "community and forums around some of the top games on the store" and add player profiles, avatars, private messaging, voice chat, and game-independent parties.

According to Pirat_Nation, the Epic Games Store will also get cross-region game gifting, publisher-funded coupons, and a tool to check how games will run on your system.

A lot of this of course sounds very similar to how Valve does things on Steam, and that's not a bad thing in my books. For one, most PC gamers use Steam and it's what they're used to. And second, well, it's just a better design. If you click a game page, for instance, you want to be able to access anything relevant to that game, whether it's patch notes, reviews, or whatever else.

Let's just hope the new rebuild lands before too long and follows through on what its promises. I'll be particularly keen to see how actual in-app navigation feels in terms of snappiness. Launchers are tools after all, not products in themselves—they should keep out of the way as much as possible.

At its State of Unreal event in Chicago, Epic Games officially unveiled Unreal Engine 5.8, and one of its key new features is Lumen Lite: a scalability setting that targets the use of ray-traced global illumination for the Nintendo Switch 2, with the goal of 60 fps. As the feature also works for PCs, I thought I'd dive in and check out just what the fuss is all about. Or if indeed any fuss ought to be made.

By default, the Unreal Engine editor gives developers a simplified way of checking out various graphics settings to see how they affect performance and visual quality. There are 11 separate options that can be tweaked, but the new Lumen Lite mode only affects global illumination (GI) and reflections, as these are the main things that Epic's ray tracing system affects.

In older versions of UE, switching to 'Medium' GI and reflections fully disables Lumen, but in the latest release, the same setting enables Lumen GI, though reflections are still screen-spaced, i.e. SSR. Ray-traced global illumination is normally the preserve of the 'High' or 'Epic' settings, so to make it more performant for low-end GPUs, Lumen Lite replaces a key stage in the lighting process with something quicker but lower in quality than the usual system.

I first caught a glimpse of this in action via Skydek's YouTube channel, earlier this year, and the end results looked really promising, as Lumen Light was giving up to 40% more performance for very little difference in visual quality. But watching the demo, set in a fairly simple environment and using software Lumen, I kept wondering how much of a difference it would make when hardware Lumen is used and in a graphics-heavy scenario.

To that end, I fired up Unreal Engine 5.6 and 5.8, and used Epic's Electric Dreams Environment demo to see Lumen Lite in action. Now, as I'm merely a UE hobbyist, I did nothing more than install all the assets for each UE build and check out the performance in the viewport.

This is very much a 'worst-case scenario' or, if you prefer, a 'Nick is rather lazy' scenario, as the displayed performance is not even remotely representative of how it would all be in an actual game, and I've just clicked a few buttons, rather than directly adjusting the code for the graphics settings and then building the full demo.

Anyway, let's set the scene, as so to speak, by seeing everything in action in Unreal Engine 5.8, using Epic scalability and materials. It's not the very highest setting you can use, but in the case of Lumen, it's for targeting consoles at 30 fps. I've used a Core Ultra 270K Plus with a GeForce RTX 4080 Super, so not console-like at all, but as you can see, it certainly looks great, albeit with a rather low frame rate.

Now, let's take a look at the same situation and settings, except with 'Medium' used for GI and reflections, i.e. Lumen Lite. The first thing you should notice is that the performance is roughly 25% better, and the overall lighting is pretty good. Only the screen space reflections spoil the picture somewhat, but that's what you get for not using ray tracing in those areas.

Before you get your pitchforks out over the fact that Epic says that Lumen Lite is "twice as fast as Lumen High quality", it's worth noting that only the GI and reflections processing is twice as fast. What we're seeing here is that everything else in the UE editor viewport demo is exceptionally heavy, which is why there's only a 25% uplift, rather than a 100% one.

I was keen to compare UE5.8 and Lumen Lite to UE5.6, as that iteration was notable for targeting more performance across the board, and since 'Medium' GI and reflections in this version just disable Lumen altogether, I'd expect to see a big difference in the frame rate for a notable loss in visual fidelity. Well, that's exactly what I got. In fact, it's quite remarkable just how bad it looks compared to using Lumen, with heavy flickering across almost all objects.

So I tried it all again, switching to 'High' GI but leaving reflections SSR-based by using the 'Medium' setting. Notice the immediate improvement in how it all looks? More importantly, can you see that the use of Lumen GI doesn't hurt the performance too much?

Of course, this is all on a high-end gaming PC, not a Switch 2 or a handheld device like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally. The former has more than enough resources to hand for the ray tracing part of the whole rendering chain to not be a problem, as demonstrated by the difference between Lumen Epic and Medium quality above.

But it did make me wonder whether Lumen Lite is a little bit unnecessary, and that a healthy dose of good old-fashioned optimization will be just as good. If I were a Switch 2 developer, I'd probably say, "No, Lumen Lite is very necessary and a great idea," because I only have to worry about two hardware configurations: docked and handheld mode.

When it comes to making PC games, it's a whole different kettle of fish, and while Lumen Lite might be useful as the default mode for 'Steam Deck' settings, every other hardware config really needs careful tweaking to account for the differences between the numerous models of AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs that can support Lumen (software or hardware).

If a studio is going to dedicate the necessary time and resources to doing all of that, then they probably won't use Lumen Lite and instead will fine-tune things by hand, so to speak. However, now that we're in a period where many studios are being shut down and hardware costs are ballooning, any game devs using UE5.8 will probably just stick to the basics because of time and cost constraints.

Epic almost certainly added Lumen Lite on the basis of feedback from developers, looking for a quick and simple solution to ray-traced lighting on the least capable hardware. Well, they've got exactly what they asked for, and it is genuinely useful. I just fear that the 'one-click solution' is going to be heavily used instead of what we'd all like to see.

Epic announced several upcoming Fortnite collabs earlier today, including one with Vampire Survivors. But a few hours after the presentation, Vampire Survivors developer Poncle left a Reddit comment suggesting that the partnership might not happen after all.

While the post is brief, Poncle seems to be reacting to a recent video which demonstrates how Epic artists use generative AI to assist with the design of Fortnite characters and locations, and perhaps also to today's reveal of generative AI features in Unreal Engine.

"Following today's news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sorts of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we're currently 'reviewing' our collaboration with Fortnite," the developer wrote. "We'll let you know if anything moves forward."

At Unreal Fest today, Epic showed off a new experimental plugin feature that integrates generative AI models like Claude and Gemini with Unreal Engine. In a blog post about features coming to Unreal Engine 6, Epic said that these tools will act as "creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time–consuming manual tasks." During the presentation, it demonstrated using generative AI models to change the lighting or add objects to a scene.

The more immediate concern for Poncle, however, may be the video Epic posted earlier this week (embedded above) in which artists use generative AI to quickly develop character and environment concepts for Fortnite. Assets created for the Vampire Survivors collab could presumably be made in the same way.

I've asked the studio for more information on its concerns, and PC Gamer has reached out to Epic for comment.

It's unclear when Poncle and Epic made the collab deal. At the presentation, Epic announced several other collabs coming to Fortnite: Control Resonant, Phantom Blade Zero, and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

It's been six years since Epic first launched Unreal Engine 5, and at its State of Unreal event in Chicago today (head to 1h 40 mins in the above video) and in a separate blog post, we got our first look at what the next major release will offer to games, film, TV, and more industries. And it turns out that the biggest direction for the changes in the new engine came from Fortnite and UEFN.

If you're unfamiliar with the latter, it's basically a version of Unreal Engine 5 that's somewhat simplified and pared back to allow anyone to make levels or entire games for Fortnite. It's hugely popular and honestly very simple to use. I introduced my partner to it a few months ago, and despite having no experience in game development whatsoever, she created a fully functional Fortnite map and game mode within a day.

The sheer usability of UEFN is core to the changes in Unreal Engine 6, and when I talked to Epic at last year's State of Unreal event in Orlando, it explained that the separation between UE and UEFN would eventually go, with the two combined into a single package and offering the best of both worlds.

In the words of Tim Sweeney, it's "UE 5 plus UEFN equals UE 6, plus some more cool stuff on the way." The idea behind the merge is to allow developers to create something and then ship across every possible platform/store at the same time, including Fortnite itself. The unification also involves bringing APIs and code together across all of the various additions that Epic has for UE, such as MetaHumans.

That said, Fortnite isn't really going to be the showcase for Unreal Engine 6; that honour goes to Rocket League, and the very first glimpse of it all was dropped last month at the Paris Major event of the RL Championship Series.

Perhaps the most significant change in Unreal Engine 6 is the move to open standards for tools, code, APIs, etc. This isn't something that can be wholesale implemented overnight, and I suspect that not every element will be open in this manner, but the end goal is to give developers (games or otherwise) an easier path to getting content and code out to Epic's and external ecosystems.

Epic didn't say anything about specific features in the keynote, so no idea if there will be a major change to Lumen, for example, but it did say that UE6 is targeted for release at some point in 2027 ("2027-ish" was the exact phrase, though the blog post says "Early Access release at the end of 2027").

It also said a few things about Verse, the scripting language used in UEFN, and how the gameplay programming model in UE6 will be shifted to that language (though C++ will still be there underneath it all). Directly related to that will be something called Scene Graph, which will replace the current gameplay framework used in UE5. That will be built entirely on Verse, and with it, Epic plans to "build a full distributed software transactional memory system" for huge, interactive live worlds.

That won't mean anything to gamers, but for developers, it means that their "game code can be written as if it were running on a single machine without needing to coordinate custom networking code all over the place."

And naturally, AI is going to become a bigger feature of Unreal Engine, with the first step being taken in the new UE5.8 release and its MCP server plugin. That system will let you set up any LLM you want to use and give it various tasks to perform, from simple code refactoring all the way up to generating a full 3D scene that you can then tweak as required.

There's more to all of this, of course, but there's not quite enough information yet to glean any insight as to whether the step from UE5 to UE6 will be as dramatic as the jump from v4 to v5 was. My feeling is that it won't be, from a PC gamer's perspective at least, but game developers will probably relish the thought of having an Unreal Engine that's easier to use and quicker at producing the content required.

It is a "time of both crisis and opportunity" for the games industry, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in his concluding remarks at today's Unreal Fest address, where the Unreal Engine and Fortnite maker demonstrated new features coming to its development tools.

The kids are playing more games than ever and Fortnite is growing again, Sweeney said, but "a huge number of the new releases of major games are failing."

"We're seeing often hundreds of millions of dollars of dev cost, followed by tens of millions of dollars of revenue, and the dev costs are continuing to grow," said Sweeney. "It feels to many like a tidal wave is sweeping over the AAA game business."

Sweeney's assessment of the problem echoed sentiments I heard repeatedly at the Game Developer's Conference back in March: Gamers want social online experiences, but it's extremely hard to break in and compete with the biggest platforms, like Roblox. Players go where their friends already are, and are more willing to buy in-game items in games they know will still be around in a year.

"One view of the future is that Roblox grows and eats gaming," Sweeney said. "A lot of people are saying this online, but you know, what you have there is a centralized platform with a single gatekeeper that commoditizes all content, takes more than 70% of revenue, and has 450 million users on board, and so that's a real challenge to game developers."

Epic believes in a "much brighter" future for developers, said the CEO, in which they rally around Epic's metaverse vision to collectively take on Roblox with a network of Unreal Engine games, "linking up our content, linking up our communities, and linking up our economies."

"We're going to need to build better games," Sweeney said. "We're going to need to build them more efficiently. We're going to need to design up front and build for connected games, where all of our playerbases are connected socially and our economies are connected, so that players, instead of seeing these as isolated products, see them as part of a global ecosystem that all game developers participate in together."

Rather than focusing on graphics tech, Epic is pitching the upcoming Unreal Engine 6 as an upgrade to efficiency (it's getting generative AI integration) and interoperability. Make a game in Unreal Engine, and not only can you release it as a standalone executable, but also as a game within Fortnite, or within another Unreal Engine product.

The ecosystem Epic currently offers up is generous compared to the Roblox example. Unreal Engine is free to use for game developers, and Epic collects a 5% royalty only when a game surpasses $1 million in revenue. The Epic Games Store offers a similar deal, waving fees for the first $1 million in revenue, and after that taking a 12% cut.

Sweeney has also been a vocal critic of Steam's 20-30% cut, as well as its requirement that games use its payment processor for in-game purchases, something he's famously gone to battle with Apple over. Developers are free to bypass the Epic Games Store's fee for in-game purchases by using their own payment processing solution.

A Roblox-sized network of games and players based on those terms—low fees, the freedom to publish across many platforms, and so on—does sound like a boon for developers of that kind of game. But the natural question I'm left with is: How do the games I like fit into this vision?

A "global ecosystem" of social experiences, where no one bats an eye if Darth Vader walks into a room next to Homer Simpson, would not seem appropriate for, say, The Witcher 4, which featured at the last Unreal Fest. Is the "tidal wave" of growing development costs really going to wash away the old-fashioned 'make a big RPG and sell it' model, turning even those games into hangout spaces optimized for brand partnerships and cosmetics sales?

Epic doesn't seem to think so—it, after all, funded Alan Wake 2 and the new Fumito Ueda game—but based on today's address, it's not where it foresees its next billions coming from.

It's probably fair to say that Unreal Engine is probably the most comprehensive tool around for creating games, animations, and video effects. And, with the launch of UE 5.8, it's becoming even more extensive and even a little bit more AI-friendly. Whether you're just an Unreal Engine hobbyist like me, or a full-time game developer, you can download version 5.8 right now via the Epic Games Launcher.

Even if you don't plan on using any of the new features (of which there are a lot), it's always worth trying out the latest release just for bug and performance fixes. But what's actually new? The headline acts in UE5.8 are the introduction of Mesh Terrain and Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE). Both are experimental features at the moment, but the former should be of great interest to anyone creating big, open-world terrains, as the tool basically generates full 3D meshes for you.

PVE is somewhat similar, except that instead of creating landscapes, it produces vegetation (trees, bushes, reeds, grass, etc) from scratch, with the procedural system working in line with meshes already present in the world. For example, let's say you had a crumbled old archway in a forest, PVE will 'grow' trees around it, accounting for the natural source of light and competing vegetation.

Complementing these are MegaLights, which first appeared in experimental form in UE5.5 (but is now "production-ready"), an experimental fog screen space scattering feature, and perhaps most interesting of all, Lumen Lite. This is a mode for Lumen global illumination that Epic claims to be twice as fast as Lumen High Quality, while still preserving "much of the visual impact".

The release notes for UE5.8 specifically mention that "games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps," so it's blatantly obvious what platform it was developed for. However, since it's also supported on PC, UE-powered games of the future could well offer this as a graphics option for low-end hardware users.

Tucked away, almost at the end of the new version details announcement—which blessedly includes improvements to shader compiling—is one more experimental feature, an MCP plugin. With this, you can implement any LLM of your choice to "connect to and understand both the engine and your project." In other words, if you want to use AI to create assets or code, carry out tests or refactoring tasks, then you should be able to hand that over to the LLM easily enough.

Epic left the note about this feature after everything else, and I suspect that's because AI is hardly flavour of the month in the world of PCs and gaming right now. After all, Epic already has a section of PC gaming fandom that takes a dim view of Unreal Engine games, whether you believe that's the fault of Epic or a given game's developers themselves, and AI-use is another PC gaming bug bear.

Anyway, because of the consternation about AI in gaming—from being the primary cause of the horrendous price increases for DRAM and SSDs, as well as the endless controversies over its use in games—the inclusion of this plugin is likely to draw ire from some quarters.

The thing is, many game studios will have to rely increasingly more on AI for certain workloads if they hope to stay afloat. With the likes of Microsoft and numerous other companies about to swing a sword of Damocles across all their gaming divisions, studio heads will be looking at every avenue that will result in them having a future.

I'm not suggesting that game devs must use AI, nor am I saying that the inclusion of the LLM plugin (specifically an MCP server) with UE5.8 is a good or bad thing; it's simply a sign of our times. One can argue that Unreal Engine's feature set is sometimes a little too far-forward in reach (console and mainstream PC hardware still isn't quite good enough to cope with an all-in Lumen and Nanite game at high fps), but this minor plugin is very much a 'here-and-now' thing.

A possible social media ban for children in the UK could be expanded to games, the government's online safety minister has suggested.

Speaking to The Sunday Times (via Game Developer) Kanishka Narayan said that a ban on social media for teenagers—which is being considered by the UK following a social media ban being implemented in Australia—could include restrictions for online video game platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, an area that Australia's social media ban does not extend to.

Narayan didn't cite any specific games in his conversation with The Sunday Times, but he said that, following a recent visit to Australia, his primary concern regarding children's use of the Internet was over "stranger pairing", between children and adults they don't know.

Apparently, this issue was discussed, "mostly in the context of gaming platforms" rather than conventional social media like Tiktok, Instagram etc. "That will weigh quite significantly in my mind as we think about how we stop some of the most egregious harms for young people," Narayan added.

Narayan's statements were recently echoed on Sky News by Rachel De Souza, the Children's Commissioner for England. Speaking on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, De Souza said that young boys in particular are vulnerable to being exploited on gaming platforms.

"Boys often aren't on social media," De Souza said. "They're often spending three or four hours a day gaming. And these games often have features that allow a 55-year-old in Arizona to come in and speak to a nine-year-old."

Roblox in particular has been repeatedly called out for its failures to adequately protect its player-base—which is largely composed of children. The platform has been subject to numerous lawsuits over child safety concerns, while there have been "at least two dozen" people arrested in the US and accused of "abducting or abusing victims" they'd met on Roblox.

Roblox's responses to these lawsuits and allegations have varied in quality, but this month, the company will introduce new age-based account categories as it strives to "more closely align content access, communication settings and parental controls with a user's age." These are much-needed and long overdue features, though it's worth noting that this is only one reason why Roblox has been accused of putting its audience at risk of exploitation.

But is a wider social media ban that incorporates games the answer? Well, in March, the BBC reported that the effectiveness of Australia's social media ban had been questioned, with the country's Internet regulator saying that social media companies were not doing enough to comply with it. In response, a spokesperson for Meta said that the company was "committed to complying" with the ban, while claiming that accurate age determination was "a challenge for the whole industry."

Personally, I think a social media ban wrongly implies that children accessing social media is the problem, rather than vastly profitable tech giants failing to dedicate adequate resources to get their houses in order—an issue that affects adults as much as it does children in various ways. Whether or not a UK social media ban will actually come into force, and what form it will ultimately take, remains to be seen.

At the 2026 Summer Game Fest, we got another, closer look at the next game by Ico and Shadow of the Colossus creator, Fumito Ueda. The first game from Ueda's studio, genDesign, has been revealed as gen Atlas.

We're in comfortable territory for Ueda fans, with gen Atlas set a desolate, strange world defined by colossal megastructures and mysterious robots—but it also has even more of a hard sci-fi edge than I'd anticipated.

The new trailer is immediately much more colorful than gen Atlas' first showing, or really anything Ueda has ever made, with a disembodied head robot flying around this strange world and attaching itself to different mech bodies, seemingly a core feature of the new game.

You also control one of Ueda's patented weird little guys with a poncho, capable of platforming around abandoned megastructures, even riding the main mech friend with the disembodied head powers.

“The team and I are grateful to all the fans who’ve been eager to learn more about our game,” Ueda said of the new game. “Their passion and enthusiasm has always motivated and inspired us. We hope to share an experience that inspires moments of quiet wonder and discovery.”

We got our first look at gen Atlas in the 2024 Game Awards, but it was very much a mood piece more than a formal reveal. Gen Atlas is set to release on PC day and date with its console versions, but as an Epic Store exclusive.

The once budget handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck, recently received an astronomical price hike, with Valve citing "global logistical challenges" (otherwise known as the global memory crisis) for this decision. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney soon weighed in on the matter, drawing attention to Gabe Newell's $500 million superyacht in the process.

Commenting on X, Tim Sweeney says, "Everyone’s being too harsh here. There has been a significant rise in the cost of components that Steam customer spending ultimately funds, and economic trends have created severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts."

For the unaware, the Leviathan is a 111-meter superyacht built for Gabe Newell with an on-board hospital, submarine garage, and 15 gaming PCs. It's the 50th-largest yacht in the world right now. It also comes with two gyms, a 250 square meter beach club with a spa and bar, and diving platforms. It's luxurious is the point I am trying to make.

It does sort of seem like Sweeney is just taking swings for the sake of taking swings here, because, although Gabe Newell does own a superyacht (that was likely super expensive), it's hard to believe the Steam Deck price hikes will exactly cover that cost.

The price of memory is sharply surging upwards, and Valve is just one of many companies that have raised prices to accommodate it. Without knowing the specific price of the hardware, it's hard to say if Valve is making a bigger profit or not from the rise than it was pre-memory crisis.

The comments on Sweeney's post are not very happy with it. The top one, as of the time of writing, says, "Hey Tim when was the last time Valve laid off their employees? Oh yeah never?"

It seems like the last public round of layoffs made at Valve was back in 2019, where 13 were let go. And tens of staff were let go six years prior, in 2013. Epic Games, on the other hand, let go of 1,000 employees just two months ago, with one employee saying, "We only had a slight hint that the company revenue wasn't doing well."

Despite prices of Steam Deck models rising by almost 50%, it still somehow sold out in North America less than 24 hours after the hike. If the Steam Deck can be successful way above its original price, it does make me a little worried that I'll need a superyacht to afford a Steam Machine for my living room, even if it may not be Valve's fault.

The 1,000 developers that Epic Games laid off in March were, in the words of CEO Tim Sweeney, of "once-in-a-lifetime" quality—and a website that compiles their resumes proves it.

The ex-Epic Awesome People List comprises 545 entries and shows just how wide and deep the layoffs cut. It hit young developers learning their trade and veterans with more than 25 years of experience: Epic cut animators, producers, programmers, HR managers and QA specialists. Among those gone are lead designers, lead artists, and Fortnite's balance director.

Scrolling through the list is a reminder that behind that massive headline figure are individuals with unique experience, now all looking for jobs in an already competitive market.

And it's clear from speaking to a couple of them that they weren't expecting it.

"The layoff was very sudden and we only had a slight hint that the company revenue wasn't doing well," says one developer, who asked to remain anonymous. Staff had been told in January that Fortnite revenue was down-–but it's "tough to predict" the success of future seasons, they said.

Natalie Munoz, director of corporate communications at Epic told me that the company keeps "employees informed of how the business is performing at regular company and team meetings".

"It definitely came as a shock," says Hunter ErkenBrack, who worked at Epic for nearly a decade and was balance director when he left, overseeing a global team making design decisions in Fortnite's Battle Royale and Reload (he was also lead designer on Reload).

He said he was actually let go quietly a few months before the mass layoff, just ahead of the game's Simpsons mini season in November 2025. He lost his job "just months after a title promotion and one week before a well-planned four-week paid sabbatical that you earned for seven years of continuous service at the company," he says-–he was considering going to Japan with friends at that time.

"I never got a chance to use it or get it paid out … I got severance but I'm now looking to sell my house since most of the available jobs aren't remote," he says. Epic has said that affected staff would receive a severance package of at least four months of base pay, with more based on tenure, and that it was extending Epic-paid healthcare coverage.

I asked Epic whether there were additional rounds of layoffs in the six-to-nine months before March's announcement—Epic's Munoz said: "We did not conduct layoffs in the fall."

It's easy to think of Epic as a monolith but both developers discuss the camaraderie within their smaller team. People genuinely cared about their work. "I have very fond memories … We had a small pod of five and we all became pretty close over the past two years. I will definitely miss working with them," says the anonymous developer.

For ErkenBrack, building the balance team was his fondest memory. "The old days of Fortnite were fun and chaotic in a stressful way of course but that team was my work family," says ErkenBrack.

"Joking with them as we 'saved Fortnite'"—from invincibility, invisibility, instant elimination bugs, and exploits—"is time I'll always remember and cherish. They were mostly unimpacted by layoffs at least. I've joked with them that if I was a sacrifice then I'm glad to make it for them since I'll eventually land on my feet somewhere."

I asked Munoz whether Epic had restructured to account for the loss of some of its most experienced staff. She told me that it had moved to a "product-led model" that brought development teams closer to publishers and that it still had "tenured leaders and a talented team in place to deliver awesome Fortnite experiences".

Both developers I speak to are still hunting for work, along with hundreds of others.

"I'm applying for all sorts of design director and lead designer roles. I figure I'll get one eventually or I'll start consulting," ErkenBrack says. "There aren't a lot of live-service design specialists like me which is a double-edged sword in this rough job market, with so many other unicorn candidates. I'm optimistic and feeling excited about my future despite everything happening that was out of my control."

LinkedIn is now flooded with posts from Epic developers—both seeking jobs and trying to help their former colleagues. "I had so many friends and ex-coworkers reach out to ask how I was doing and also they sent me lots of job possibilities," says the anonymous developer.

"The grapevine works so fast and people really care."

If you're a former Epic developer who's keen to tell their story, please email Samuel Horti at sphorti@gmail.com, or message him @SamuelHorti on X or Bluesky.

The Fortnitification of videogames has seeped into just about every live-service excursion at this point. You can play as Nicki Minaj in Call of Duty. Final Fantasy 14 is getting an Evangelion raid series in its next expansion. Tekken 8 just announced a Baki character as its final Season 3 DLC fighter. Media can no longer exist on its own, it must merge and coalesce into an amorphous glob of characters and celebrities.

One notable exception has been Riot's games, particularly League of Legends and Valorant. While there are skins that certainly appear inspired by other famous media, it's never outright crossed over with other characters. And it'll be staying that way, according to League's lead designer August Browning.

During a stream on his Twitch channel (clipped and edited by HeWhoQuacksss), Browning responded to a question on how open Riot was to including third-party skins. "We've been pretty not open to that," he said. "The second you do third-party skins, the tone of your game completely changes."

He then goes ahead and talks about some of the games that have gone all in on collaborations. "Now that doesn't mean it's bad—it's really cool to play Overwatch and play all these anime characters and K-pop idols and things like that, right? It's cool to go into Fortnite, and have Goku and Jinx fighting Ariana Grande and Peter Griffin. But tonally speaking, it is also very different from the tone of all the characters in [League]."

Browning goes on to say that "historically, Riot has been pretty hesitant to do skins from other IPs," though highlights that the game does have a Louis Vuitton skin for Sena as well as a Swain skin that "looks very similar to certain chicken establishments." But overall? Browning calls straight-up crossing over other characters "a big step."

I mean, I get it. I don't need every videogame I ever play to put all my favourite characters from other stuff in it. I love Persona 5, but I don't need Joker making an appearance everywhere I go, you know? I have to agree with Browning's sentiment that all of these collaborations can drastically shift your game tonally, and I'd even go so far as to say it can really water down a game's identity.

Is putting Godzilla in Crocs and making him do K-Pop dances in Fortnite inherently funny? Obviously it is, but that ridiculousness loses its edge when everyone is doing it. Though I wouldn't consider myself the biggest enjoyer of Riot's library, I certainly appreciate its desire to stay in its own lane.

As reported by TheGamer, Epic Games has announced Unreal Engine 6, the next iteration of its ubiquitous videogame and CGI middleware. The announcement came during the Paris Major of the Rocket League Championship Series.

DiscussingFilm shared a brief clip of the announcement on X, "The Everything App." It shows some snippets of shinier cars and cinematic angles of in-engine gameplay. The trailer declares a "new era" and "new engine" for the venerable vehicular sci-fi soccer sim, before revealing a first look at the Unreal Engine 6 logo.

It's been four years since the release of Unreal Engine 5, and 12 since Unreal Engine 4 first hit the scene. Rocket League itself is still running on the truly ancient Unreal Engine 3, the tech that powered much of the Xbox 360 generation. An upgrade of this magnitude strikes me as a sequel-level shift, but Epic has never been one to opt for an Overwatch or Destiny-style standalone sequel to its live service games.

Fortnite, for example, got its own upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 with no disruption to its massive digital economy. In fact, it's a little bit surprising to me that Epic's marquee game wasn't the vehicle for an Unreal 6 announcement—though it's obviously in much less need of an upgrade than Rocket League.

An announcement like this is seismic for the games industry: Unreal is one of the (if not the) most widely used middleware game engines. Major studios with a history of proprietary tech like CD Projekt have switched to Unreal in recent years. It's also a popular option for indie devs as an alternative to Unity, and even has a prominent place in the film industry, used by the likes of Disney for producing CG visuals.

The Unreal Engine 5 era has been a mixed bag: Epic has achieved new heights of adoption and ubiquity, and the engine itself has proven capable of supporting gorgeous unions of art direction and photorealism like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Avowed.

But Unreal 5 also has a well-earned reputation for poor performance and optimization, particularly on PC. Epic's own Fortnite runs like butter in Unreal 5, but whether other games' performance woes are the fault of Epic's tools or its customers' use of them, the end result is still the same. A number of comments under DiscussingFilm's X post share a similar theme: "Fix Unreal 5 first."

This Rocket League vehicle for Unreal Engine 6's reveal strikes me as being more subdued than the bombastic reveal of Unreal 5 at the 2021 Game Awards: A still-shockingly realistic and faithful homage to the beginning of the Matrix that was accompanied by a free open world demo on consoles. That felt like a brash statement of intent. This feels like more of a conservative teaser.

Time will tell if Unreal 6 will embody Epic's metaverse aspirations, but a shot in the trailer showing other Epic games like Lego and Normal Fortnite in a line-up with Rocket League certainly seems to hint at this ambition. In 2024, Tim Sweeney described Fortnite's growing status as a platform for independent developers and multiple interoperable games as a model for what the company hoped to achieve on a larger scale with Unreal Engine 6.

The Overwatch gang has finally arrived in Fortnite, and you know what that means. That's right, we're talking about Tracer's butt again. Fans are convinced that Tracer's backside got buffed in her Fortnite incarnation, and you know, I think they might be right.

Some quick history, for those who either weren't around 10 years ago, or are fortunate enough to have memory-holed the whole thing: One of the big controversies in the early days of Overwatch (and this is going to sound incredibly stupid, but I swear it's true) was the bodaciousness of Tracer's booty. First, gamers complained that an over-the-shoulder victory pose had too much ass, so Blizzard changed it and then other gamers complained that there was not enough ass.

Ten years later, former Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan said the amount of ass actually "stayed exactly the same"—it was merely the pose itself that changed. As PC Gamer's resident knower-of-Overwatch Elie Gould said, a decade of water under the bridge had turned the whole thing into something of a joke, although there's no doubt in my mind that an undercurrent of resentment and rage continues to flow through some corners of the online world.

Which brings us to today. Just a month after Kaplan's comment, Tracer's caboose is back in the conversation, because some of the folks on the TracerMains suibreddit—and today I learned there is a TracerMains subreddit—seem pretty sure that she's been re-proportioned for the Fortnite crossover.

Tracer has a bigger butt in Fortnite from r/TracerMains

Look, I'm not here to objectify videogame characters or anything, but speaking entirely observationally and clinically, yeah, that's a big dumper. The Unreal Engine's really working overtime to render this one.

For purposes of comparison, here's the original Tracer tush that caused all the uproar a decade ago:

So yeah, maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that one of these things is not like the other.

Another angle:

The way I see it, there are two possibilities at play here—three, I suppose, if you include the possibility that we're all just imagining the maximizing of those glutes: One, the good folks at Epic know what they like and they're not afraid to let their freak flag fly, or two, the Unreal Engine is just naturally back-loaded, so to speak. I have no idea which it might be, but I hope it's the former.

As a conscientious videogame journalism professional, I have reached out to Epic Games to ask if they did indeed give Tracer some newly embiggened ham cakes, because that's the sort of thing I do on a Friday afternoon when everyone just wants to get out of the office and go home. I'll let you know if anyone replies.

Overwatch, one of the pioneers of the live service model, has finally come full circle with an official Fortnite collab this week. For years, Blizzard kept its iconic heroes close to its chest, but now they've been released, free to show up as premium cosmetics elsewhere in the live service multiverse.

It already felt like Blizzard was becoming less precious with its Overwatch characters after spending the last three years flooding the hero shooter with brands like Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Porsche. Collab skins went from being sorta like cosplay to near-copies of characters from other games.

In a world where Destiny 2 has a whole Star Wars-themed expansion and the stars of the Fallout TV show are earning killstreaks in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, anything is possible. So when the rumors of a Fortnite collab started a few months ago, they seemed plausible.

And here we are: Mercy from Overwatch has officially hit the Griddy, Genji is dancing to Cardi B, D.Va is editing her way to a victory royale, and Tracer is blinking across the Sandy Strip. Overwatch heroes are now skins in the game that took what Blizzard started and turned it into the business model that every major publisher is desperate to emulate.

Alongside the skins are recreations of popular Overwatch maps, like Hanamura and King's Row. While you're gathering loot, you can find Tracer's twin pistols which shift your view into first-person. It's just like playing Overwatch, if Overwatch were a massive battle royale where the only objective is to kill anything that moves until you're the last one standing.

There's something wrong about seeing Mercy, a support hero in Overwatch, carrying around an AK-47. Overwatch's universe is supposed to be a hopeful version of the future, and while there are major caveats to that, dropping these heroes into a completely different context renders them into the same charmless, plastic toys that every iconic character seems doomed to become.

It doesn't help that they all spout lines from Overwatch like you're pulling a string on their backs. In the trailer, Mercy floats onto the screen to say, "Heroes never die" like she does in the original Overwatch teaser cinematic, except she isn't really saying it to anyone in particular. She's just there to kick off more references as Tracer and D.Va join in with their own phrases from Overwatch. D.Va's "Nerf this!" is particularly nonsensical because, without her exploding mech, it's unclear what she's even referring to.

This is what the age of collabs has brought to gaming: An insatiable maw that chews up once-memorable characters and spits them back out as barely recognizable cosmetics for $19.99. Overwatch is just the latest game to be swallowed up in a trend that doesn't show any signs of stopping soon.

Cast your mind back to October 2024 and you may remember the time when Russia fined Google a website-breaking amount of money. Like grains of rice on a chessboard, a fine Russia levied against Google for blocking some pro-Kremlin channels had compounded to the point that Google 'owed' the country ₽2 undecillion. That's a two followed by 36 zeroes. That amount was later capped at a more generous ₽91.5 quintillion but, either way, it's more money than there is on Earth.

Which I suspect, as a tactic, was not much of a winner, as Russian courts have turned around and asked for a much more payable fine from EA, Take-Two, Battlestate, and NetEase (via Kommersant) for failing to localise the data of Russian gamers on domestic servers.

Law firm Semenov and Pevzner told Kommersant that Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had filed lawsuits resulting in ₽2 million fines against the four companies, while three remaining lawsuits against Embracer Group, Digital Extremes, and Epic Games are yet to reach a conclusion.

Which is not a lot. At the time of writing, ₽2 million is about $27,000. If the court were to impose the maximum allowable fine against the three remaining companies—₽6 million—that would be just over $80,000.

That's couch-cushion money for companies at this scale, whose revenues are measured in the billions. In the unlikely event any of them were to pay, it would be tantamount to a rounding error on their balance sheets.

Perhaps this indicates that the fines themselves are not the point. A source spoken to by Kommersant suggests that the lawsuits are merely the beginning of a crackdown on foreign-made online games within Russia, a move which would likely redound at least somewhat to the benefit of homegrown games. For its part, Roskomnadzor says it has no such plans, but it would fit the country's previously documented attempts at "digital sovereignty".

Fortnite is back with yet another annual Star Wars celebration, and this year, three new Creative experiences. Droid Tycoon is one of the big three games added to Fortnite for this year's celebration, and it's basically Steal a Brainrot with an intergalactic twist. It's less Ballerina Cappucina and more BB-8, but the usual progression systems and upgrade mechanics are all still there.

These tips will help you kickstart your humble Droid Tycoon job and transform it from a Tatooine test run to a fully-fledged robot enterprise.

How to make money fast in Droid Tycoon

Buy new droids

Droid Tycoon is all about investments. You spend some Credits to buy basic droids, put them to work to make you more Credits, then offload them and replace them with more expensive droids when the time comes.

It's a simple loop, but there are a few things to keep in mind when you're first starting out. First, prioritize upgrading your base. Adding new droid slots will significantly increase your earnings, and you should try to buy cheaper droids with special modifiers like Gold or Diamond to make the most of your investment.

Scrap pile

Don't neglect the scrap pile! Manually whacking the scrap heap with your pickaxe is the best way to make money until you've padded your pockets enough to afford rare droids. It levels up and rewards more Credits over time, so stick with it.

Companion perks

You should also pay attention to your droids' abilities. Each droid can follow you around as a companion instead of toiling away at your factory, and they can provide some seriously sweet buffs. Some droids—like the common CB—increase your pickaxe's level for free. You can swap companions at any time, so hang out with each of your droids to learn what they can do.

Side objectives

Lastly, Droid Tycoon sets itself apart from other Brainrot-likes with side objectives across Tatooine. You'll need specific droids to complete objectives like moisture evaporator repairs, but other objectives like hostile Stormtrooper takeovers can be cleared with nothing but the blaster on your hip.

Completing side objectives will get you crates with random rewards. The common ones usually just give you Credits, but you can score Upgrade Chips and other rare goods every now and then. You can also send your droids out on passive missions at your base's shipyard. Don't forget to send these out!

Rebirth requirements and perks

Rebirth is a significant milestone in all tycoon games, and Droid Tycoon is no exception. As soon as you open up your base, you can check your Rebirth requirements at a kiosk near the front entrance.

As long as you have the specified droids and enough Credits, you can reset your progress in exchange for permanent enhancements. Rebirth in Droid Tycoon is surprisingly generous; you get to keep all your droids after paying the Credits cost.

Some higher-level Rebirth requirements ask for upgraded droids, so pay close attention to the icons. If they've got a weird color scheme, they probably need to be Gold, Diamond, Rainbow, or some other special version of the droid you're looking for.

How to upgrade droids

That's where droid upgrades come in. While you can buy droids with special modifiers right off the conveyor belt, you can make deals with the residents of Tatooine to improve your favorite droids.

Droid upgrade vendor

The droid upgrade vendor is located in a shady shop behind the cantina where you can find most NPCs. He'll let you upgrade your droids in exchange for Upgrade Chips, which you get from those side objectives mentioned earlier. The first upgrade from default to Gold rank costs five Upgrade Chips, and things only get more expensive from there.

Test your luck

Other than the droid upgrade vendor, you can also find NPCs and merchants inside the cantina who will trade droids with you and offer other deals. There's a vendor who can upgrade your pickaxe if you have enough Credits, and there's even a shady little guy that'll let you gamble at a chance for a free droid upgrade.

Check back at the cantina regularly to see what the NPCs have to say. Sometimes, they'll ask for a common drone and give you something crazy in return. Just watch out for those PVP-hungry players when you leave the safety of your base. These kids have had one too many Tung Tung Tung Sahurs stolen from them on Roblox, so they're not taking any chances here.

BB-8 event

As you expand your base and reach higher Rebirth levels, you can start chasing down the rarest droids in the game. That includes BB-8, who only appears during—you guessed it—the BB-8 Event. There's a huge countdown timer in the center of the map for that one, so set yourself a reminder.

Last week I drove down to a fancy studio lot in Los Angeles to play Fortnite. "Play Fortnite" isn't a very descriptive phrase these days, as the battle royale has long since evolved into a platform with numerous games under the official Epic banner, plus thousands more community-made modes.

What I was there to see fell somewhere between official and community: a collection of Star Wars games made with UEFN (Unreal Engine for Fortnite), but by studios that make Fortnite stuff for a living. They were commissioned by Epic, in cooperation with Disney, to showcase what's possible with the new Star Wars UEFN toolkit (which includes a bunch of official assets and sounds from the movies) while also promoting the Mandalorian film that's out soon.

Alongside a mix of press and content creators, I played hours of:

• Galactic Siege: A riff on classic Battlefront
• Droid Tycoon: An idle game where you hold left click and buy droids to farm money
• Escape Vader: A co-op horror game where you avoid Darth Vader… very easily

Some of Fortnite's Star Wars offerings unfortunately reminded me of the inglorious days of licensed tie-ins. The difference these days is that these are snackable experiences that exist in an always-on platform, rather than standalone 4-hour games stamped on a disc. These UGC games were made by smaller outfits that specialize in turning formats popular with children (like tycoon or bed wars) into games themed around whichever brand is writing the check.

Today that brand is Disney. These games ranged from terrible to blandly inoffensive. We might as well start with the best.

Galactic Siege

What I like about Galactic Siege is that it understands how singularly awesome Star Wars: Battlefront was back in the day. Two teams (Rebels vs Empire) recreate the battle of Hoth while fighting over three control points—the format is a callback to the Galactic Conquest mode from Battlefront. You pick between a handful of classes, can respawn on teammates, and cash in points to play as Rey, Vader, or pilot an X-Wing.

Developer Jogo Games, whose other Fortnite work includes "Only Up Time Travel" and "Toy Bed Wars," followed the Pandemic Studios (R.I.P.) playbook to the letter. Its only twist on the formula is a layer of persistent progression. A pre-game lobby gives players time to customize their own lightsaber and jedi who becomes a playable hero, and that's a neat idea all around. I do wish the grindable upgrades for force users didn't include balance-oblivious boosts to speed, health, and damage—even the most casual of shooters value competitive integrity enough to not hand out straight damage advantages to the grindiest players.

My gripes with Galactic Siege come down to combat. The gunplay is less than excellent, the battlefield is padded with incompetent bots (though maybe the stormtroopers' poor accuracy is an easter egg), and the screen is packed with UI elements that serve no contextual purpose. At one point I ran to the back of the battlefield and witnessed bots spawn as default Fortnite battle royale dudes before suddenly popping into stormtrooper mode. It's strange for Epic and Disney to go so far in providing tools, assets, and lore-accurate blasters for Star Wars games, just for the limitations of UEFN to still be this apparent. I walked away with plans to fire up the real Battlefront at home.

Droid Tycoon

If you've ever glanced over the shoulder of a 9-year-old with unlimited access to Roblox, there's a good chance they were playing some riff on a tycoon: a format popular on Fortnite and Roblox that can adapt any setting (such as a Star Wars droid factory) into an idle clicker. Droid Tycoon was the most stable and overall functional thing I played all day, but it's the sort of game that makes you feel stupid for spending time with it.

Activities in Droid Tycoon include: holding left click on a regenerating pile of scrap to get money, assigning droids to stations where they stand still and accrue money, and sometimes shooting other players to steal their droids.

I'm not above idle clickers—I was a sentient being during the Cookie Clicker craze of 2014, after all—I just don't believe these UGC engines produce good ones. The best idle games embrace their disposability or relish in being the fourth-most interesting thing happening on your desktop. Droid Tycoon, being a game within Fortnite, demands your full attention. It believes that I can be bothered to manually run around an empty droid factory dropping robots on various stations—actions that could just be buttons if they're not going to be engaging on their own. And for what? The prize of unlocking a shooting range that serves no purpose?

That's hardly a design flaw unique to Droid Tycoon alone, though I consider it a bad look for Fortnite that Epic sized up which genres deserve the Star Wars treatment in its vast creation engine and decided this was one of them.

Escape Vader

Last, and definitely least. Escape Vader is a co-op horror survival affair where four players wander around the wreckage of the Death Star collecting energy coil thingamajigs. All the while you're avoiding an AI-controlled Darth Vader, an invincible monster who skulks down hallways.

Escape Vader has a cinematic trailer that would have you believe it's got the full might of Lucasfilm and Epic behind it, but in reality, it's about as polished and interesting as a $2 Steam horror game you took a chance on with some buds. It's janky, confusing, and worst of all it's not the least bit scary.

Developer Beyond Creative is going for an Alien: Isolation-type thing with ventilation shafts and steam pipes that can slow Vader's advance, but navigating around the slow bastard is so trivial from the jump that there's little point. The atmosphere is OK for a UEFN game (the official Vader sound effects are a big lift) but that's setting the bar quite low. Our group escaped Vader on our first try, and when Epic informed us that we'd be playing the mode again on its singular map, my heart sank.

Integration

I'll readily acknowledge that I'm not the target audience for Fortnite anything, let alone these insubstantial modes, but if this is what to expect from movie tie-ins from now on, they've certainly lost the charm of the ones I grew up with.

But times have changed, and so have the scale and goals of these projects. Studios like Jogo, FOAD, and Beyond Creative are set up more like marketing agencies whose output is Fortnite maps—Jogo's website says it has "a marketing reach unrivaled in the Fortnite Creative space," and Beyond Creative works exclusively on branded games. When they do make their own games, their success is weighed by engagement hours and front page placement at the moment.

It's a strange environment in which to fit a Star Wars "integration." A "Fortnite game" could theoretically be anything, yet Epic's trusted partners have delivered a shallow Battlefront rehash, a bad horror game, and a clicker. They didn't click with me, but I've seen UEFN produce some really impressive stuff in the right hands, so perhaps we really need to see what talented super fans do with the tools.

Fortnite's big Star Wars takeover is happening all throughout May. These three games are out tomorrow, May 1.

Epic has made Easy Anti-Cheat a requirement to play Rocket League online, hopefully bringing an end to the era of bots whizzing around in high rank matches and endlessly XP farming. The software comes as part of the game's latest update, and does include an option to play the game offline without EAC running.

The majority of players probably won't notice much difference, but one big change for the more committed Rocketeers out there is the end of Bakkesmod. Bakkesmod is a kind of all-in-one bolt-on that adds a tonne of useful quality of life features to Rocket League: things like automatic replay saves, a more varied training mode, stats during matches, fan-made items, and support for an even wider range of community plugins.

EAC does not play nice with mods, and the main man behind the project has announced that this feels like a natural endpoint. "It is absolutely incredible to see how well liked and commonly used BakkesMod is to this day," writes Bakkes. "There have been over 800 published community submitted plugins in the last few years. Over 750,000 people use the mod on a daily basis, and over 1.5 million of you use it every week!

"With that being said, I've made the decision to stop actively updating the mod. The introduction of EAC feels like the right time to bring things to a close. Both I and the team of core contributors who have helped over the years have moved on from the game, and while we've kept things running, the passion and drive to properly support the project just aren't there anymore. This means that BakkesMod will not work on game versions released on April 28th and later."

Older versions will remain available on GitHub, while the Patreon that has supported the mod is closing. Over on the Rocket League subreddit, the reaction is just sadness: alongside a feeling that maybe, just maybe, Psyonix and Epic could have done a better job at stealing some of BakkesMod's most popular ideas.

That's all, folks from r/RocketLeague

To return to the topic of EAC itself, some players are reporting performance issues which they believe to be linked to EAC, though most seem to have noticed no impact on performance. I played last night and noticed no impact with the naked eye, and have just tested with a frame-counter and am seeing no drops in performance.

Other players are just delighted that EAC seems to have instantly nixed some problem areas for Rocket League.

"It completely cleared out the win trading bots," writes tbrockl337. "Which were making it difficult to get one fair game let alone two in a row. And having to also deal with the impacts of swapping back and forth from trying to beat bots to trying to beat people. The game feels real and natural again. We should be thrilled. I certainly am."

The arrival of EAC has seen a small spike in negative reviews for the game, which is perhaps to be expected, though I doubt the sentiment will persist: and Epic has added this to fix some specific problems, so it feels incredibly unlikely the decision will be reversed. Which is unfortunate for BakkesMod above all else, though perhaps there the creator is right. Some things do have a natural end point.

Epic Games has confirmed that it will offer "self-service" refunds on D4vd cosmetics in Fortnite. The move comes after the singer, real name David Anthony Burke, was charged with the first-degree murder of a 14-year-old girl who went missing in 2024. At this point, however, Epic has not indicated that the cosmetics will be removed from Fortnite entirely.

"We hear the concerns," Epic said via the Fortnite Status account on X, confirming a report of a previously processed refund. "We have a bunch of changes we’re rolling out over time. The first one will be available on Tuesday April 28th, when anyone who purchased one of these items will be able to get an immediate self-service refund. And, right now, players who request refunds for D4vd cosmetics via player support can be refunded."

D4vd came to prominence in 2021 by posting Fortnite gameplay montages backed by his original music; he released two charting singles in 2022, and a pair of EPs the following year. His first studio album, Withered, was released in 2025. He also performed at The Game Awards in 2024, joining 21 Pilots and Royal & the Serpent to perform music from the League of Legends animated series Arcane. He was charged with the murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez on April 20, more than six months after her remains were found in a Tesla registered to D4vd's address.

The reaction to Epic's decision to allow refunds for D4vd cosmetics in Fortnite, but to leave the items and the singer's music in place, seems for the most part to be that it doesn't go far enough. A few people have trotted out the "innocent until proven guilty" argument, as though Fortnite is a court of law and not an extraordinarily lucrative commercial product with pressing reputational concerns. Most, though, say the items should be removed from the game completely.

That would not be without precedent: Epic very quickly pulled the Peaceful Hips emote from Peacemaker in 2025, for instance, when its apparent pro-Nazi symbolism became very hard to overlook.

Rolling Stone reports that D4vd was dropped by his record label, Interscope, in 2025, after police began investigating the singer as a suspect in the murder. Following his arrest, singers who have collaborated with D4vd, including Holly Humberstone, Laufey, and Kali Uchis have also reportedly begun removing those works from streaming platforms.

D4vd, who is now 21, has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Epic declined to comment.

I used to think that the heart of a perfect Fortnite Battle Royale loot pool was two strong shotguns: a pump-action for raw one-shot power, and an automatic shotgun for drawn out fights. Pump shotguns bark the last word in expert hands, but spammy weapons are more forgiving if, like me, your aim is mush.

Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 2 has disabused me of that notion. It's proved that more—more choice, more playstyles, more power—is simply better, so long as each individual weapon has its own quirk.

The recent addition of the Super Shredder, a funky shotgun-sniper hybrid whose spread shrinks to a pinpoint when aimed in, gives us four solid shotguns. The Chaos Reloader is the best, but the Iron Pump and Shredder are close behind. The Dual Hammer is probably the weakest but even they have their place because of their forgiving spread sustained damage over time. A friend who plays on a controller swears by them.

What impresses me most is that there's real intention and thought behind each one. They all enable a completely different playstyle—and each has weaknesses you must compensate for elsewhere in your loadout.

Chaos theory

The single-shot Chaos Reloader is clearly the beast of the pack. Its body shots hit like a runaway train, dealing up to 150 damage, but you can only fire once before reloading. Missed shots are brutal. I've died multiple times because I've missed, switched weapons, sprayed, swapped back to my Chaos and fired a blank because it hadn't finished reloading. You need to pair it with a reliable spray weapon and you can't just run, for example, a long-range DMR alongside it.

The Iron Pump's 2x headshot multiplier is brilliant, but if you're hitting the body its damage per second is piddly at around 80—one of the lowest for any weapon in the game. It demands precision and nifty feet to dance in and out of cover, matching your clicks to the slow fire rate.

The Super Shredder's wayward hipfire necessitates you aiming down your sights, making it harder to track your targets up close, while the Dual Hammer shotguns are consistent but lack one-shot power. They're therefore weak against enemies who jiggle in and out of cover, or during a box fight, where you might only have a split second to fire before your opponent builds a barrier.

My shotgun thoughts mirror my general feeling on this season's lootpool. Epic has nailed it. My tier list, which I update regularly, bulges in its A and B tiers. Pick up any three weapons and you'll probably have a viable combo: a refreshing change to the tired meta dominated by red-dot rifles. I've particularly enjoyed the renaissance of SMGs after multiple chapters of irrelevance.

But more than any other season in memory, it feels like the shotgun you pick determines your loadout and playstyle. Carry the Chaos and you need a powerful short-range secondary—an assault rifle won't cut it. Pick the Shredder and you'll want to keep your distance; the Dual Hammers work only if you can apply constant pressure. Switching guns between rounds lends variety to every Fortnite session, and a healthy mixture within a squad prepares you for every situation. Player numbers might be dwindling but I can't remember a better shotgun meta.

In February this year, Turkiye's Family and Social Services Ministry announced draft legislation to impose various restrictions and overweening oversight on Steam, Epic, and other gaming platforms. The country's parliament has now approved the bill, with some minor changes, which will mean tough times ahead for such platforms, and newly limited access for Turkish players.

The bill is part of a wider legislative push which, the government claims, is about protecting children by restricting access to things like social media. Some of the requirements of the new legislation are pretty boilerplate, such as clearly displaying age ratings and offering "clear [and] easy-to-use" parental tools, but the platform-holders will surely breathe a sigh of relief that the regulator will not have the authority to ban them (though it can throttle traffic after certain violations).

Any gaming platform that has more than 100,000 daily users in Turkiye must now appoint a local representative (though they don't have to open an office). This rep's contact info must be easily accessible on the platform itself, declared to the authorities, and they have to respond to government requests within a strict timeframe.

If the platforms breach the new rules, first up is a warning and one month to correct the violation. If they fail to fix the issue to the authorities' satisfaction within that month, then it's a 10 million Turkish lira fine ($223,000), and after another month of non-compliance the fine trebles to 30 million Turkish lira ($668,000). Should the fines not have the desired effect, this is when the regulator would begin limiting access speeds to the platform in question.

But next to the social media companies, gaming platforms arguably got off lightly. Many more draconian proposals were rejected. The bill no longer grants authorities the power to shut down gaming platforms, and it removes a requirement for mandatory data-sharing with the government, as well as one for maximum playtime limits. A proposal to ban unrated games was rejected, though they will now be automatically assigned an 18+ rating. Individual developers no longer have the duty to verify a user's age: it's down to the platforms.

The large social media firms, on the other hand, got it in the neck. First up, all social media for children under 15 is now banned in Turkiye. In addition, these platforms must now comply with content removal requests that involve national security or public safety within one hour, as well as ensuring any deleted material cannot be re-uploaded. They'll also be required to provide data to the authorities on-demand with a 15-day deadline for compliance, and to fund risk assessments on the social impact of their platforms.

There's also a new framework of fines for social media platforms, and much more onerous consequences if their new obligations are not met. If a platform does not act on an issue within 30 days of being asked, the regulator can now prohibit any new advertising on the platform. Should the authorities still be unhappy, they can then impose bandwidth reductions of 50 percent that can rise to 90 percent.

The problem being, of course, that what's a matter of "public safety" or "illegal content" is very much in the eye of the authoritarian beholder. This bill was introduced under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose government is routinely accused of authoritarian media censorship and information suppression: it says this is all about ensuring child safety, but being able to squeeze these sites in such a way is a big stick that can be waved at them for all sorts of reasons as the Turkish government sees fit.

Although the law has been passed, it has not yet come into effect. When it does, Steam and everyone else will have six months to comply with the new regulations.

Valve risks fines of up to AU$825,000 a day if it fails to respond to a transparency notice issued to it by the Australian government's eSafety Commissioner. According to a statement released by the regulator, Steam is "reportedly a hub for a number of extreme-right communities", and must explain to Australia how it is "identifying, preventing and responding to these harms".

Valve isn't the only gaming organisation under fire: Roblox, Microsoft (for Minecraft), and Epic Games (for Fortnite) have all been served transparency notices as well.

"We’ve seen numerous media reports about grooming taking place on all four of these platforms as well as terrorist and violent extremist-themed gameplay," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said. "This includes Islamic State-inspired games and recreations of mass shootings on Roblox, as well as far right groups recreating fascist imagery in Minecraft.

"Media reports have also pointed to games in Fortnite gamifying the horrific events of the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp and the January 6th US Capitol Building riots, while Steam is reportedly a hub for a number of extreme-right communities."

I've reached out to Valve for comment and will update if I hear back.

Concerning Fortnite, Epic Games said in a statement that its rules "prohibit extremism, child endangerment, dangerous or illegal activities and threats of real world violence. The islands mentioned in the story violated our rules and we took action against them in 2024."

It continues: "Epic’s text chat filters remove mature language including hate speech, and our systems automatically report potentially high-harm interactions in text chat with players under 18 so we can take action. Fortnite has built-in protections for younger players including high-privacy default settings for players under 18 and voice and text chat are off for players under 16 until a parent consents. Using Epic’s Parental Controls, parents can customise their family’s experience including choosing who their child can communicate with."

The notice has been served by the same Australian government organisation responsible for forming new Age-Restricted Material Codes which, in theory, require age verification measures to be implemented to prevent under-18s accessing adult material. While that rule has been in force since March not everyone has implemented it, despite the threat of penalties "up to AU$49.5 million". Steam hasn't implemented any such measures. Nor has Rockstar, according to AFR, though Sony is in the process of rolling them out.

Sony is using Yoti for its age verification checks; other platforms, like Roblox but also Substack, use Persona, which was backed by Founders Fund, an investment firm co-founded by Palantir's Peter Thiel. As I've written before, keeping children from accessing adult material is important, but surrendering personal information—including photo ID—to third-party companies is a legitimate privacy concern.

Still, the eSafety Commissioner isn't interested in how these things are done, only that they're done.

It's certainly not the first time Valve has faced criticism for allegedly allowing extremist material on Steam. A US senator took Gabe Newell to task for it in 2022, and yet another US senator did the same in 2024, deeming Steam an "unsafe place for teens and young adults".

In the wake of severe layoffs last month, Epic's increasingly looking to the House of Mouse to shore up its flagging fortunes, per a recent report from Bloomberg.

At the time of the layoffs, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote that the company was "spending significantly more" than it was making thanks to a slump in engagement with Fortnite—far and away Epic's chief money-printing instrument—since 2025. "Despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season," wrote Sweeney.

But Sweeney and other Epic direction-setters hope Mickey can sort it, it seems. Disney's $1.5 billion investment in Epic two years ago will bear its first fruit in November, in the form of a Disney-themed extraction shooter starring the corporation's characters. Which sounds like a great way to get a lot more videos of Goofy melodramatically buying the farm, so I'm all in favour.

Per Bloomberg's unnamed sources, internal responses to the game have been, ah, a little underwhelming. In particular, there are concerns at the company that the game's mechanics might not be the most original, though Epic's senior director of global communications Liz Markman has come out and said that Bloomberg's description of the situation is "not reflective of the ambitions of the Disney collaboration. We are building a new games and entertainment universe of Disney experiences."

I've reached out to Epic to ask about all this, and will update if I hear back.

But whether Epic staff love Call of Goofy: Warzone* or not, it's not the only Disney-shaped basket the company's putting its eggs in. The extraction shooter is tipped to be the first Disney/Epic collab to break cover, but Epic is geared up to produce at least two more after that. No details on those, though, save that the second game has apparently also earned tepid internal reviews.

Me? I'm not sure how much room the world has left for more extraction shooters, but I will also cop to the fact that—as a rapidly ageing millennial man who spends most of his time thinking about how good Uplink was—I am perhaps as far away from the target audience of a Disney extraction shooter as its possible to be. I'm certainly ready for a deluge of clips of Winnie the Pooh execution moves, though, so put me down as a tentative 'aye'.

*Probably not the actual title. It should be.

At this point what isn't in Fortnite? Godzilla in Jordans? Check. Our favourite virtual popstar Hatsune Miku? That would be a yes. So I'm never really surprised when I see a new collab announced for Fortnite, and the latest Toy Story crossover is no exception to that.

Teased in a short video that Fortnite shared to its socials, it shows a delivery car from Pizza Planet drive along and stop, followed by what seems to be Buzz Lightyear stepping out and walking off. I say 'seems to be' because we don't actually get a good look at Buzz.

This raises a couple of questions. First off, which other toys will join the collaboration? Some fans are wondering where Woody is in all of this, but I don't doubt he'll be announced as part of the collaboration for its release. I'm really just wondering if we'll get the chance to play as one of the aliens.

Not only would that be some excellent emote or voiceline fodder with 'The Claw' and 'Ooooooohhhh' but it would also just be pretty fun to run around and merk people as a little green alien. There's no word yet on whether this could be an option so I'll just wait and hope for now.

But the other question this collab has me asking is will the toys be human-sized or toy-sized. I assume they'll be the same size character models as the rest of the characters, as it would be pretty unfair to go up against a tiny toy that you can barely see let alone shoot. But I can only imagine how horrifying it would be to see a life-size Woody sprinting towards you. Again, only time will tell if this horror comes to fruition. But I do have a feeling we'll be having to deal with human-sized toys chasing us around.

For the first time ever, I am genuinely worried about Fortnite's future.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced last week that 1,000 people—about a fifth of all staff—would lose their job. The company brings in an estimated $6 billion a year but is "spending significantly more" than it is making, Sweeney said, citing a "downturn in Fortnite engagement".

Let's leave aside the question of just how Epic is spending more than $1 million per employee; let's also leave aside the depressing fact that one of the most-played, most successful, most monetized games of all time cannot secure the future of its talented staff, now sacrificed to maintain sacred shareholder value. Let's instead think about what this means for Fortnite The Video Game.

"What we now need to do is clear," said Sweeney in his statement: "build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events." More revealing than Sweeney's corpo-babble were the words of Fortnite producer Robby Williams, who posted on X that the aftermath of the layoffs would be "very hard and painful."

"Our teams will have to pick up the pieces and try to keep moving forward but we cannot even fully understand what kind of impacts this will have on the game for the rest of the year and likely beyond," he wrote.

Fortnite could go lots of ways from here. Not all of them are dreadful.

I can feasibly imagine a future in which Epic renews its focus on its core game modes of Battle Royale, Reload, and OG. If that happens, we might continue to see regular imaginative updates, in line with the fresh loot pool and rivalry system introduced in Chapter 7 Season 2 (although it's inevitable some will hit, some will miss). That consolidation may already be in motion: alongside the layoffs Epic announced it was cutting three peripheral modes.

But it's not hard to envisage a very different future, one in which remaining staff are under pressure to drive up precious "engagement" with fewer resources. It is clear that maintaining the status quo won't cut it. Big number must go up—and the dev team, however talented, are swimming against the tide. Fortnite's cultural cache is waning, fan goodwill is leaking away, and the general public have less money to spend.

And if Sweeney thinks a full-strength dev team has "had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season," then what does he expect to happen when he lops a limb off? After layoffs some tasks are inevitably absorbed by, or more accurately poured onto, remaining staff, who find their days stretching longer, their inboxes bursting. Tired, stressed minds rarely produce the "magic" Sweeney is hoping for.

From what Williams says, there's no clear roadmap for what happens next. Staff appear to have been caught off-guard: principal engineer Evan Kinney said he was "confused and bewildered" after spending the past week debugging the new Rivals system while recovering from pneumonia.

The first priority for developers, quite rightly, must be to come to terms with the change and steady the ship. I'd be amazed if planned features were not delayed and burgeoning ideas shelved until it becomes clear just how bad the damage is. Then, somehow, they must look forward.

What happens in, say, a year if those remaining staff have not performed the miracle of both pulling in more players and convincing them to spend more money? Does Epic keep cutting, cutting, cutting? Does it look to the success of third-party modes like Steal The Brainrot, and try to copy them?

All this is taking place at a time where fan sentiment is at an all-time low. The apparent proliferation of AI art and music, revolts over price hikes for the V-bucks in-game currency, now, the game's official subreddit is full of the names and stories of developers who have lost their jobs—with posts about Sweeney's failures mixed in.

I know that Fortnite's subreddit is not its fan base. I reckon that lots of players either don't know or don't care about what's happened this week. But they will probably notice if updates slow, if the enormous ambition Fortnite shows season after season—new weapons, new maps, entire new systems—fizzles out.

I hope—really hope—that Fortnite's devs strike gold and reverse the trend of gradually declining (albeit still massive) player counts. But I can't help but fear the worst.

It's no secret that layoffs often upend lives, but a particular pain point for workers in the United States is that it's exceedingly common to only have health insurance through your employer. If a sudden layoff blindsides you, your coverage goes with your income. So it went with Mike Prinke, a technical writer who worked at Epic for seven years—right up until the studio laid off 1,000 people last week.

Prinke's termination came amid particularly awful circumstances: He's currently undergoing treatment for terminal brain cancer. His wife, Jenni Griffin, posted about their situation on Facebook in a plea to Epic or anyone who could help. Epic's post announcing the layoffs said impacted staff would receive paid healthcare coverage for six months, but the nature of Prinke's illness means medical coverage is not their only hurdle.

"Because of the layoff, we didn’t just lose income—we lost his life insurance. And because his condition is now considered a pre-existing condition, he can't get new coverage," Griffin wrote. "As I face the reality of losing my husband… I'm also facing the reality of what type of funeral/burial I can afford. How I will keep a roof over our heads. How I will protect our son and the life we built together. What will happen to our dogs.

"I truly believe that if the people who made this decision understood the full human impact, they would not have intended this outcome. Mike is not just a number. He is a father. A husband. A person deeply loved."

In an interview with Kotaku, Griffin said Prinke's condition was well-known within the studio, as he had frequent appointments. Some of these included specialized treatments to prevent memory loss so he could maintain a high performance at his job.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney spoke about Prinke's situation on X, replying to a thread from a Fortnite news account which tagged him and asked "ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?" In his reply, Sweeney said "Epic is in contact with the family and will solve the insurance for them.

"There is high confidentiality around medical information and it was not a factor in this layoff decision. Sorry to everyone for not recognizing this terribly painful situation and handling it in advance."

Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who left the company in 2017 and whose credits include the Half-Life 2 episodes, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has taken aim at Epic over the latest round of swingeing layoffs imposed by the company. Over 1000 people are out of a job, while Epic CEO Tim Sweeney arguably rubbed salt in the wound by saying other companies would now be able to hire all these high quality staff.

"Can someone explain this to me," begins Faliszek on TikTok. "Why anybody who works at Epic should work hard? Cause Epic just laid off 1,000 people. And it's gonna shut down Fortnite Rocket Racing, Ballistic and Festival Battle stage, whatever that is. Who knows?

"It's not like they're a publicly traded company. It's not like there's some need to hit the stock market thing. This is Tim Sweeney. This is Tim. A thousand people is more than [the number] who work at Valve."

Faliszek doesn't hold back, and proceeds to rain down scorn on Sweeney in particular.

"And so Tim has gone from making games to making one game, spending all his time doing that and trying to make as much money as possible," says Faliszek. "And I guess well, hey, Tim, Gabe's better at that than you. I don't know what to tell you, man, because you stopped caring about making things."

It's worth bearing in mind that Faliszek may feel a little protective towards his former boss, because Sweeney's never been shy of picking a fight (in 2017, Valve's COO internally replied to Newell about a Sweeney rant simply saying: "you mad bro?"). Since the launch of the Epic Games Store, Sweeney has heavily criticized the cut of Steam sales Valve takes—20%-30% today—arguing that it's a "bad deal for developers" that hurts PC gaming.

"You just make one game," continues Faliszek. "If you work there, maybe you really love that game. But how do you have any agency? How do you have any ownership when you're just gonna get laid off like this?

"When I worked at Valve, I owned Valve," says Faliszek. "It was my company. I don't know if you know that, and some people may laugh about this."

It's not 100% clear what Faliszek means here, because Valve remains a private company, though that of course doesn't preclude employees from being given a slice. But it seems more likely, based on what he goes on to discuss, Faliszek means a more intangible kind of ownership based around real pride in what they were doing.

"I don't get why you remove that agency from people," says Faliszek. "Like, why would you care? Why would you think that your hard work is going to be rewarded? I worked my ass off at Valve, and I cared about the things I made, and I cared about the people I worked with so much.

"If I'm at work, I wanna go home and I wanna be with my family. But if I'm at work, then I'm gonna work my ass off, so the time away is worth it. And I've just always worked that way. Not to say that's always better, and I think sometimes it's problematic, and I wish I could just kind of chill out like some people do, but I work my ass off.

"Would I do that at Epic if they're gonna treat me like that and just have layoffs like that and just act the same way [as EA]? Like, hey, 'great job, made Battlefield 6, we dethroned Call of Duty: here's a pink slip.'"

Faliszek says it infuriates him to see "lazy dev" complaints when companies like Epic "just cut them off at the knees, man." He suggests looking at the documentary about Half-Life and Valve: "And how many people still work there after all those years?"

And it turns out the salary was good. Very good. "They care so much about what they're making that they're still there and they're all rewarded handsomely," says Faliszek. "To be clear, I could retire, I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today. I made more money than I'll ever make. And the money I made is dwarfed by the people who were there longer than me or before me.

"But Valve understood that. That's how you get this thing where people cared, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving. What they were building on was something that they had agency over and owned. Like, even now, I'm excited when I see the Valve announcement about the VR stuff and everything, that makes me happy.

"Would you be that way about Epic now? Everybody I know at Epic that was like 'the Epic guy' that had been there forever is gone. I mean, maybe there's still some people there besides Tim, but the people that I liked and trusted, they're gone. How do you build on that?

"I mean, Tim, you're the one who decided to buy Bandcamp. I get what you're trying to do, but come on, man. You raise V-buck prices to make ends meet, and now you're gonna lay off a thousand people and wonder why the industry's in the place it is?"

Faliszek circles back round on the idea of ownership and opines that, after layoffs like this, most of Epic's remaining staff are "just gonna clock in." Not that this is likely to be an issue after this particular TikTok, but he adds "I sure as hell wouldn't go work at a place that I didn't think respected me and wouldn't reward that."

He then draws a line between this latest round of layoffs and the wider industry picture. "What we're doing to the industry now and the seniority, we're losing the care, we're losing the passion," says Faliszek. "That just freaks me out, man. I guess if you are of my mindset, that's why you do your own thing, but I would much rather take care of people, reward them, show them that their hard work counts: and they'll invest and work hard."

I asked Epic Games and Tim Sweeney for comment on Faliszek's remarks. The company did not respond to them specifically, but pointed me towards the Newsroom post it released on 24 March addressing the layoffs.

Certainly the mood music coming out of Epic right now is dire. Yesterday Fortnite's producer asked for patience as the remaining developers "pick up the pieces" after massive layoffs, adding: "We cannot even fully understand what kind of impacts this will have on the game for the rest of the year and likely beyond."

Horizon Chase Turbo and its mobile-only predecessor, Horizon Chase, will be delisted on June 1, according to the series' official X account. That means neither will be available to purchase, but if you own them, they'll still be downloadable.

It's a strange decision at face value. Horizon Chase Turbo is a pure arcade racer with no licensed vehicles. It has tracks like 'Morning Walk' and 'Asphalt and Sunshine', so there wouldn't be costs associated with using real world racing circuits like Monaco or Mount Panorama. Horizon Chase Turbo has no online component either.

It's a headscratcher until you remember that Horizon Chase studio Aquiris is owned by Epic Games, and that Epic Games laid off more than 1,000 employees yesterday. I've reached out to Aquiris and Epic to see if this has impacted the studio and its games, and if not, why these delistings are happening.

Horizon Chase 2 will remain available. It was originally released as an Apple Arcade exclusive in 2022 before making the jump to PC and consoles the following year, at around the same time Aquiris was acquired by Epic with a view to transforming it into Epic Games Brasil. Epic had previously made an investment in Aquiris in early 2022.

Horizon Chase 2 launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive on PC, though Horizon Chase Turbo remains available on Steam.

Yesterday's layoff of more than 1,000 employees at Epic Games was driven in part by behind-the-scenes issues with Fortnite: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that "despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season." Very roughly, 20% of Epic's workforce was let go—the studio said just over 4,000 people remained at Epic following the layoff—and in the wake of that very deep cut, Fortnite producer Robby Williams is asking for patience while developers "pick up the pieces" and try to figure out what comes next.

"I appreciate the outcry of support and empathy that I've seen from the community today, and I just ask that you please show as much love as you can offer to those that were impacted. None of them deserve this and it's not at all reflective of their work or their impact," Williams wrote in a thread on X (via Eurogamer).

"What comes next is very hard and painful. Our teams will have to pick up the pieces and try to keep moving forward but we cannot even fully understand what kind of impacts this will have on the game for the rest of the year and likely beyond.

"I'll continue to do my best to keep making the best game for you, and i'm confident that my peers feel the same, but please be patient with us as we navigate this tough time and do our best in spite of these truly gut-wrenching losses."

Maybe I've just grown too accustomed to receiving "no comment" or stone silence when I ask people about things, but I'm honestly a little surprised that an Epic developer is speaking so freely on such a sensitive topic. Because Williams' thread paints a remarkable picture of, if not chaos, then at least uncomfortable uncertainty in the wake of layoffs that clearly caught everyone by surprise.

This will hopefully be a temporary state of affairs. Sweeney said in the layoff announcement that Epic will hold a company meeting on March 26 "to talk about the roadmap in more detail," so developers may receive some clarity about the path forward then. At this point, though, the sheer scale of the bloodletting means it sounds like Fortnite, and the Fortnite dev team, could be in for a rough year.

Just yesterday, Epic Games announced that it had laid off more than 1,000 employees from across the company, as well as cutting over $500 million in contracting, marketing, and closing job posts. According to CEO Tim Sweeney, Epic is still "spending significantly more than [it's] making," despite the company running one of the most popular games in history, Fortnite, and Unreal Engine, which is used widely across the industry.

Sweeney put this down to Fortnite's ongoing "downturn" in engagement and "current consoles selling less than last generation's." Only a passing reference to Epic's years-long legal disputes with Apple and Google, which ultimately resulted in victory for Epic at a high cost.

Naturally, after laying off more than 1,000 employees, Sweeney went to X to explain that, "In the coming days, employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks."

Sweeney goes on to say that "Epic never lowered [its] hiring standards as [it] grew, and the layoff wasn't a performance-based 'rightsizing'... It's a sound bet that anyone with Epic Games on their resume is in the top few percent of their discipline."

And… he's not wrong on that account, I guess, but I'm not sure the affected staff will share the same self-righteous tone. Epic sure did lay off some very talented people, such as:

• Game producer Paige Dugre, who worked on the C7S2 and C6S3 maps, The Simpsons mini-season, and much more
• Principal engineer Evan Kinney, responsible for game security and helped shape various events, replay mode, and the upcoming rivalry system (which they say they spent the last week debugging while recovering from pneumonia)
• Character art lead Vitaliy Naymushin, who created Jonesy (the face of Fortnite), and other characters like Ramirez, Penny, Kyle, and so on
• Senior environmental artist George Sokol working on Fortnite for two years, including on Arenas and Ballistic modes
• Lead writer Nik Blahunka, who helped develop the story, world, and characters of the original Save the World and the subsequent battle royale mode for over 10 years
• Marketing manager Stephen Thompson, who's worked on Fortnite for over seven years

With Sweeney's memo yesterday laying out a clear goal to "build awesome Fortnite experiences" and "accelerate developer tools" with Unreal Engine, that can't be easy with many key people missing. And that's just six of the over 1,000 employees let go.

Alongside the layoff of more than 1,000 employees announced earlier today, Epic is also ending a trio of Fortnite modes—Rocket Racing, Ballistic, and Festival Battle Stage—and removing the racing games Horizon Chase and Horizon Chase Turbo from sale.

The Fortnite modes are being removed because, Epic said, "we've built a lot of Fortnite modes, and in some cases we failed to build something awesome enough to attract and retain a large player base."

Ballistic, "a deeply unserious Counter-strike clone" that we predicted was going to be huge (whoops) and Fortnite Festival's musical PvP mode Battle Stage will go offline on April 16 with the launch of Fortnite 40.20.

Rocket Racing, "along with all UEFN islands built with Rocket Racing templates," will follow in October 2026. Ahead of that, Rocket Racing Quests will be removed next week, the track creation template will be removed from UEFN, and no further ranked rewards will be offered this season.

Horizon Chase Turbo is not a Fortnite mode, but rather a standalone game inspired by arcade racers of the 1980s and '90s released in 2018. And it's apparently a pretty good one: The Epic Store doesn't support user reviews but Steam does, and over there Horizon Chase Turbo boasts a "very positive" rating across more than 4,000 user reviews—not a monster hit but definitely a 'recommend' for fans of the genre. A demo for Horizon Chase Turbo is also available on Steam, so you can get a few laps in before it's gone even if you don't feel like throwing money at it.

Both the original Horizon Chase, a mobile game, and Horizon Chase Turbo will be removed from sale on June 1. Horizon Chase 2, which launched for PC as an Epic Games Store exclusive in 2023, will remain available. The likelihood of new games in the series being developed seems not great: Epic acquired developer Aquiris in 2023 and renamed it to Epic Games Brasil, saying it would "create groundbreaking content and social experiences within Fortnite."

Epic Games has laid off more than 1,000 employees. CEO Tim Sweeney says the company is still "spending significantly more" than it's making as a result of an ongoing slump in Fortnite engagement that began in 2025, which has necessitated "major cuts to keep the company funded."

Sweeney said some of the problems facing Epic are endemic to the game industry, such as "current consoles selling less than last generation's," while others are unique to Epic. "Despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, we've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season," Sweeney wrote about the layoffs.

Sweeney also referenced Epic's years-long legal disputes with Apple and Google, an effort that ultimate resulted in victory for Epic but only after a drawn-out and surely very expensive process: "We're only in the early stages of returning to mobile and optimizing Fortnite for the world's billions of smartphones; and in being the industry's vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers."

Sweeney also stated the layoffs "aren't related to AI."

The plan going forward is to "build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events," Sweeney continued, and "build awesome Fortnite experiences with fresh seasonal content, gameplay, story, and live events." He also teased a launch of "the next generation of Epic" nearer the end of the year, and your guess is as good as ours as to what that will entail.

"Market conditions today are the most extreme we've seen" since the early days of Epic, which was founded in 1991 and officially became Epic Megagames the following year, Sweeney wrote. But there's also "massive opportunity for the companies that come out as winners on the other side," he added, which is what Epic is now focused on.

The layoffs come just over two years after Epic laid off more than 800 employees, cuts that occurred in September 2023 for essentially the same reason: "We've been spending way more money than we earn," Sweeney said at the time. He said in October 2024 that Epic was "financially sound" after spending the previous year "rebuilding and really executing solidly on all fronts." It also follows just two weeks after Epic raised the price of Fortnite V-Bucks, saying "the cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot."

Epic told PC Gamer that following the layoffs it will have just over 4,000 employees remaining.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 reveal has pulled in some very strong opinions. Since its unveiling, both Nvidia and Bethesda have clarified that developers will have creative freedom, but many developers have labelled it "slop" and "disrespectful to the intentional art direction of devs". One particularly strong voice in favour of the tech is the lead producer of Epic Games, Jean Pierre Kellams.

As shared over on X, Kellams says, "All you guys roasting DLSS 5 like it doesn’t look better/is detracting from art direction are absolutely insane."

"The lighting and shading improvements are bonkers. If that was shown as a next-gen hardware reveal and not “AI” you guys would be going nuts like the Watch Dogs demo."

If you don't know Kellams for his work on the likes of Fortnite, you may know him for his history with Platinum Games, working on the English adaptation of Bayonetta 2, The Wonderful 101, Devil May Cry, and more.

Ex-Intel alum and former owner of PC Perspective, Ryan Shrout, said that Kellam's post "seems like the right answer to me", and they went hands-on with the tech yesterday. They argue it's "not a face filter" and "What I saw in the demos was a comprehensive improvement across the entire scene. And the moment that really drove this home wasn't a face. It was a coffee maker."

Shrout says, "One of the things I came away most encouraged by is the developer control story. This is critical. If DLSS 5 were a black box that slapped a one-size-fits-all enhancement over every game, the artistic intent concerns would be completely valid. But that's not what this is."

Interestingly, when a comment inevitably brings up the yassified Grace Ashcroft Nvidia showed off, Kellams argues, "Her skin shader has much better subsurface scattering (she doesn't have the Japanese game character perfect skin). Her lips actually have creases now. Her ear stud is now catching light properly."

Kellams finalizes his point, saying, "If I was a technical artist, I'd be begging for this right now. It's essentially making super high resolution physically accurate lighting trivially cheap. If this is the demo, I can't wait until tech artists start really digging in."

Part of his argument is that DLSS 5 could be resource-efficient and that "the technical trade offs that you have to make for performance to get that level of lighting is untenable."

Notably, this is something Nvidia noted with its RTX 50 series launch. In a demo, showing off neural materials, it managed to bring down memory usage on fabric by a third, which certainly does bolster this opinion. It claims "Neural Texture Compression leverages neural networks accessed through neural shaders to compress and decompress material textures more efficiently than traditional methods."

Notably, when discussing artistic intent, Kellams argues that you can't guess at intent until a director comes out and states as such, and that some of the tone or atmosphere from games are purely tradeoffs made for certain engines or models. He claims Nvidia's Resident Evil Requiem demo "has WAY WAY WAY better lighting" and a more realistic world.

"The gloominess you became accustomed to is actually a feature of lighting tradeoffs that DLSS 5 is 'fixing'", Kellams states.

Though the demo Shrout and the likes of Digital Foundry got access to was seen running through two RTX 5090s, it's worth noting that it will be at max 4K settings for demonstration purposes, and Nvidia has said the tech will be usable on a single GPU when it launches later this year. We'll have to get hands-on to find out the performance hit you will get in return for DLSS 5.

But wide adoption of DLSS 5 will largely be about how consumers react to it, and Kellams thinks that ship has already sailed. "I get that some very vocal people don’t like AI. But guess what. Technology doesn’t care if you like it. It is a tool. AI isn’t coming. It is here. Just this morning my oncologist was telling me all the ways it is helping cancer treatment and research."

Tim Sweeney, the CEO and co-founder of Epic Games, is not short of a quarter or two: depending on which estimate you go with, he's worth anywhere between $5 billion and $9 billion. And it turns out that Sweeney has been using some of his cash to one admirable end: buying up swathes of forest in North Carolina, purely to protect it from development.

A new report in The Times of India points out that this has ended up with Sweeney becoming one of the largest private landowners in the state, with his holdings amounting to roughly 50,000 acres of land over 15 counties. That's roughly 78 square miles of forest, the size of a small city.

Sweeney began his Captain Planet arc in 2008, spurred by some of the fallout from the global financial crash, which saw developers abandoning housing and resort projects across the board as financing disappeared. He began to purchase forests and wilderness that were at risk of development, with the end result being to preserve them as they are for wildlife and future generations to enjoy.

One of Sweeney's largest single purchases is called Box Creek Wilderness, which is a 7,000-acre forest in the Blue Ridge foothills. Sweeney reportedly paid around $15 million for the area, which contains more than 130 rare or threatened species of both animal and plant.

And Sweeney's not just sitting on it all for himself. In 2021 his strategy shifted: he told the News & Observer that, thanks to economic shifts, land was becoming too expensive to keep buying. Sweeney then began to look into turning his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status.

"Most of my big conservation land purchasing breakthroughs came when the economy was in poor shape and land was prudently priced," said Sweeney. "Since 2021, the economy has been stronger, land has become more expensive, and my focus has moved to getting large blocks of contiguous conservation lands I’ve acquired since 2009 into permanent conservation."

He uses a Limited Liability Company called "130 of Chatham" to make the purchases, holds it for years, then either donates it to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a steep discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In such cases, per former Epic employee Aakash Gupta, he ensures there's a legal structure that makes development on the land impossible regardless of future ownership.

In 2021 Sweeney donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, which marks the largest private land donation in North Carolina history."

"This extraordinary gift ensures that these remarkable mountain landscapes will remain intact forever," said Carl Silverstein of the conservancy when the land transfer was announced. The Roan Highlands are known for rare spruce-fir ecosystems and are one of the most diverse regions in the southern Appalachians.

There is of course a more cynical way to look at this, involving financial advisers doing financial advisor things. Others will point out that the money involved represents a fraction of Sweeney's total wealth. But the upshot remains the same regardless: the forests and wilderness don't get flattened and developed.

As Sweeney said in 2021: "If you can protect land permanently, it will outlast any one person." So the next time you buy a Sabrina Carpenter skin on Fortnite, rest assured a little chunk of your V-Bucks really are doing some good.

Fortnite announced this week that V-Bucks—the last remaining currency with any goddamn dependability around here—are about to get more expensive. "The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills," said Epic.

I'm not a Fortniter (no reflexes at my age, you see), but given the size of the game, my assumption is this news had an economic impact roughly equivalent to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Anyway, you might be surprised to hear the announcement didn't exactly wash with fans, who seem remarkably unfazed by Epic Games' rising gas bill and what-have-you. The community reaction was immediate, dramatic, and decidedly unthrilled at the notion of spending the same amount of money to get fewer V-Bucks. Some cancelled their Fortnite Crew subs (the Crew grant now only totals 800 V-Bucks, as opposed to 1,000), some vented on social media, some are attempting to organise a boycott under the slogan "You cut our V-Bucks. We cut your funding."

As an entity, Epic's been pretty stoic about the backlash and didn't comment on the matter when I reached out, but at least a couple of Fortnite devs have been out and about on social media trying to quell the rage. "Seeing comments like 'the Item Shop is the main focus instead of the game' hits me really hard," wrote Andre Balta, Epic's senior director for ecosystem growth, on X.

"It's not the impression we want to give nor how we focus our efforts. We put a ton of work and care into Fortnite’s gameplay and this focus is only growing. Paying the bills frees up our teams to continue driving stories and building stuff you love." Ted Timmins, Fortnite's design director, likewise chimed in to echo those sentiments.

But the horse seems to have bolted, and I'm not sure anything Epic could say—beyond "fine okay we won't make V-Bucks more expensive"—would mollify the angriest players at this point, who are currently agitating for a boycott of the game on March 19. And, yes, there are plenty of other players wondering if a one-day boycott will actually do anything, and suggesting a longer one instead.

If you're anything like me, videogame boycotts are something you greet with a hearty "Yeah yeah, sure thing buddy." The history of attempted boycotts in this mould—out of anger from proposed changes to monetisation or gameplay—is long and inglorious, and I can't summon a single example of one succeeding to mind. I don't even mean succeeding in its aims, I mean succeeding at actually getting anyone to boycott anything, even if they agree to.

But anything's possible. Perhaps the Fortnite community will succeed where everyone else has failed. Players certainly seem angry enough.

Well, here's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Fortnite: Save the World, the game that gave us Epic's absurdly popular battle royale, has been quietly persisting for the better part of a decade, just chilling in the shadow of its offspring. And now it's going free to play.

I know: was it not F2P already? Apparently not!

Fortnite: Save the World had a long journey into existence. It was announced in 2011, but didn't actually appear until 2017, after several delays and significant changes, and even then it only launched in early access. Epic's plan was to make the switch to F2P eventually, but by 2020, when it left early access, that plan had been dropped entirely.

In the meantime, Save the World had already been entirely overshadowed by Fortnite Battle Royale, which was originally conceived as a mode that could capitalise on the popularity of PUBG, before it was spun off into its own separate free-to-play game.

Fortnite Battle Royale became synonymous with Fortnite—if anyone said "Fortnite", they were inevitably talking about the spin-off, not Save the World. And you could be forgiven for assuming that Save the World had ridden off into the sunset (with other Epic live service games like Paragon).

But it's still here, and come next month you'll be able to check it out without dropping any cash. It's going to open its doors to the masses on April 16, and Epic's encouraging pre-registration by promising some rewards once enough people sign up, including a cosmetic skin.

Given how competitive the live service market is these days, it'll be interesting to see what the level of interest is in returning to proto-Fortnite. It costs nothing to check out, so maybe folk will be intrigued to see where one of the most popular games ever made got its start.

Fortnite: It's pretty popular. And it makes a lot of money, sure, but it costs a lot of money too: Server infrastructure alone probably costs, well, a lot, and Epic is also kicking out money to Fortnite content creators—a lot of money, in some cases. It adds up! All of which is to say that V-Bucks, Fortnite's virtual currency, are about to get more expensive.

"The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we’re raising prices to help pay the bills," Epic said by way of minimalist explanation. What's really happening, though, is shrinkflation, an execrable economics term that describes price increases imposed by reducing the size or quantity of the product in question.

There are detailed explanations and theories you can read about shrinkflation if you're into that sort of thing, but essentially it's a way of camouflaging price hikes because the price doesn't actually go up, so people are less likely to notice and get mad about it.

Anyway, here's how V-Bucks are changing as of March 19:

Nobody likes this sort of thing, but the good news is that Epic is also ramping down the prices of its various passes. The Battle Pass and OG Pass, which previously cost 1,000 V-Bucks, will cost 800 V-Bucks following the update, while the Music Pass and Lego Pass will drop from 1,400 V-Bucks to 1,200. So on that front, at least, things will remain relatively stable.

The Battle Bundle (the Battle Pass with the first 25 levels already unlocked) is also going down, from 2,800 to 2,600 V-Bucks, and Battle Pass owners will still be able to earn enough V-Bucks by completing it to cover the cost of the next one—it'll just be 800 V-Bucks, instead of 1,000.

Hayden Cohen, a former contractor at Epic Games, is facing legal action for allegedly sharing the company's secrets on X and Discord under the name AdiraFN.

Game companies tend not to like leakers as a matter of principle, but Cohen's problems are compounded by the fact that he allegedly shared the information while under a non-disclosure agreement. NDAs, as they're known, are contracts that commit signatories to not divulging information they may discover while carrying out specific, typically job-related duties. They're serious business, as Epic's action makes clear.

Cohen signed an NDA, as required by the terms of his employment, but instead of not sharing the sensitive information as he'd promised to in the legally-binding document to which he'd affixed his signature, Epic alleges in its complaint that he "repeatedly misappropriated Epic's trade secret information and broadcasted it publicly through his anonymous social media accounts on X (formerly Twitter) and Discord, operating under the alias 'AdiraFN' and 'AdiraFNInfo'."

"The leaked information could not have been obtained through any legitimate means and was not otherwise available to the public (such as through data mining public builds of Fortnite for unreleased content)," Epic claims.

"Defendant leaked Epic's confidential trade secret information that was accessible to him solely because he worked on projects for Epic, and his corresponding access to Epic's internal systems and channels."

The social media accounts in question have been deleted or scrubbed, but evidence of AdiraFN's leakage is plentiful: As recently as February 19, for instance, the account claimed (via Hypex) that a Fortnite collaboration with Game of Thrones is in the works. Other notable crossovers leaked by the account include Kingdom Hearts, Marvel Rivals, K-Pop Demon Hunters, and He-Man.

Epic shared a couple other examples in its complaint:

Amusingly, when the AdiraFNInfo accounts were closed, a few followers speculated that it was for precisely this reason: That Epic figured out who the leaker was, and had dropped the hammer on them.

My first thought upon hearing this case was, "Why?" Why would someone torpedo their livelihood and future employment prospects just to anonymously share some secret videogame happenings? It was all for "clout," Epic said in its complaint, which alleges Cohen "regularly leaked confidential details about more than a dozen unannounced collaborations and upcoming content releases in Fortnite publicly to thousands of his followers on X and Discord, and was then amplified to reach hundreds of thousands of others with millions of views."

That doesn't seem like a great reason to start a fight with Epic's legal team, especially since it has not been reluctant to pursue matters like this in the courts, but on the other hand I've never sampled the pleasures of clout so maybe I just don't know what I'm missing. In any event, Epic is demanding a permanent injunction against further leaks, the destruction of all confidential information in Cohen's possession, and—this is the part that will hurt—financial damages and legal fees.

A Financial Times report (via Reuters) says the US government is debating whether Tencent's holdings in US and Finnish videogame companies pose a national security risk, and whether it should be forced to divest them. Multiple sources said cabinet officials were scheduled to have a meeting on the matter earlier this week, ahead of US president Donald Trump's scheduled meeting with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, but the meeting was postponed due to scheduling conflicts.

Chinese conglomerate Tencent is a major player in the Western games market. It owns studios including Riot Games and Digital Extremes outright, and has significant holdings in Epic, Larian, FromSoft, Krafton, Ubisoft, Remedy, Inflexion, Supercell, and numerous others. The FT report says that's led to concern in the US government that Tencent could gain access to personal data of US citizens, something that's traditionally been reserved for the US government and companies. (Like here. And here, and here. Oh, and here.)

(And here.)

This process has been dragging on for a while now. The US government initially turned its attention to Tencent's gaming holdings in 2020 during the first Trump administration, eventually leading to negotiations that seemed to be successful, at least to the extent that Tencent wasn't forced to sell off its holdings—although in 2025, Tencent was declared a Chinese military company by the US Department of Defense.

The second Trump administration, which we are now just over a year into, has been much more overt in its corrupt, chaotic corporate dealings. In 2025, for instance, the US arm of TikTok was sold to a company whose "managing investors" include Oracle, owned by billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison, and Silver Lake, a private equity firm that joined with investment firm Affinity Partners, owned by Trump son-in-law Jared Kusher, to assist with Saudi Arabia's acquisition of Electronic Arts. Trump also weighed in on Netflix's attempted acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying the proposed deal "could be a problem"; Netflix eventually bowed out and WBD went to Paramount, which is owned by Larry Ellison's son David, in a deal backed by—you guessed it—Saudi Arabia.

Chaos could also very easily be the result of forcing Tencent to pull out of the US games industry. Finding new money to fill the gaps left by Tencent would be a challenge to say the least, and I would guess that at least some of the larger companies involved would end up in the hands of private equity, much as TikTok did. Is that bad? Anything can happen, but this excerpt from PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter's outstanding breakdown of why the EA buyout has everyone nervous lays the reality out clearly:

"Private equity has maimed retail franchises like Party City. It has brutalized digital media outlets like the Gizmodo Media Group and demolished local news across the US. It's left hospitals full of bats and increased mortality in retirement homes. A report using S&P data found that in 2024, private equity-backed companies accounted for more than 10% of all corporate bankruptcies and over 50% of bankruptcies with over $500 million in liabilities—but "despite their role in precipitating bankruptcies, private equity firms often emerge financially unscathed."

It's not always like that, but often enough that a private equity buyout is generally not considered a desirable outcome, and given the precarious state of the games industry already I think I'd rather not tempt fate.

I've reached out to Tencent for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

I love a good moan about Fortnite: about Epic Games vaulting my beloved shockwave grenades, about the sorry state of SMGs, and about a baffling update adding off-brand weapons.

So I should give credit where credit's due. Through careful buffs and bringing back some older weapons, Epic Games has curated the best loot pool in ages.

I felt very differently a month ago. I loved Chapter 7's varied map, but one weapon—the Deadeye AR—dominated. No other rifle came close. SMGs were as irrelevant as they have been for most of the past year, and the sole sniper only felt viable in a three-weapon loadout alongside the Deadeye and a shotgun.

What a difference a few weeks can make. I took a chunk of time off as paternity leave and I've returned to find that bad weapons are suddenly good and that a new red-dot rifle, the MK-seven, is challenging the Deadeye's supremacy.

The most meaningful change has been to SMGs. Epic has ditched the fast-firing Dual Micro SMGs to focus on the Holo and Flex SMGs, buffing the damage and magazine size on both weapons. The Holo always had potential because of its optic, which made it easier to aim—now, it's finally fulfilling that potential as a stable, high-damage, full-auto weapon that shines over short-to-medium ranges. Its 200 damage-per-second means that when I've played a little stealthy and caught opponents napping, I've obliterated them before they know what's happening.

It's so good that for certain players it's worth ditching the Deadeye assault rifle. The Holo's damage fall-off makes it struggle at mid-to-long ranges but if you can control sightlines, slip in and out of cover and get close to another player, you'll beat the Deadeye in a straight fight.

The Flex got a similar buff and while I still prefer the Holo, the Flex is a more… well, flexible weapon. Its rapid hipfire sprays through builds and when you right click, it fires slower but deals more damage, and is surprisingly accurate at range. Its new larger magazine means you can theoretically deal more than 200 damage per second for more than four seconds before reloading. Lethal.

And this is all happening while Epic has added zero-gravity Flowberry items, the champagne-spray Fizz and the Mist Grenade. These make you more mobile and reward the agile playstyle that SMGs necessitate.

These SMGs buffs also bring the Deadeye sniper into play. It's still a middling rifle, and I'd love to see Epic try a one-shot-headshot beast, but it's now a lot easier to justify carrying. Before, it only really worked as a third weapon alongside the Deadeye and a shotgun. Now a sniper and SMG is a lethal combo, leaving you enough loadout slots to carry both the wing suit and shockwave grenades alongside heals. Pop shots from distance and shockwave in for the kill with your SMG—or, if you miss your sniper shots, fly to a better position with the wingsuit.

Mini buffs to other weapons including the tactical pistol and the tactical assault rifle have shrunk the gap between the handful of S-tier weapons—the Deadeye, the Iron Pump shotgun, the Twin Hammer shotguns—and everything else. And the MK-seven, another red-dot assault rifle, will outdamage the Deadeye, albeit with more recoil.

It genuinely feels like there are now a dozen solid weapons. One glance at our top-heavy best weapons tier list will tell you that, and the two weapons I rate lowest, the Enforcer assault rifle and Sovereign shotgun, are only low-ranked because of how strong the alternatives are.

The only sore spot for me is the Lock On assault rifle. God, I hate that thing.

As the name suggests, it automatically locks onto enemies when you aim down sights in their direction and, after a short pause, you squeeze the trigger for a three round burst that can't miss. I get why it's in the loot pool: to help players with worse aim. But it just feels unfair when you're killed by it, and I think it's actually too powerful in the hands of movement demons who can shockwave around the map and blast you in mid-air without having to aim. In my view the Arc Lightning gun, which has a forgiving cone of fire but limited range and slows your movement, is a better-designed weapon.

But one rotten drop in a pool this large is completely forgivable. Wallow in the warm water before it drains.

Fortnite is hard when your crosshair sways like a drunk sailor on rough seas. Victory royales are rare. Every lobby has one or two players who could've turned pro, probably, definitely, judging by the way they land headshots and judge their shockwave jumps. Just making the final five is an achievement.

But that challenge means winning is a joy. I've been playing since launch and my heart still pounds in the final zone—earning a victory crown leaves me on a high for a good hour knowing that I, somehow, have outplayed 99 other people (well, perhaps 49 other people, and 50 bots).

So how much easier would it be if you didn't have to aim?

That's the question posed by the Lock On assault rifle, a weapon added in Chapter 7 that commits the dual sins of feeling weak when you use it and annoying when you fight against it.

As the name suggests, if you aim in the vague direction of an enemy it locks onto them. It happens in four stages, four pips around your crosshair, each representing a three-round burst of the rifle: if you pull the trigger after stage two, you'll hit them with two bursts but if you wait for the full lock on, you'll land four.

It isn't overpowered. It deals just 10 damage per bullet at its base rarity so if you fully lock on you'll deal 120 damage. By that point your enemy knows where you are and can evade, build, or hide behind cover before you have time to charge it up again.

I still think it's bad game design.

Instinctively, it feels tailor-made for beginners or for those who struggle with their aim. As long as your position is strong and your crosshair is vaguely near your enemy, you'll hit your shots. But it doesn't work on those terms. Its damage is so low that you'll lose basically every time against any other rifle. Even if you land a few bursts, your enemy can turn and finish you off.

Yes, if you can get the drop on an opponent then you're immediately at a 100 health-point advantage—but if you're catching your opponent unawares they're likely an easy target anyway. You may as well fire with the Deadeye assault rifle and carry on firing. Even if your aim wavers, you'll deal more damage.

I think its true purpose is as a finishing weapon that can hit wounded opponents as they try to escape through the air. We know that Epic believes Fortnite has a "combat fleeing issue" and that shockwaves make it too easy to "escape an engagement". The Lock On is a direct counter to defensive shockwaves, allowing you to drop weakened enemies out of the sky.

But isn't that a bit unfair? Mobility items should make you difficult to hit, a well-placed shockwave grenade should give you a chance to escape. Otherwise, what's the point? By allowing shots to land for free, this rifle eliminates the thrill of recovering from a disadvantage, of turning a 1v1 on its head.

And besides, Epic has already nerfed the fan-favorite shockwaves by shrinking their stack size from six to four, so you already have to think harder before throwing them. Now, you need to worry about aimbots beaming you too.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the Lock On, however, is getting ambushed when you're fighting a different enemy. Getting third-partied in Fortnite, particularly in solo modes, is already frustrating because it feels like you're being penalised for being aggressive: by taking fights you're alerting nearby players to your location, allowing them to swoop and finish you while you're distracted. With the Lock On, that requires precisely zero skill. As long as you have line of sight you can wait for enemies to whittle each other down and then pounce.

I worry about the kind of playstyle the rifle encourages, and its wider effect on how 100 players play battle royale. It is not good enough to be a primary weapon, and it won't help up close like a shotgun will, so you really have to carry it as a third weapon instead of, say, an extra mobility item.

If everyone did that, rounds would be less dynamic and less active. The optimum way to use this rifle is to camp at a safe distance and pounce when an enemy's back is turned—or, conversely, to combine it with Fortnite to simply jump around the map, pinging enemies from the sky without having to aim.

Thankfully, the community seems to be shunning it. Everyone on the game's subreddit is annoyed by it, and I rarely encounter players who want to carry it. That's when you know it's time for a rethink.

The Lock On assault rifle is too weak to help newer players—and too annoying to make any stronger. The only thing it needs is to be stuffed at the very back of Fortnite's vault, never to be seen again.

It's 11 years old and Rocket League has decided it's had it up to here with cheating. In a post (actually an "article," which I guess the everything app has now) on X, the game's official account announced that, come April, Rocket League will be implementing Easy Anti-Cheat.

"Adding Easy Anti-Cheat elevates our ability to detect and ban cheaters in real time, and is part of a broader effort that includes additional bot detection methods, and DDoS attack prevention," said Psyonix.

This will, alas, bust any mods you're using, but as with other EAC-using games like Halo: The Master Chief Collection, you'll at least have an option to turn the tech off, though that will kill your ability to queue for online matches, private matches, and tournaments. "When Easy Anti-Cheat is turned off, you can run mods while playing offline matches, training, LAN matches, and viewing Replays while using custom video editing tools," said Psyonix.

"Community content like Steam Workshop maps is playable with or without Easy Anti-Cheat enabled, but you’ll want it off if you run mods on top of the content."

The good news is that, because it's effectively icing a bunch of mods with the move, Psyonix is committing to "building popular mod-inspired features directly into Rocket League, including an option to display MMR in-game, changes to custom training, and an optional flip reset indicator."

Specific mods, like the kind used in Rocket League tournaments to aid spectation, will also be able to be used by specific accounts (you can't apply, though—Psyonix will offer the ability to "specific partners" according to its own metrics).

Finally, and honestly, here's the part that most matters to me: the devs promise not to absolutely hose your Steam Deck and Linux installs of Rocket League. That shouldn't be a surprise—Easy Anti-Cheat is used by plenty of games that get the green light on Are We Anticheat Yet?—but Psyonix is owned by Epic, and Epic uses EAC for Fortnite which, infamously, will not work on your Deck. But Psyonix says "we know some of you love to play on Steam Deck and on Linux operating systems through apps like Proton, and this will still be supported with Easy Anti-Cheat on."

Epic Games may have since left the BSP-carved valleys of Unreal in favour of the cartoonish hills of Fortnite, but at least it hasn't locked the series that put the company on the map deep in a digital vault somewhere. In the last few years, it has given permission for the Internet Archive to assume hosting duties for its older shooters, which is why you can download both Unreal Gold and the original Unreal Tournament from archive.org.

Now, the latest of these rehabilitated shooters has been released into the wild, bounding across the fields in search of flags to capture. Yep, Unreal Tournament 2004 is available to download for free, with Epic's approval.

This was made possible by OldUnreal, a long-running community support project dedicated to keeping Epic's early shooters alive. The plans for reviving UT 2004 were announced at the end of last year, detailing a simultaneous game release and a community patch.

Grabbing the game for yourself is slightly more complicated than usual. Like Unreal Gold and OG UT, the original disc image for UT 2004 is hosted on the Internet Archive, as OldUnreal is not allowed to host the game outright. But it is allowed to host an installer that will download the game from said archive, which you can access here.

Once you've downloaded the installer and retrieved the full game, you then need to mosey on over to GitHub to pick up the OldUnreal community patch for UT 2004. This spruces the game up for modern operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

"Please note that this is the first public patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in over 20 years," writes UT project manager and computer science professor Stijn-volckaert. "We have implemented numerous fixes and improvements, written a new SDL backend for Linux and macOS, and even a new renderer. We have also migrated the entire codebase to modern build systems. Some new bugs may have slipped in!"

If you've never played Unreal Tournament 2004 and are wondering whether you should, the answer is yes, as soon as possible. It's generally regarded as the high-point of the series, certainly on a par with the 1999 original. UT 2004 combines the visual upgrades from UT 2003 with a much wider array of game modes.

Crucially, UT 2004 introduced the vehicle-based Onslaught modes, and brought back UT's innovative, objective-based Assault mode missing from UT 2003. One of those Assault maps, AS-Mothership, takes the action into space, with you duking it out with the opposing team in fighter craft before the attacking team boards the titular mothership in an attempt to blow up the core. It's rad.

Whether you'll be able to find a game for a multiplayer shooter that's been out of action for years is another matter. But I should imagine this new release will coax a few players back online. Even if it doesn't, UT-2004's bot AI is pretty robust from what I recall. Either way, Stijn-volckaert says the community patch "works in online games except on servers with AntiTCC".

Responding to recent statements by Epic Game Store VP and general manager Steve Allison in a Game File interview, indie publisher Santa Ragione has again publicly criticized EGS' handling of Horses, a controversial art game that was delisted from both the Epic and Steam storefronts⁠—Santa Ragione has argued in both cases that the storefronts employ uneven standards with adult games, and that they failed to clearly communicate the reasoning behind Horses' removal.

Speaking to Game File, Allison said that "[Santa Ragione] went through the self-publishing process and [Horses] went through," referring to how the studio filled out an International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) form to determine it had an M-rating⁠—and thus, was fit for EGS⁠—leading to its initial listing on the platform.

Epic made provably incorrect statements about the game’s content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and has not shared their claimed AO IARC certificate, which normally includes a link for the developer to appeal. They do not ‘love that studio’, they have effectively ghosted us

— @santaragione.com (@santaragione.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-09T16:33:02.957Z

“My understanding is the trust and safety team thought [Horses] was worth taking a fresh look, and they determined that it indeed was against our policies on a couple fronts," said Allison. Epic performed its own IARC assessment of Horses and judged it to be Adult's Only (AO), the ESRB's X-rated kiss of death, leading to the game's removal from the Epic Store a day before launch.

"And so, the call came late—and we love that studio; we did their previous game as a short exclusive—but because that [trust and safety] team, that’s their job and that is, if you do the letter of the law on our policies, it is what it is.”

As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, Epic told Santa Ragione that it does not carry AO games as a matter of policy, with an exception "for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology."

Allison told Game File that the second look at Horses was prompted by news and discussion about the game close to release. While Horses had been delisted from Steam for two years, Summer 2025 saw a series of high profile instances where conservative activist groups (via payment processors like Visa and Mastercard) pressured Steam and itch.io to remove adult content.

This, in turn, brought renewed attention to Horses' delisting from Steam, particularly in the face of much more high-profile games on the platform with realistic, uncensored full-frontal nudity like Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, equally disturbing subject matter like Fear and Hunger, or both, like the Outlast series.

Horses portrays a surreal "farm" in rural Italy where hypnotized, nude human beings in horse masks are treated as livestock and dominated by a sadistic overseer. Horses has been compared to Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous voyage into the fascist id⁠.

The second half of the game, in particular, portrays or implies brutal acts of sexual violence, but always visually censored⁠—the "horses," as well as the horrible things that happen to them, are all obscured with a pixellation effect.

Santa Ragione took to Bluesky to dispute Allison's framing of these events. "Epic made provably incorrect statements about the game’s content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and has not shared their claimed AO IARC certificate, which normally includes a link for the developer to appeal," the studio wrote. "They do not ‘love that studio’, they have effectively ghosted us."

Santa Ragione also points to the existence of unredacted longplays of Horses on YouTube and Twitch as evidence the AO rating was misapplied by Epic⁠—both platforms have made news in the past for aggressive moderation of speech and explicit content. Horses also remains available for purchase on both GOG and the Humble Store.

"Horses is interesting for other reasons too, and I hope that the unfortunate situation of its release won't stop us from considering what the game is actually doing, whether it works, and where it fits in with the conversation of the wider texts it draws inspiration from," PC Gamer contributor Maddi Chilton concluded in a review of the game last December.

"Despite its shortfalls, Horses is a genuine attempt to approach, through videogames, the spaces that film and literature take for granted, and we shouldn't overlook that just because Steam was squeamish."

If you're anything like me, your Epic Games Store account is a kind of Library of Alexandria of free-but-unplayed games. Every so often you open the site, add whatever the current free game is to your collection, then never, ever, ever play them. Perhaps some day a long winter will come, and we'll all sit down and chew through our collections like they're so many acorns in our cheeks.

For now, though: the Epic launcher is bad. It's just not a good launcher—it's slow, bloated, and continually forgets who you are. That's not just me saying that, it's Epic. Last year, Epic head honcho Tim Sweeney straight-up said the launcher was "clunky," and now EGS vice president and general manager Steven Allison has told Eurogamer that "the launcher sucks. Let's call it what it is. It's really slow."

Allison says there are "a lot of things we need to fix. We have needed to fix them for years. We've been really focused on developer tooling and all the things we do there. But last year, we finally started to point more of our resources towards player experience stuff."

Which is pretty similar to what he told PCG when we sat down with him for a chat about the storefront's future (sans the "sucks"). Up to now, the EGS has been making "calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around," explained Allison, which is why you might experience lag on slower connections. Apparently, that's all set to change.

In essence, Allison says Epic's devs are hard at work stripping out the EGS' innards and putting in new, faster innards. "We're basically pulling the guts out, putting new guts in… It should start to feel good, be faster and people be like, 'Holy shit. It doesn't suck so much.' And that will be a win for us." The EGS team is also working on adding community spaces to the storefront. To be frank, the absence of anything resembling the notoriously toxic Steam forums has been one of the things in EGS' favour so far as I'm concerned, but I guess others disagree. Anyway, small, achievable goals.

Which, okay, sure. It's nice when corporations acknowledge reality—it's harder for them than it perhaps should be—but let's bear in mind that Sweeney was copping to the EGS' clunkiness almost a full year ago and the store itself has been available since 2018. At no point in that long tenure has it been good. Rather than shuffling out once a year to have the bosses shamefacedly take their lumps for how bad it is, it'd be preferable for it to just stop being bad.

Hey, that's what Allison promises, and that sounds great, but I also won't be paralysed with shock if you and I meet here again next year when some other exec performs the shame ritual.

The Epic Games Store development team is now squarely focused on "the things that players need," says store GM Steve Allison.

After launching the store in 2018, Epic prioritized building features aimed at game publishers, because "there's no store without content," Allison said on a call with PC Gamer this week. Attention was then turned to building the mobile versions of the store, but the time has now come for a major effort to improve the user experience.

That includes a technical overhaul coming mid-year—"We're ripping out the guts of the Epic Games Launcher on PC," Allison said—as well as new social features. There are plans to test "community and forums around some of the top games on the store" and add player profiles, avatars, private messaging, voice chat, and game-independent parties.

Epic remains more cautious than Steam about social features

The addition of forums represents a shift in approach. Back in 2019, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that the Epic Games Store would not have its own message boards, and encouraged developers to link to external forums.

At the time, Epic also opted not to emulate Steam features like user reviews, presenting its launcher as a light-touch intermediary between developers and players more than a destination in itself. Epic's account system is a good example of that philosophy: Unlike the Steamworks API, which only lets games interface with Steam's social features, Epic's Online Services can connect players across platforms and stores.

That interest in interoperability hasn't been abandoned, but Epic is now open to building a more active community within its launcher, with limits that keep its approach distinct from Valve's.

In the case of user reviews, Epic introduced a system in 2022 that asks random users who've played a game for more than two hours to assign it a star rating. Allison says the system has been "fairly bulletproof" as a way to include player ratings without allowing review bombing.

"The brigading that happens on the Steam platform against games, when they do things like cap a frame rate at 30 frames or whatever, that can turn a game's commercial outcomes upside down, that's something we want to not be able to facilitate," he said.

Steam has introduced features to mitigate review bombing, such as identifying surges in "off-topic" reviews, though the ability to collectively express anger via a mass thumbs-downing is no doubt something some Steam users would say they like about the platform. The moderation of Steam's forums and user groups is also notoriously lax.

Epic may never cater to users who want a free-for-all, but Allison says they know that more social features are desired, and they're going to build them.

"Right now, the first thing we're going to explore is adding a forum and using our trust and safety team to moderate the forums," said Allison. "But we're open to all that stuff now. We still have issues with and believe that those things [such as review bombing] need to be mitigated, but it's on us to figure it out."

Speeding up the launcher

The other big announcement, a technical overhaul of the Epic Launcher, has been in the works since October, and is expected to roll out this summer.

"The goal there is to eliminate the experience that players have where [the Epic Games Store] feels a little slow," said Allison, "Like you go to your library and it takes two seconds to load in, the system resourcing for when it's in tray, the time to load."

Allison said that the improvement is "pretty profound."

In its year in review dispatch, Epic also shared some of the store's statistical achievements from 2025, most notably record spending on third-party games.

Although Epic's user experience doesn't currently match Steam's, it has attracted game developers by offering them a better deal—a lower revenue cut which as of last June doesn't kick in until after a game reaches $1 million in annual sales—and has had success attracting users with its free games program, which Allison plans to continue for the foreseeable future.