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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Unsurprisingly, Epic Games CEO and frequent X poster Tim Sweeney has thoughts about the $900 million lawsuit against Valve in the UK, which recently got the go-ahead from a competition tribunal. Also unsurprisingly, given his competing store and past criticism of Steam, Sweeney approves of the action, and based on his related legal tussles with Apple and Google, thinks there's something to it.

The lawsuit, filed in 2024, very broadly alleges that Valve unfairly prevents game makers from offering their products at lower prices on other platforms and requires that all add-on content for games purchased on Steam also be purchased through Steam, and that Valve's "excessive commission" has resulted in inflated prices for UK consumers. Valve had argued that the suit should not be allowed to proceed as a collective action—functionally similar to a class action—but a Competition Appeal Tribunal disagreed, ruling earlier this week that the suit can proceed.

Sweeney has homed in on the DLC issue specifically. Although developers can sell DLC on other platforms and have it carry over to a user's Steam copy, Valve doesn't allow them to sell add-ons directly through in-game stores or to use their in-game UI to steer users to off-platform stores. This, Sweeney says, is "like a car dealership demanding 30% of gas purchases," and is one of the things he and Epic have successfully fought Apple and Google over.

Sweeney's comments naturally led to a flurry of dissenting responses, but he resolutely stood his ground: "Today, in the USA, developers are free to steer users of iOS and Android apps to competing purchase methods. Apple and Google collect 0% on those transactions. On computers and smartphones, Valve is the only major store still holding onto the payments tie and 30% junk fee."

The Epic CEO acknowledged in multiple replies that Steam keys or DLC can be purchased from other platforms, but has reiterated that the problem is that "developers can't offer alternative purchase options to customers IN-GAME" while following Valve's rules. It's a complaint that's effectively identical to the one at the core of Epic's legal wars against Apple and Google.

Epic is not directly involved with the lawsuit, but combatting Steam's 30% fee and prohibition on steering users to off-platform purchase methods for add-ons was one of the founding goals of the Epic Games Store. In 2019, Sweeney went so far as to say that if Steam dropped its fee to 12%, he would stop pursuing Epic Games Store exclusives and even consider putting Fortnite on the platform.

Meanwhile, Epic has demonstrated a willingness to spend enormous amounts of money pursuing the principle against some of the biggest tech companies on the planet. Calling Steam's 30% cut a "junk fee" is maybe a little much, but I also don't think there's any doubt that the industry is slowly trending away from it—led, in part, by Epic's efforts.

Steam has managed to maintain its big cut and restrictive policies because it has such a dominant position in the market—being first sometimes really is best—but if this lawsuit in the UK (and a similar action slowly unfolding in the US) go badly for Valve, it may be forced to dial things back drastically. I'm sure Sweeney will have some choice thoughts on that if it happens, too.

Reacting to claims made by New Blood's CEO that Epic Games Store's free giveaways supposedly cause a boost in Steam sales, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is once again unhappy with his store's lot in life.

"On some transactions, Epic wins. On more, Steam wins. But one thing is constant on every transaction: gamers and developers win by having more options and better deals", says Sweeney.

This time, Sweeney's comments were challenged in a long thread by Michael Douse, the publishing director at Larian Studios, makers of Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming Divinity. Douse chimes in with added context about Remedy's critically-acclaimed Alan Wake 2, which took over a year and two million sales before it became profitable, arguably partly due to its Epic Games Store exclusivity.

"I understand Epic entirely funded Alan Wake 2 but this altruistic pro-developer talk doesn't sit well when Remedy seemingly went into financial crisis because they couldn't tap Steam for AW2 sales suffering potentially hundreds of millions in lost revenue," says Douse.

He goes on to add, "Competition is good, and important, but it is difficult to buy the message when there are demonstrable cases of games underperforming as a result of the tactic."

Bringing things back to Epic's strategy of tempting players to its platform with free games, Douse says, "the viability of the store sits on their ability to convert hundreds of millions of Fortnite players into mid-hardcore premium gamers, and I don't see the Fortnite brand attempting to do that."

"Giving everyone everything for free might bump numbers but doesn't create a viable storefront from which to sell premium experiences."

I'll add that, if the Epic Games Store aspires to be a true competitor to Steam, then it should start by offering a comparable, robust platform before splashing the cash, handing out free games like a bribe, and nabbing seemingly permanent exclusives on PC (though in Alan Wake 2's case, Epic did fund it). Maybe then I'd be more tempted to even play the free games I own over there before considering buying them on Steam instead, like I've done on a few occasions now.

As reported by Eurogamer, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took to X (formerly Twitter) to criticize an attempt by US lawmakers to ban the social media app and its accompanying generative AI tool, Grok. The move came after users discovered that Elon Musk's Grok has the ability to take photos of real people, including minors, and produce images of them undressed or in otherwise sexually compromising positions, flooding the site with such content.

"Reason #42 for open platforms: to shut down every politician’s incessant demands to all gatekeepers to censor all of their political opponents," Sweeney wrote in a first tweet responding to MacRumors' report of US politicians requesting that Apple and Google remove X and Grok from their app stores.

"All major AIs have documented instances of going off the rails," Sweeney continued in a follow up tweet. "All major AI companies make their best efforts to combat this; none are perfect. Politicians demanding gatekeepers selectively crush the one that's their political opponent's company is basic crony capitalism."

"AI going off 'guardrails' is not the same as actively excusing content for pedophiles," wrote Remap and former Waypoint editor, Patrick Klepek, in response. "Your priorities as someone in charge of a company that makes a video game catering to young people are completely off."

404 Media's report from January 5 at the beginning of this saga offers illustrative examples of Grok's newly-discovered capabilities, like influencers undressed, made to appear pregnant, or shown breastfeeding a child. There are also extensive reports of users generating such material from images of minors.

The Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) defines child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as "evidence of child sexual abuse" that "includes both real and synthetic content, such as images created with artificial intelligence tools." One of RAINN's examples of CSAM is "any content that sexualizes or exploits a child for the viewer's benefit."

Since the controversy came to light, the only change X has made has been moving Grok's ability to generate images in tweet replies behind a paywall⁠—X now appears to be more directly profiting off of Grok's ability to generate CSAM than it was in the first place.

This is all particularly galling in the face of the actual politically-motivated censorship Sweeney has overseen on the platform that helps make him a billionaire. Back in December, the Epic Games Store followed Steam's lead in banning the art game, Horses, for hazy reasons, an outgrowth of the pressure placed on payment processing companies by conservative activist groups to censor transgressive art and legal pornography on the internet.

Given the opportunity, Sweeney appears eager to defend an unprecedented online sexual humiliation machine, calling for open platforms and free speech while presiding over censorship on his own, closed platform. Sweeney's follow-up may have the beginnings of a solution, though: "All major AIs have documented instances of going off the rails." If this is what we can expect from such tools, maybe they should all be banned.

Now that its popular Simpsons-themed mini-season is over, Fortnite Chapter 7 is live, complete with Kill Bill collaboration and a censored version of the Pussy Wagon. That's not what players are talking about, though. What's got them up in arms now is that some of the new art for this chapter looks AI-generated.

The smoking gun is a poster of a yeti relaxing in a hammock, feet dangling over the edge, which clearly has nine toes. After all this time, AI art still struggles with hands and feet. I mean, I can't draw hands and feet either, but at least I know not to draw four toes on one foot and five toes on the other.

Other billboards and paintings are being called out for having the smeary look common to a lot of AI art, and an anime-style spray of Marty McFly from Back to the Future looks enough like the Studio Ghibli AI knockoffs that briefly became the internet's favorite thing it's been looked askance at as well. (It's the same art style as the calling cards from Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.)

"IIRC, the Marty McFly spray is part of the Battle Pass, so you're paying for that", says one forum user. "Between this and the next season which is rumored to be Harry Potter themed, I'm done with this game."

Sweeney's recent comments on the supposed inevitability of AI in every part of game production have brought him into the crosshairs on Reddit. "The real question I'm surprised nobody has thrown at Sweeney", one user asks, "if AI can do a lot of the hard work, why don't we just replace him with AI?"

Look at any of a number of Steam store pages—Arc Raiders, for instance—and you'll see a fairly prominent "AI generated content disclosure" laying out which parts of the game make use of AI generated content. Go to the Epic Games Store, however, and you'll see nothing of the sort. And that's a difference that's not likely to change, for one simple reason: Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks AI disclosures are a waste of time.

"The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation," Sweeney wrote on X (via GamesRadar), agreeing with a user who called for Steam and other digital storefronts to eliminate the gen AI labelling. "It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production."

This isn't the first time Sweeney has expressed support for generative AI: Earlier this month, for instance, he waded into the debate over Arc Raiders' use of AI-generated voices with a fantasy about games with "infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialog based on and tuned by human voice actors." And he's probably not wrong that in the coming years, more and more game companies will take advantage of generative AI to some extent.

His comment about "the rights situation" alludes to one of the biggest worries about generative AI: That it steals and reuses actual creative work without acknowledging or paying the people who created it in the first place. Sweeney is well aware of that issue, because it's something he's voiced concerns about in the past, and I'm pretty confident he knows full well that those legalities are still being settled as major media companies fight to preserve their little slices of the pie. The presence of potentially infringing content in gen AI games alone justifies the existence of AI labelling, as far as I'm concerned.

But I think the bigger question amidst all this right now is, quite simply, what purpose would eliminating the label serve? There are plenty of game companies who don't use generative AI, and hopefully that will remain the case even as its use expands overall. And a significant portion of gamers obviously care—just look at the blowup every time the presence of generative AI in a game or image comes to light.

I suspect that's the real reason AI boosters would like to see AI labelling in games go away: Not because it's "irrelevant," but because a lot of people don't like plagiarized bullshit in their games, and it's harder for them to make informed decisions and push back on AI use if it isn't disclosed.. Maybe someday Sweeney will get his wish, and we'll be so awash in AI generated sights and sounds that we'll be forced to throw up our hands in surrender. But I imagine that if we do ever reach that point, we'll have plenty of other, more pressing things to keep our thoughts occupied.

Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney has waded into the furor over the use of generative AI for videogame voices, saying the technology presents an "opportunity for in-game voice and voice actors," with games that could potentially have "infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialog based on and tuned by human voice actors."

The exchange began with a comment on Eurogamer's Arc Raiders review, written by freelancer Rick Lane—also a contributor at PC Gamer—who took issue with the game's "inexcusable" use of AI-generated voices. "Political opinions should go into op eds folks," Sweeney wrote, seemingly overlooking the fact that reviews very much are opinion pieces.

In a follow-up post, Sweeney doubled down: "This technology increases human productivity in some areas by integer multiples, and views on whether this is a net good and should be rewarded, or bad and should be fought against, are speculative and generally distributed along political lines."

I'm not sure that's accurate—my perception is that the divide isn't along political lines so much as it is between billionaires (like Sweeney) who tend to view generative AI as a way to crank out more content with less expense, and pretty much everyone else. But he went on to share some other thoughts on the matter, explaining why he thinks criticism of generative AI is misplaced.

"Since the author [of the review] states the pessimistic case, I’ll put the optimistic one here," Sweeney wrote. "Game developers compete to build the best games in order to attract gamers. When tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people."

When another user pointed out that the rise of generative AI is in fact depriving voice actors of work, Sweeney said there's "an even bigger opportunity for in-game voice and voice actors" in the future of AI than there is in simply acting.

"Instead of games having a few dozen or hundred lines of pre-recorded dialog, how about infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialog based on and tuned by human voice actors?" he wrote.

"I've always found pre-written lines of fixed dialog super limiting. It was painful to write text dialog in ZZT in 1991 after writing more dynamically-composed text adventure games in the 80's! AI dialog generation + human personality and tuning could totally transform gaming."

I suppose it could, but Sweeney's argument strikes me as, well, flimsy. What is "tuning," as opposed to training, something voice actors have furiously opposed because of the threat it poses to their livelihoods? What happens when that "human personality" is no longer viewed as an essential part of the formula? And of course there's the fact that all of this is entirely hypothetical, what-if stuff that doesn't address the actual criticism but merely brushes it off.

It's fair to say that generative AI isn't ready for prime time just yet, but it's definitely moving in that direction, and that movement has provoked a range of responses: Pocketpair Publishing boss John Buckley, for instance, stated flat-out in October that Pocketpair won't publish games built using generative AI, while Junghun Lee, CEO of Embark Studios parent Nexon, seems to be embracing AI just because everyone else is.

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson, by comparison, has effusively high hopes for AI-powered game development, saying in 2024—after the bong rip hit—that EA is "AI-native" and he envisions a future in which "3 billion players around the world" are set to "creating personal content and expanding and enhancing the universes that we create," using—of course—EA's own AI technology. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has a somewhat more measured take, saying that AI can be a powerful tool for business but is inherently "backward looking," which means it's fundamentally unable to actually create anything.

Sweeney's remarks, to my reading, aren't too far off Zelnick's: Humans create, AI manipulates. But the cavalier dismissal of criticism of generative AI as it actually exists right now, and not how it might be in some imaginary future, isn't great. Ironically, Sweeney seemed to acknowledge those concerns in another reply tweet: When X user doubttom, whose post began the exchange, wrote, "Progress marches on but haven't we seen it enough times in the past where we can do better for the people being affected now?" Sweeney replied simply, "Yep." On that point, at least, I have to agree.

In the world of PCs and PC gaming, debates are usually quite evenly distributed. AMD vs Intel. AMD vs Nvidia. WASD vs arrow keys. Cats vs dogs. You'll find arguments for either side most of the time. However, when it comes to Unreal Engine 5, comments from PC gamers are mostly on the side of "it just runs really badly." Epic Games has tried to counter such claims many times before, but with the debate still running, CEO Tim Sweeney has stepped in to say that the main reason why UE5 games don't run well is how they're developed in the first place.

He said this at the recent Unreal Fest event in Seoul, as reported by Korean site This is Game (via RedGamingTech). Press members asked about what Epic Games was doing to address optimisation issues for games developed on UE5. "The primary reason Unreal Engine 5-based games don't run smoothly on certain PCs or GPUs is the development process," replied Sweeney (alas, my grasp of Korean is non-existent, so hopefully the machine translation has got it spot on).

More specifically, he suggested that one particular problem is the choice of PC platform used in the formative stages of a game's creation. "Many developers begin by developing games for high-end hardware, then optimize and test on lower-spec devices in the final stages."

He's certainly not wrong. I've seen many examples of pre-alpha code being run on fairly high-end hardware, but that's only because those are the rigs that all the developers at the studio use. Once the bulk of the game is done, coders then work on getting it to run just as well on other configurations, but with less time being available to do this compared to the early stages of development, a comprehensive optimisation process isn't always possible.

While it is easier to scale up rather than down, one factor that can complicate the issue is when developers target consoles rather than PCs to judge performance. For example, the makers of Avowed (Obsidian Entertainment) picked the Xbox Series S for their benchmark hardware, and despite being a relatively weak platform, the PC version was decidedly wobbly on release. On face value, code for an x86-based console should be easy enough to translate to a PC, but they're disparate enough to make it quite a challenge.

Sweeney also acknowledged the fact that tweaking code for a range of platforms is simply a very time-consuming process. "Since optimization requires significant manual labor, we plan to provide automated optimization features for various devices, enabling developers to work faster and more easily.

"In addition to providing training on the overall testing and optimization process, it's crucial to raise awareness that optimization should occur early. If necessary, our engineers can directly intervene to raise awareness of optimization techniques and provide technical assistance."

The latter is arguably more useful than the former, because it takes time for Unreal Engine to be updated to include such tools and features, and even if they're released quickly, game developers are unlikely to use that version of UE for their game. In fact, because AAA development takes so long, many big releases come out on quite old versions of Epic's software package.

Take Stalker 2 as an example. That's an Unreal Engine 5.1 game, a version of the engine that's missing a huge amount of improvements that Epic has added over the years. The devs are currently working on shifting the whole thing across to version 5.5 (and perhaps may even make the jump to the much-lauded 5.6), but even if the update makes everything all super peachy, the damage has already been done to UE's reputation.

Avowed actually started on Unreal Engine 4, then switched to UE5, with the final release being version 5.3 in February of this year. You might wonder why game developers don't just update the tools they use the moment Epic releases a new version of Unreal Engine. After all, Unreal Engine 5.3 came out in September 2023, and 5.4 appeared in April of last year.

Well, if you've done a year or two of solid coding, you'll be familiar with the engine's quirks and foibles, and more importantly, you'll have stability. By that, I don't necessarily mean software crashes; it's about having as much consistency in the development process as possible, to avoid having to waste precious time adapting to new things. Sticking to the same engine, even if it's not the latest one available, isn't laziness—it simply involves fewer risks.

Ultimately, Sweeney is right in that the main reason why UE5 games don't often run well on PCs is the game development process itself, though I disagree that it's mostly down to choosing the wrong target platform. Of course, he's not going to blame his company's product, but at least Epic acknowledges the issue and it's trying to do something about it, just as Stalker 2's devs and others are as well.

I suspect that none of this will stop some folks from having the view that Unreal Engine 5 just runs really badly on PCs, because there will always be games based on that engine which get launched in a poorly optimised state. For those cases, either Epic and UE5 will incur the usual flak, or the developers themselves will be in the firing line.

Excuse me for a moment while I dance around my office, yelling 'same as it ever was', while a certain Talking Heads song plays in the background.

I've been trying for a long time to spend much less time on X. But in an attempt to not to dwell on the, well, absolute state of everything, I'll try to say something nice: I didn't entirely dislike the implementation of community notes. As rapidly developing stories pop off, it doesn't hurt to have a little bit of extra context right next to the original post.

However, now I may have yet one more reason to leave for good, as X is piloting a scheme that allows AI chatbots to generate community notes. From July 1, X users can sign up for access to the AI Note Writer API in order to put forward their own little chatbot that can propose community notes. Like those written by humans, these AI-generated community notes will start appearing later this month on your feeds "if found helpful by people from different perspectives."

This pilot scheme is being implemented in the hopes of both "[accelerating] the speed and scale of Community Notes," and also leveraging feedback from the community in order to "develop AI agents that deliver increasingly accurate, less biased, and broadly helpful information."

It's worth noting this push comes after a reported 50% drop in the number of community notes created since January. Speaking to Adweek, an X spokesperson attributed at least part of this sharp decline to the passing “seasonality of controversial topics" such as the U.S. election. And as anyone who has spent time on X recently will have observed, there's nothing for engagement quite like 'controversial topics'.

In light of this AI note writer announcement though, my most pressing question is… did X forget the widely documented phenomenon of AI hallucinations? You know, that thing where LLMs tend to just make stuff up in a bid to only predict the word most likely to come next, rather than generating anything factual?

Okay, to be fair to X, it's not going to be a complete AI free for all. For a start, AI notes "will be clearly marked for users," and furthermore these will be "held to the same standard as human notes," with "an open scoring algorithm to identify notes found helpful by people from different perspectives." Still though, as with human-written community notes, I'd argue there's still the possibility of disinformation gaining greater visibility through vote-bombing.

It's all very 'Move fast and break things'—and, speaking of, Meta notably let go of all of its third-party fact-checkers in favour of its own take on a community notes system earlier this year. Moderating massive platforms like Facebook and Instagram is a huge job, and one that is likely very expensive to even do somewhat well—offloading that work to a community of volunteers makes sense simply in terms of finances.

Though, that said, there's likely other reasons why big tech like Meta is rallying around arguments of 'free speech' and shirking the responsibility of actually moderating their platforms. Memorably, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney recently criticised big tech leaders for "pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favor with the new administration" in an alleged bid to skirt antitrust laws.

Former Microsoft head Bill Gates has attempted to offer another perspective, saying that though "you can be cynical," he met with Trump in December "because he's making decisions about global health and how we help poor countries, which is a big focus of mine now." Besides all of that, Trump's rolling back of Biden-era guardrails on AI and the 'Big Beautiful Bill' attempt to hold a moratorium on any state-level regulation of AI for the next decade suggests the current administration only intends to get cosier with big tech as the years drag on.

Apple has unveiled its newest attempt to make more money from App sales while skirting EU law with tiered developer options. Spotted by The Verge, this new strategy was announced on Thursday, and changes the Store Services fee to this new system that will limit the features available to developers for their app depending on how much money they have decided to give Apple.

At the lowest tier developers will pay a five percent commission on all in-app purchases. This fee will give them access to basic app features including reviews, privacy information, and some access to Apple Support. That's a pretty bare-bones option, so if developers want access to anything else inducing automatic updates and downloads, they'll have to go for a higher tier on the Store Services chart.

Tier 2 is currently the only other option, which costs more than double tier one at 13 percent commission. This is likely the option most developers will need, and will be selected by default. For anyone that can manage with the more basic package, they can downgrade to the lower option. Here's hoping the EU fights to bring about a better solution like it has before.

Alongside these changes, Apple is rolling out a new fee. The Core Technology Commission is being introduced which will allow Apple to take a 5 percent bonus on any outside purchase made within App store apps. Given most of these changes are in response to the $570 million USD penalty Apple recently faced for its "anti-steering" practices responsible for placing restrictions on developers ability to direct consumers to alternate payment methods.

Whether or not these changes will appease the EU is hard to tell. They mostly look like renaming things to skirt rules rather than actually addressing issues raised. Epic boss Tim Sweeney—who's no stranger to legal dealings with Apple—certainly doesn't think it will do any good, stating that the new plans are "blatantly unlawful in both Europe and the United States".

Now we wait for the EU Commission to review Apple's proposed changes before making a decision. It could be that the megacorp is set to see more compliance fines on top of the interest on that whopping $570 million worth of fines it's still yet to pay.

Last month, after a long and protracted legal battle, Apple restored Fortnite to the US app store. Fortnite had been removed in late 2020 after launching its own in-app payment system that bypassed the App Store's payment system (and the 30% commission), a violation of Apple's terms, and Epic took Apple to court.

Epic's argument was essentially that Apple operates the App Store as a monopoly, and characterised this as a fight about consumer and developer rights. The courts agreed and Apple now has to allow apps to point users to their own payment systems (which it doesn't get any cut from), and after initially dragging its feet the courts forced it into compliance.

Apple did comply but also launched an emergency appeal, requesting that the changes to the App Store be halted while further legal wrangling was ongoing. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has now denied Apple's appeal, with the judges writing: "Apple bears the burden of showing that the circumstances justify an exercise of [our] discretion. After reviewing the relevant factors, we are not persuaded that a stay is appropriate."

Guess who's cock-a-hoop at that news? Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has been loving life recently, and took to X to celebrate this latest victory:

"Apple's stay is denied by the 9th Circuit Court," says Sweeney. "The long national nightmare of the Apple tax is ended. May next week's [Worldwide Developers Conference] be the Apple-led celebration of freedom that developers and users have long deserved."

In response to a question about how Apple will make money, which doesn't really seem to be a particular problem for one of the largest companies in the world, Sweeney says "Apple is free to make money by fairly competing to offer services such as payments and ads to willing buyers."

Sweeney's jubilation was shared by several prominent developers. Randy Pitchford posted a screen of Fortnite's Victory Royale screen, while 3D Realms / Apogee co-founder George Broussard replied: "Tim, you're gonna make Tim Cook retire early. Might be a good thing."

Fortnite is now back on the App Store in the US, with its own payment system, and for now Apple can do absolutely nothing about it. Sweeney is certainly enjoying the moment, and why not, but this is far from over.

After a protracted legal battle, which is far from over, Apple has restored Fortnite to the US app store. Fortnite was removed in August 2020 after launching its own in-app monetisation system to bypass Apple's in-app payment system and the 30% commission it charges.

This violated Apple's terms, and led to a legal challenge from Epic Games, which accused Apple of operating the app store as a monopoly. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was in an unsurprisingly ebullient mood at the news and thanked those who'd taken Epic's side in the dispute which, as ever, he characterises as a fight for developer rights.

"Thanks to everyone who supported the effort to open up mobile competition and #FreeFortnite from the very beginning," said Sweeney. "And thanks to all of the folks who initially sided with Apple then later came around to the winning side, supporting app developer rights and consumer rights."

Apple has made no comment.

"This is a clear win for Epic Games," games business professor Joost van Dreunen told the BBC. "Epic has effectively forced open a door that Apple and others worked very hard to keep shut.

"The industry has long tiptoed around platform gatekeeping, but this moment signals a shift in the balance. Creators and publishers will now have more leverage to challenge entrenched distribution models."

Fortnite has been available on iOS in the EU since January. Apple is complying with the court order after it got absolutely slammed by judge Yvonne Rogers Gonzalez for an "obvious cover-up" in a ruling that left no room for doubt:

"This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition."

That doesn't mean this is the end: Apple is fiercely protective of its walled garden approach to the app store, which it argues is in consumers' best interests, and of course has the money to fight this until the bitter end. And Epic Games may well be the David to Apple's Goliath, but it happens to be an extremely deep-pocketed David with a pugnacious CEO that's treating this fight like a holy calling.

"Apple lost the 2021 injunction appeal in 2024, and it's final and unappealable," says Sweeney. "Now there's a new contempt of court decision, and Apple is seeking to stay and appeal it, but whatever happens, they're still obliged to comply with the injunction and the law."

Sweeney also put things in more Fortnite-y terms: "we back fam."

In August 2020, Apple kicked Fortnite off of the iOS App Store for violating its terms after Epic Games bypassed Apple's 30% transaction fee by adding its own payment processor to the battle royale game. Almost five years later, Fortnite is finally available on the US App Store again.

The return isn't entirely triumphant for Epic, but at this point Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is ready for a truce.

After the 2020 stunt that saw Fortnite get the boot, Sweeney took Apple to court over its insistence that iOS app developers use only Apple's payment processor—and pay its fee—and emerged with a partial victory.

The court did not give Epic what it really wanted, which was to make Apple let iOS app developers include their own in-app payment options, but it did say that Apple couldn't stop them from directing users to external websites to make purchases.

Apple wasn't willing to cede even that much ground, though. It 'complied' with the order by implementing a new fee that applies to out-of-app purchases and finding new ways to warn users against using third-party payment options.

Epic protested, and in April of this year Apple was seriously reprimanded by the court, which said that the iPhone maker's compliance "strains credulity" and insisted that it immediately stop interfering with out-of-app purchases.

That was good enough for Sweeney, who called for peace. "If Apple extends the court's friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we'll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic," said the CEO.

Despite insistence from the court that it "will not tolerate further delays," Apple still withheld approval of Epic's Fortnite resubmission, leading to more protestation from Epic until today, when Sweeney finally announced that the game has returned to iOS devices, tweeting "we back fam."

Apple and Epic have told the court that they've resolved their differences (for now at least), and Fortnite is once again available in the US App Store. It is also available in Europe on the mobile version of the Epic Games Store, which Epic can operate on iOS in Europe and not the US due to EU regulations. (It's also on another third-party iOS app store called AltStore.)

As Epic prepared for its return to the App Store after the court's ruling, it offered players a 20% bonus for making purchases through its payment system rather than Apple's.

The long-running war between Epic and Apple now feels like it's just part of the fabric of reality. Just as the sun always rises, Epic and Apple are always at each other's throats. It's almost reassuring. And lately, the conflict has been getting pretty spicy again.

Last month, a ruling stopped Apple from charging a commission on purchases made outside of an iOS app—the point of contention that initially led to Fortnite being pulled from the App Store way back in 2020.

The assumption was that Fortnite would finally be returning to the US App Store (it's been available in the EU since last year). But nope, Apple has blocked Epic's submission. Which means Fortnite's not available anywhere.

It's some next-level pettiness, and Tim Sweeney has now responded in kind. Now the Epic boss is tweeting out recommendations for fake Fortnites. At first it was Fort Battle Royale Epic Shoot, but that's since been removed from the App Store. Not to worry, though, because it's always very easy to find rip-offs over there.

"Update: Apple has taken down Fort Battle Royale Epic Shoot, Sweeney wrote in a follow-up tweet. "Players looking for a fake adware version of Fortnite on the App Store should instead try Epic Survival Battle Royale 3D Clash Squad Battle Royale 3D, approved by Apple."

Sweeney isn't trying to support questionable adware developers, obviously; rather, he's unsubtly highlighting the absurdity of Apple blocking one of the world's most popular games from the App Store, despite regularly allowing shameless imitators to exploit its popularity.

But unlike Fortnite, these little imitators aren't on Apple's radar—or its shit list.

As Fortnite slowly grinds its way back to iOS devices in the US, Epic Games is offering players a deal: Make purchases in Fortnite—or Rocket League or Fall Guys—using Epic's payment system and you'll get back 20% of what you spend in Epic Rewards.

That's a big boost over the usual 5% offering on Epic Games Store purchases, and it's simple math, as Epic demonstrated with this handy-dandy image: When, for instance, you spend $23 on 2,800 V-Bucks, you can get $4.60 back in Epic Rewards, or you can get nothing.

The 20% rewards offer applies on all platforms, and yes, it's permanent.

"Competition is a wonderful thing!" Epic boss Tim Sweeney enthused.

The announcement of the new Epic Rewards offering comes basically side-by-side with Epic's announcement that it's "submitted Fortnite to Apple for review so we can launch on the App Store in the US."

So, how did we get here? Fortnite's imminent return to the App Store follows just a week after Epic's major courtroom victory over Apple in a legal battle that began all the way back in 2020. While Apple mostly came out on top in that dispute, Epic did score one big win when the courts ruled that Apple could not stop iOS app developers from directing users to their own payment processor outside of the app, rather than Apple's.

This is potentially very advantageous for developers, because using an external payment processor for purchases would enable them to escape Apple's stiff 30% fee—so it's not really shocking that Apple's compliance with that ruling wasn't exactly enthusiastic.

Epic took exception to Apple's ongoing reluctance to comply with court orders in a meaningful way, which is what eventually led to this most recent ruling, which included a statement—from the judge, mind, not from Epic—that Apple "continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream."

With Apple suitably chastised, Epic is swinging for the fences. The day after the ruling, Epic announced plans for "webshops" on the Epic Games Store that will enable developers to offer out-of-app purchases "as a more cost-effective alternative to in-app purchases, where Apple, Google, and others charge exorbitant fees."

To encourage people to use those webshops, any purchases made through them will also earn 5% back in Epic Rewards—not as high a percentage as its offering on its own games, but again, a whole lot better than nothing.

Even if you don't care about Fortnite or mobile gaming in general, you're not being left empty-handed: Epic is also offering 20% rewards on other Epic Games Store purchases—including games from other companies, not just Epic's own stuff—until August 31, also on all platforms. So if you were planning on buying something from the Epic Games Store, or maybe just pondering the possibility, now would be a good time.

The Epic Store purchase option for iOS devices is slated to go live alongside Fortnite's return to the App Store in the US (it returned to the App Store in Europe in 2024), which Epic obviously expects to happen very soon.

'The Epic Games Store launcher sucks less than it used to' is not very high praise but it's about as far as I'm willing to go. It has improved, undeniably, but it's still painfully slow, awkward, and just not pleasant to use—not to the point that I refuse to use it, but if I have a choice between Steam and Epic, all else being equal I'm going with Steam. My PR pals at Epic may not be super-happy to hear me say that out loud, but I'm not the only one who feels that way: Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney thinks so too.

"One of the reasons that people characterize the Epic Games launcher as clunky is because the Epic Games launcher is clunky," Sweeney said during a recent interview with Lex Fridman. "We need to improve this."

"We've not put enough emphasis on the quality of life features. We've recognized this very clearly multiple times and we've gone through multiple refactorings. But you know, that's definitely been a disappointment to us and to a lot of users."

It has indeed been disappointing: In our 2024 comparison of the many launchers available for PC, Epic scored a miserable 41%—better than the Microsoft Store, EA, and Battlenet, to be fair, but still a far cry from Steam, GOG Galaxy, and even Itch.io.

One of the challenges facing Epic, according to Sweeney, is that its launcher's problems aren't "uniform," but can vary dramatically depending on the user's distance to a CDN (content delivery network) and the size of their collection. Speaking from experience, that rings true: I have no idea where my neighborhood CDN is but I do have pretty crappy internet, and loading up any kind of sizable Epic library is an exercise in frustration—especially when compared to Steam, which flows like water by comparison.

Comparisons with Steam also came up in the interview, naturally: Sweeney reiterated his long-held position that the Epic launcher shouldn't adopt all the features offered by Steam, but said he does want "all of the convenience features that makes it as easy and fun to use as Steam."

He also predicted—boldly, I would say—that in the long run, "the benefits of the Epic Games approach are going to outweigh the benefits of this Steam approach, especially as gaming becomes multi-platform."

"Your game vastly benefits by connecting all of its players together and not segregating them off into different online platform populations and so on," Sweeney said. "I think the future trend is in that direction. I wish Valve had opened up Steamworks to just work on all platforms. They could have easily done it, we did it, but they seem to be using it as a lever to keep people locked into the Steam PC game store."

Sweeney also took a moment to call out "a very toxic group of Steam users" who engage in "harassment campaigns" against developers who use Epic Online Services. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, for instance, suffered a spate of early negative reviews on Steam because it automatically installed Epic Online Services along with the rest of the game in order to enable crossplay and synchronized friends lists.

"Developers do that so they can connect their players across platforms and have friends across platforms and voices across platforms," Sweeney said. "But, you know, suddenly that's trying to be turned into a negative."

Whether Sweeney's prediction that Epic will ultimately outlast Steam (or, I suppose, that he'll one day convince Gabe and company to open their walled garden) remains to be seen. For now, though, I think we can all agree that he's right that we're right about the Epic launcher: It is definitely clunky. Fortunately, if you're one of the Epic users struggling with it, there are options: GOG Galaxy will do the job, and for something more purpose-built, Heroic "is miles better at being the Epic Games Launcher than the Epic Games Launcher," according to PC Gamer dot com.

Epic Games has for several years now been engaged in a legal war with Apple and Google, centered around the closed ecosystems of iOS and Android: Where developers have no choice but to pay a 30% store fee on all revenue. The massive success of Fortnite seems to have brought this into sharp relief for Epic and CEO Tim Sweeney, who argue that it should be able to distribute its games on these ecosystems without paying just under a third of its profits to the gatekeepers.

So far it's spent an awful lot of money but had mixed results, with Fortnite still unavailable for iOS in the US. Epic has reached a stage where the Epic Games Store is available on Android worldwide and on iOS in the European Union, and it's now taking the next step of distributing games through that storefront (it takes a 12% cut of payments it processes, but 0% of payments the developer processes themselves). As part of this Epic is swallowing the cost of Apple's Core Technology Fee, which it calls "illegal", for participating developers.

This is a step forward, of course, but it's not any kind of long-term solution: The vast majority of customers are always going to prefer the direct convenience of the App Store or Play Store. Epic's fighting an uphill battle to even get developers to use the EGS on mobile, but that in itself will no doubt be part of its ongoing legal arguments with the platform-holders.

As part of the launch Tim Sweeney has been on the interview circuit, telling IGN that the company has invested over $1 billion in the EGS so far (this figure is presumably for the whole thing, not just the mobile launch). That's silly money but Epic, thanks to the industry-leading Unreal Engine and the ongoing success of Fortnite, has the means to do it: And more than anything else, Tim Sweeney is up for this fight in a major way.

"I think we might run into serious financial problems after a couple more decades of this," Sweeney told IGN. "But we're determined to fight this out. I expect large parts of this struggle will go on throughout the rest of this decade and we're fully committed to going through it and investing to break through."

Sweeney characterises the legal fight as "an investment in Epic's future" and part of a continuum in how the company's changed with the times. "If you look at Epic’s history, we've always aimed big and we've always grown prudently," says Sweeney. "Our first big 3D game in the era of Doom and Quake was the first Unreal game in 1998. And that sold two million copies. It was pretty cool! And we made Gears of War and expanded to console, and that sold six million copies.

"And we decided to become an online game developer, and it took years to figure out how to do that, with years without growth. But we figured it out eventually with Fortnite in 2017 and now we're a company with billions of dollars of revenue a year and thousands of employees and an opportunity of the sort that we've never had before."

It does help, when you're in a fight like this, to have a Fortnite reliably bringing in the big bucks. Interestingly enough Sweeney's rowing back a little from a certain buzzword beginning with "m", even if he still thinks the idea has merit.

"Some people call it the Metaverse and some people call it just games, but it is real," says Sweeney. "And you find hundreds of millions of players who are highly engaged in immersive 3D games together with their friends. And we think that if we are successful with this, then someday there will be billions of users of this kind of game. And we think we're in an awesome position to be a leading company or perhaps the leading company in that world if the shackles are removed that prevent us and all developers from actually competing on our own and becoming first class companies in the industry."

I'm not going to lie, it is a little hard to agree with the idea of "shackles" on Epic, though Sweeney persists with the metaphor and says no trillion-dollar company "is a vassal in another company's ecosystem." His real anger is what he sees as Apple and Google just sitting back, doing nothing, and creaming off as much profit as they can.

"You're either a company that has a direct relationship with customers and freedom to do business with them directly, or you're behind Apple and Google's paywall and you do not have that chance and you cannot grow and most of the profit your business produces will go to Apple and Google who will use it for fuck all… share buybacks and dividends rather than investment in hiring and innovating and building technology and making the world a better place."

The Sweenster estimates that the battle against Apple and Google has cost Epic, quite outside of the legal fees, "a billion dollars of revenue, perhaps several billion… But I felt very firmly that the proper way to challenge them was to demonstrate to the world the real effects of their policies because Apple... Apple does a good job of hiding it. They don't let developers tell users that they're paying 30% of their fee for nothing or their purchase price is going to Apple for nothing, and it's not widely known."

The regulators are now looking at these closed markets, and the Epic CEO says "we view our company's aims on the scale of decades. We've been in business for 33 years now, which is a pretty long time for a tech company, especially a game developer. There were a lot of game developers in 1991, not many of them are around now.

"But we think our best days are ahead and we think our best days can only be achieved when we have true freedom and we believe the best way to get to that freedom is to go all in and fighting for access rather than arguing about money as Apple is trying to encourage all other developers to do."

There's a great bit in the film adaptation of Master & Commander where well-known Englishman Russell Crowe bellows out to his sailors "do ya wanna see a guillotine in Piccadilly? D'you want your children to sing Les Marseillaise?" Back to Sweeney:

"Do you want your kids to grow up in a market where Apple and Google extract all the profit from all digital businesses and control access to all the information? It's not a good world, just like FYI. So no regrets, though it’s been terribly costly. We're really looking at our future opportunity and future value rather than the opportunity that we missed by fighting Apple and Google this way."

Epic has plans to bring EGS to mobile in markets where it's not currently available and keep fighting the good fight. It is easy to be sniffy about various billion-dollar companies going at one another, and I'm certainly guilty of making more than a few jokes about it, but this is one of the great fights of our industry's age and, if Epic doesn't fight it, it's hard to see who else will.

Is it self-interested? Of course it is and Tim Sweeney would admit that. But the potential is there for this to fundamentally change the games marketplace for every developer and, Epic would say, inarguably for the better. This fight has been going on for five years, and it feels like it's just warming up. It is safe to say that Epic is not short of cash: But nor is it short of purpose.

Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney had some biting words on Friday for tech executives who are fawning over US president-elect Donald Trump, accusing them of playing nice to push anti-competitive policy to the detriment of the rest of us.

"After years of pretending to be Democrats, Big Tech leaders are now pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favor with the new administration," Sweeney said in a post on X. "Beware of the scummy monopoly campaign to vilify competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors."

Google and Apple are among Trump's new tech industry admirers: Both are donating $1 million to the inauguration, with Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly making the contribution personally. Sweeney and Epic have been battling both companies for years over smartphone software distribution.

The short version is that Sweeney wants to sell games on iPhones and Android phones without using Apple and Google's official stores and payment processing systems—or paying a fee for the privilege—and has argued that the companies are unfairly monopolizing the mobile software market by making that very difficult to do. He's made some progress in Europe, but the situation in the US hasn't budged much. Last year, Sweeney vowed to "keep fighting on until there's an ultimate victory" over Apple and Google's "totally broken vision for the world."

Although law firm Skadden predicts that "aggressive antitrust enforcement is unlikely to disappear altogether" during Trump's second term, the new administration is expected to be softer on antitrust cases, and FTC Chair Lina Khan said this week that she hopes Amazon and Meta won't be handed a "sweetheart deal" in upcoming antitrust trials.

Probably not coincidentally, Amazon and Meta have both made their own million-dollar Trump inauguration donations, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also loosening Facebook content moderation policies in an obvious attempt to please the new administration.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said recently that he'd love to personally congratulate Trump, and that the GPU maker will do everything it can "to help this administration succeed," although Nvidia hasn't announced plans to donate to the inauguration.

Trump himself has commented on the attitude change from big tech leaders. "The first term, everybody was fighting me," the president-elect said in December. "In this term, everybody wants to be my friend."

There's a growing field that I like to call 'digital archeology': the excavation and analysis of weird artifacts that have become buried in decades-old software or only exist on archived websites. Sometimes those artifacts just rise to the surface on their own, as was the case with an image of "mold" spotted by a Fortnite player in the game's news feed.

It isn't a picture of mold, but a stock photo of "cave pearls, a kind of calcium carbonate deposit that forms in limestone caves," Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said on X in response to the question from M1das.

Sweeney says he added the texture to the first version of Unreal Engine all the way back in 1995.

"This is Unreal Engine's default texture," he said. "I imported it into Unreal Engine 1 in 1995 while I was developing on a 90 MHz Pentium. It's still there and shows up when a programmer forgets to specify a texture."

I assume I must have seen these cave pearls many times: I've played a lot of Unreal Engine games, and whoever messed up Fortnite's news feed is hardly the first developer to ever forget a texture. But I don't recognize the image. Not like the Source engine's missing texture icon, that famous fuchsia checkerboard, or its giant red "ERROR" text.

Maybe Unreal's default texture just evaded my long term memory by being so ambiguous: blobs of an organic-looking something. It hasn't evaded the subconscious minds of Unreal developers, though. "This image haunts my dreams," said an ILM Immersive artist last year.

In an interview with The Verge, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney outlined his big plans for the rest of the decade, and why Epic had to lay off 16% of its workforce last year to make it happen. The top line is that Sweeney still sees promise for a "metaverse" of interoperable assets and marketplaces between Fortnite and other Unreal Engine games/initiatives, like a planned Unreal "persistent universe" owned by Disney.

"Last year, before Unreal Fest, we were spending about a billion dollars a year more than we were making," Sweeney said. That's since receded to just "a bit" more than Epic earns in revenue. For perspective, Forbes estimated the company's revenue to be north of $6 billion in 2022, while the Epic Game Store self-reported $950 million in sales in its 2023 year in review. Like Microsoft, The Embracer Group, and many other publishers, Epic balled out in the go-go years of the pandemic and NFTs before having to tighten its belt amid the current industry contraction.

But the lofty ambitions remain, with a focus on better linking the Unreal Engine proper with the more approachable Unreal Editor For Fortnite, the evolved form of the Fortnite Creative tools mapmakers have been putting to great effect in all manner of custom modes and maps. "The real power will come when we bring these two worlds together so we have the entire power of our high-end game engine merged with the ease of use that we put together in [Unreal Editor for Fortnite]," said Sweeney. "That's going to take several years. And when that process is complete, that will be Unreal Engine 6."

Sweeney wants developers using Unreal to be able to "build an app once and then deploy it as a standalone game for any platform," and also be able to incorporate their work into Fortnite or any other Unreal game. One of Epic's initiatives along these lines is a planned "persistent universe" owned by Disney but compatible with Fortnite: "We announced that we're working with Disney to build a Disney ecosystem that's theirs, but it fully interoperates with the Fortnite ecosystem.

"And what we're talking about with Unreal Engine 6 is the technology base that's going to make that possible for everybody."

And I gotta say, that vision doesn't appeal to me any more now than it did at the height of metaverse mania. But while there are a ton of serious impediments to making it happen, these aren't the bong rip musings about 3 billion AI-empowered developers from EA CEO Andrew Wilson or Ubisoft's flaccid attempts to sell Ghost Recon NFTs⁠—Epic has the resources and industry ubiquity to at least get this initiative off the ground.

That huge Fortnite war chest immediately springs to mind⁠—this is a company engaging in a multi-front legal war with the likes of Google and Apple without breaking a sweat⁠—but even more critical is that Unreal Engine is everywhere. UE3 already felt like a juggernaut 15 years ago, but Unreal Engine 5 has increasingly found a place in Hollywood as a tool for creating CGI in movies. Unreal is also seeing a lot of adoption in the indie and double-A space while some major developers known for their in-house engines have dropped those tools in favor of Epic's middleware⁠—CD Projekt and now Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) are the ones that most surprised me.

At the same time, you could drive a truck through the figurative gap between "I'm using Unreal Engine" and "I'm an enthusiastic partner in the Unreal metaverse." There are also other, competing visions for what the next five to ten years of gaming will look like, and the big elephant in the room here is Valve. The Verge quotes Epic EVP Sax Persson as saying "people are not dogmatic about where they play" based on Epic's own surveys, but has he seen the way people talk about the Epic Store vs. Steam?

My own feelings about the store's usability and how a third party alternative launcher developed by some guy is preferable to multi-billion dollar Epic's own program aside, Epic's huge investment into the storefront has not significantly altered the PC launcher balance of power⁠—Fortnite aside, EGS exclusive games always seem to actually break out and sell well only once they come to Steam a year later, and even the critical darling, Epic-published Alan Wake 2 hadn't managed to turn a profit six months after launch. We say this not as fans of Valve but a sober observation: Steam keeps on winning.

I'm with PCG online editor Fraser Brown: Fortnite isn't the future, it's an anomaly. But we'll see what that future holds. If I'm cyber-Goku doing the Griddy in the greater Fortnite-Disney-Unreal metaverse come 2029, I'll eat a big helping of Unreal Engine 6-rendered crow before getting domed by a Mickey Mouse armed with a Barrett .50 cal.

Any thought that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney might quit while he was ahead in his long-running disputes with Apple and Google went out the window earlier this week when Epic sued Google, again, and took a swing (figuratively, of course) at Samsung for good measure. Reinforcing that point, Sweeney said at the Unreal Fest in Seattle yesterday that he has no intention of easing up until Epic has claimed a clear-cut victory against everyone. 

It's been four years since Epic first picked a fight with Apple over alleged "anti-competitive restraints and monopolistic practices," after which it quickly followed up with similar action against Google. Subsequent years of legal wrangling have seen some unexpected wins for Epic: A jury sided with Epic over Google in 2023, finding that Google "wilfully acquired or maintained monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive conduct," while new regulations in the European Union requires Apple to allow third-party marketplaces on iOS devices.

Epic hasn't been entirely satisfied with the results, however. In August, Sweeney accused Apple of "malicious compliance" with the EU's Digital Markets Act, saying Apple has made the process of installing the Epic Games Store app on iOS devices unnecessarily burdensome, and earlier this week it filed that new lawsuit against Google and Samsung over essentially the same complaint: That they've made the installation process such a hassle that some users just wouldn't bother.

Speaking at the Unreal Fest, Sweeney laid out his vision for a collaborative future in online game development, in which "all companies and creators can participate together in the future as peers," and decried Apple and Google as the big obstacles to making it happen.

"For a vibrant digital ecosystem to exist in the future we need fair competition and an end to these monopoly rent collectors," Sweeney said. "Apple and Google have a totally broken vision for the world which is to limit what developers can do, to impose ever more restrictions to prevent things like the metaverse from happening, or to tax it to the point where they're extracting all the profit from it.

"We're at a point now where game development is expensive, it's low margin, and game companies are suffering. Apple and Google make way more profit from most games than the developers make themselves while contributing nothing back. And this has to change."

Sweeney said that when he was growing up, Apple was an open platform—he described it as "the Steve Wozniak vision for Apple, not the not the modern bleak vision of Apple"—that enabled anyone to make things and share them with the world without needing "permission" from corporations. I don't imagine he wants to go back to a time when using a computer required knowing BASIC—at least I hope not—but it "highlights that open platforms are more fun," he said, and also encourages more enthusiasm and innovation among users and developers alike.

Thus, his dogged determination to eliminate "gatekeepers" and end "junk fees" on digital storefronts. Sweeney hailed Epic's "massive victory" against Google and the passage of the Digital Markets Act in the EU, and while that regulation doesn't apply outside of Europe, "relief is on the way."

"The UK and Japan have passed new laws and there's major legislation in many major developing countries all around the world. And the world is changing for the better," Sweeney said. "Though there's much more to do, we're going to keep fighting on until there's an ultimate victory."

It's an ambitious vision, but one Sweeney seems to genuinely believe in: In the same address, he said the games industry is undergoing a "generational change" that's blending gaming with online social experiences in unprecedented ways. Yes, that's the metaverse, and a lot of people still aren't sold on it (myself included) or at the very least don't agree on what it means, so a certain amount of eye-rolling is allowed. Some, like PC Gamer online editor and rabid contrarian Fraser Brown, reject the notion outright. But given the monstrous ongoing success of Fortnite, which hit a record 110 million monthly active users over the last holiday season, and Epic's slow, relentless grind against Apple and Google, I'm not sure I'd bet the farm against Sweeney just yet.

Epic boss Tim Sweeney reckons we're in the midst of a "generational change" in the videogame industry—one that's going to see games like Fortnite stick their flag on top of a pile of (largely singleplayer) blockbuster corpses. But all he's doing is repeating a fallacy that has been touted for years, with little evidence to back it up. The metaverse ain't the future and singleplayer games will never stop coming. 

"One of the manifestations [of that change] we're seeing right now is that a lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling nearly as well as expected," Sweeney said. "Whereas other games are going incredibly strong. What we're seeing is a real trend where players are gravitating toward the really big games where they can play with more of their friends."

Now, to be fair to Sweeney, the picture he paints of the current state of the industry is not entirely inaccurate. We've witnessed a slew of high-profile flops and disappointments over the last year, most recently the actually-quite-good Star Wars Outlaws. And there's no denying that Fortnite is a gargantuan powerhouse which, along with the likes of Roblox, demonstrates the popularity of not just multiplayer games, but social platforms. 

The videogame industry is a constantly evolving animal, and in the nearly four decades I've been gaming, it's never sat still. It wasn't all that long ago that PC gaming was allegedly dead, but now it's the most vibrant platform around. I've watched the rise of MMOs, the downfall (and resurrection) of adventure games, the advent of MOBAs, and the massive impact of free-to-play and live service games. These aren't generational changes, though, because the industry doesn't evolve in spurts, it's in constant flux. And it's so vast now, that it's impossible to say "This is what gamers want".

Sweeney's prediction implies that a certain type of gamer is going to die out and then be replaced by a younger kind of gamer who wants different things. But that's absolute nonsense. The average gamer is approaching middle age: a demographic that largely isn't catered to by Fortnite and Roblox. And while plenty of middle-aged gamers, myself included, are more than happy to play social games—sicko that I am, I've got three MMOs on the go at the moment—it's actually a lot easier to make time for a game where I don't even need to think about other humans.

Time and time again, it's proved to be foolish to pigeonhole gamers. Just look at EA. Back in 2010, EA Games' then-president, Frank Gibeau, basically said the same thing Sweeney is saying now: "I firmly believe that the way the products we have are going they need to be connected online," he said. "Online is where the innovation, and all the action, is at." Singleplayer games "are finished" he thought. And that kind of thinking infected EA for a decade, resulting in things like BioWare's most catastrophic flop, Anthem. 

In a 2018 annual report, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot insinuated the same thing. "New releases now only represent a part of our business, which is now focused on long term engagement with players," he said, before celebrating The Division, For Honor and Steep. The model he wanted to push was one that wasn't dependent on new releases, but "developing numerous multiplayer games". And yes, that has led to some successes. But it's also given us Skull & Bones and Hyper Scape. Multiplayer games have just as many risks as singleplayer ones. 

These games fit into a more traditional multiplayer mould, of course, while Sweeney is more invested in securing the future of metaverse games—platforms not just for gaming, but also watching virtual concerts and advertising Star Wars. He says that the value of a game "grows in proportion to the number of your friends that you can connect to", but that is only true for a very specific type of—usually younger—gamer. And there's no guarantee they'll keep wanting that one kind of game forever. 

When I was a kid, Pogs were more popular than any videogame. But nobody thought kids only cared about physical games where they could slam colourful discs into other colourful discs, or that Pogs were going to transform the way we played games. Kids are mercurial, and eventually my colossal Pog collection just became a pile of cardboard rubbish. And while Fortnite almost certainly has an incredibly long life ahead of it, it would be a huge mistake to assume that it was going to define the future of videogames, or usher in the metaverse. 

Indeed, the metaverse is still largely considered a joke by normal people who haven't thrown their fortunes at it. It's a product of Covid-19 madness, like NFTs. Unless you're a wealthy tech investor, you probably haven't even thought about it once this year. And nobody aside from Epic or the Roblox Corporation has really created anything of value that could be considered a metaverse. With that in mind, you can't even say they're part of a trend. They're just a couple of—albeit massively popular—games. If anything, they're anomalies.

On Steam, six of the most currently played games are multiplayer affairs (if you include GTA 5), but they all fall into more traditional categories: MMOs, shooters and battle royales. None of this is evidence of a generational change. And Sweeney's talk of big budget flops also ignores the notable success stories. Black Myth: Wukong, for instance, is an extremely conservative game in terms of its mechanics—it's largely linear and staunchly singleplayer. And people went wild for it. Space Marine 2 is similarly extremely traditional and enjoyed a fantastic launch.

Baldur's Gate 3 continues to be one of the biggest things in PC gaming, meanwhile, and that's a year after launch. It's a premium, mostly singleplayer game with none of the trapping of live service, and it couldn't be further away from the metaverse. Its impact has placed it firmly in the middle of the gaming culture. So while, on their own, big singleplayer games might not draw in the same number of players as Fortnite, together they have a huge audience, and there are a lot more of them than there are metaverse experiments. This is not remotely a type of game that's on its last legs. 

Granted, a successful multiplayer live service game can generate a stupid amount of money, making them attractive propositions, but to create this consistent income endless development is required: constant patches, hotfixes, updates and expansions—year after year. And a huge amount of infrastructure is needed on top of that perpetual development cycle to cover things like cash shops, subscriptions and community support. This is not something most studios are set up to handle. And for every multiplayer hit, there are countless games left by the wayside, devoid of players or a future—most recently Concord, which Sony had a lot riding on. It's an incredibly risky bet. 

What is true is that expectations have risen, or at least changed, and there's absolutely a malaise when it comes to the massive open-world games that continue to dominate our hobby. That's just boredom, though, and not indicative of a dramatic shift in the way people play games. Developers of blockbuster games are going to need to go back to the drawing board and stop relying on the old stalwart tactics, but this has happened countless times before. Every genre starts as a novelty, we get sick of it, and developers adapt. This is simply business as usual.

So you can file Sweeney's speech away in the same place you put all the over-the-top claims about how AI will improve everyone's life or how we'll be living on Mars in a few years. It's just another CEO trying to usher in their ideal future by spouting a lot of rubbish.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said during his address at today's Unreal Fest in Seattle that while there's still uncertainty about what exactly the metaverse is, the continuing growth of Fortnite—and the failure of a number of high-profile big-budget games to meet expectations—is proof that it represents the future of gaming.

Fortnite hit "new records in concurrency," Sweeney said during his opening comments, achieving an all-time peak of 110 million active users over the previous holiday season—an accomplishment he said comes amidst a "generational change" in the games industry.

"One of the manifestations [of that change] we're seeing right now is that a lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling nearly as well as expected," Sweeney said. "Whereas other games are going incredibly strong. What we're seeing is a real trend where players are gravitating toward the really big games where they can play with more of their friends."

The perceived value of a game, he continued, "grows in proportion to the number of your friends that you can connect to," for everything from playing games together to chatting by voice, watching virtual concerts, or "doing other kinds of cool, virtual things online."

"Some people will call it the metaverse," Sweeney said, "And we're not all in agreement on what this means. Some people, when they hear the word 'metaverse,' they think of what Facebook is doing with VR and now AR. Some people use the metaverse to describe everything they don't like about the current Fortnite season."

Regardless of what you think of the moment-to-moment state of Fortnite, though, "it's new, and it's exciting, and it's something that's never happened at this scale in the history of entertainment," Sweeney said. The evolving story and ongoing live content updates are obviously a huge part of that, but he attributed much of Fortnite's success to "all the world's brands participating and dropping in: Musicians reaching users, Disney and Star Wars and others all coming together to create a world class entertainment experience that's ever-evolving and live. That's really what we think the future of gaming is about."

I'm among those who raise an eyebrow whenever the topic of the metaverse comes up, but I won't argue Sweeney's point. Seven years after Fortnite first launched it remains an absolute juggernaut, and the biggest brands in entertainment are still lining up to get in. On the other side of the coin, Sweeney's mention of a slump among some big-budget standalone releases seems on point: Suicide Squad, Final Fantasy 16, Starfield, and most pointedly Star Wars Outlaws have all been letdowns to some extent, even though they all carry the branding Sweeney is so enthusiastic about.

Like so many tech companies, Epic Games grew aggressively at the start of the 2020s and then suddenly declared that it had made a mistake. The Fortnite and Unreal Engine maker cut over 800 jobs last year and maimed and sold off Bandcamp, a website it had purchased just a year earlier.

"For a while now, we've been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators," Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said at the time. "I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic."

At an event for Unreal Engine developers today, however, Sweeney declared that the ship has been righted.

"We spent the last year rebuilding and really executing solidly on all fronts," said the CEO. "I'm happy to tell you now that the company is financially sound, and that Fortnite and the Epic Games Store have hit new records in concurrency and success."

Fortnite's new peak, achieved over the holidays, was 110 million monthly active users, Sweeney said. The Epic Games Store also reached a new peak with 70 million monthly active users in September, according to store GM Steve Allison.

Also during today's Unreal Fest presentation, Epic announced a new incentive to get game developers onto the Epic Games Store, but it's one gamers should have less of a problem with than the usual timed exclusivity deals. 

Epic already takes no Unreal Engine royalty fees on Unreal Engine games purchased through the Epic Games Store (when using Epic's payment processing). But even for sales made off EGS, such as on Steam, it will now reduce the Unreal Engine royalty fee from 5% to 3.5% so long as the developer also released the game on EGS on day one. That applies to any platform where both the game and EGS exist: For lots of games that'll just be PC, but Epic now also has mobile versions of EGS in certain regions, and continues to fight with Apple and Google over its desire to sell mobile games without paying their fees.

The PC exclusivity deals aren't completely over: Epic still offers 100% revenue share for six months when games launch exclusively on EGS. But with even Ubisoft finally giving up on exclusivity and going back to day one Steam releases, it does feel like the Epic exclusive era of PC gaming is fading into the past.

Epic has been giving away games on the Epic Games Store since it launched at the end of 2018, enticing Steam users to install its launcher with freebies as big as Grand Theft Auto 5 and Civilization 6. More than 580 million free games were claimed just last year.

Giving away half-a-billion game copies a year, even when paying a small fraction of each copy's list price, is not cheap. Thanks to documents that came out during Epic's legal fight with Apple, we learned that the company spent $11.6 million on free games in just the first nine months of the program. Epic has been giving away games for six years now.

However, responding to a question about Epic's free game strategy on a call with press earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that it's been a "very economical" user acquisition program, with the bonus that the budget goes to game developers—a group it's in a game store's interest to see thrive—rather than toward Facebook or Google ads.

"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," said Sweeney. "For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search Ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can bring in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.

"And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it's so much that often developers, when they're about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That's been an awesome thing. And it's been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store."

Epic's other big method for attracting new Epic Games Store users has been to strike exclusivity deals with publishers like Ubisoft. It's been an unpopular strategy, and hasn't gone as swimmingly.

"We spent a lot of money on exclusives," said Sweeney. "A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical."

Back in 2021, we learned that Epic was likely to lose over $300 million on just the exclusivity deals made up to that point. Epic seems to have slowed down on pursuing exclusivity deals, although it hasn't dropped the strategy.

Epic Games Store exclusivity now also applies to games Epic is funding through the publishing division it started in 2020. The first of those Epic-published games to release was Remedy's Alan Wake 2, which hasn't made a profit yet.

The free games, though: that's a hit. If you want to see what Epic is giving away right now, and every game it's given away in the past, we're keeping track in our Epic Games Store free games list.

Epic Games and its CEO, Tim Sweeney, have been at war with Apple for years now. The present situation is this: Epic only wants to put Fortnite on iPhones and iPads if it can use its own store and payment processor instead of the official Apple App Store, which takes a 30% cut of revenue. Apple, meanwhile, would prefer it if Epic did not do that.

Epic didn't get the ruling it wanted when it sued Apple over this issue in the US, but the story is different in Europe. The European Union's 2022 Digital Markets Act now requires Apple to allow third-party marketplaces on iOS devices, which means that Epic can finally sell Fortnite V-bucks in Europe without paying Apple a cut for the privilege of accessing one of the world's largest mobile device markets (except in the form of a brand new fee Apple has devised in response to the law, which Epic also takes issue with).

The time has finally come for the two companies to put the law into practice: Epic has announced that the Epic Games Store is launching on iOS today in Europe, and worldwide on Android. For now, it'll house just three games: Fall Guys, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fortnite, the latter of which has notably been unavailable to download on iOS since Epic intentionally broke Apple's TOS in 2020 in an act of corporate protest.

The catch is that Apple has not made it especially easy to install the new Epic Games Store iOS app. On a call with press earlier this week, Sweeney accused Apple of "malicious compliance," saying that the company has technically done what's required by the EU, but has been "terribly obstructive" to Epic and other companies along the way (at one point, Apple revoked Epic's developer account). 

One way Apple has been obstructive, says Epic, is by designing an off-putting 15-step install process for third-party marketplaces.

Some of the installation steps are normal, such as clicking an "install" button on the Epic Games website, and Epic stretches the definition of "installation step" by counting both returning to the main iOS screen after installation and opening the newly-installed app. But the process does look long, and throws up what Epic refers to as "scare screens," prompts telling users they need to change their iOS settings to allow external marketplaces (implying risk), and "dead ends," which are steps that don't automatically return the user to the install process.

"For now, the process of installing the Epic Games Store on iOS and Android is lengthy due to Apple and Google introducing intentionally poor-quality install experiences laden by multiple steps, confusing device settings, and scare screens," Epic said today. "We are continuing to fight in courts and work with regulators around the globe to eliminate the anticompetitive terms that Apple and Google impose on developers and consumers, so we can build a better store for everyone."

Epic expects this complicated install process to deter many from installing the Epic Games Store on iOS, but believes motivated European Fortnite fans will make the effort to finally play Fortnite on iPhones and iPads again. Epic hopes those players will lead the way in building an install base before it starts adding third-party games to the mobile Epic Games Store.

Sweeney's vision for a giant game store, launcher, and multiplayer platform that is totally independent from the hardware and software platforms it runs on—what he used to call the "metaverse," but the term's started to go out of fashion—is one step closer to reality. He expects to launch the Epic Games Store on iOS in Japan soon, too, once new regulations take effect. 

In the United States, however, no progress has been made since Epic and Apple's big trial.

"It's been a massive failure of the United States regulatory and political system that there is not a crisp, clean action to stop the monopolization occurring in the United States and in the whole world by a US company," said Sweeney on this week's call. "That's been disheartening to see, but hopefully over the coming years, somebody will continue to take that on. 

"In the meantime, we foresee being locked out of the iOS App Store worldwide, with the exception of these territories, for the foreseeable future, for perhaps years more, as we continue to fight worldwide."

Epic is also launching Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fall Guys on AltStore, another new third-party iOS marketplace which is taking advantage of the Digital Markets Act in Europe. 

Valve is currently embroiled in a US antitrust lawsuit with Wolfire, a developer that alleges the Steam platform holder uses its position to unfairly crowd-out rivals and control game prices. Valve tried to have the suit dismissed, but in May 2022 the court ruled it could go ahead with some changes and enter the discovery phase: the juiciest part of the legal process where, among other things, plenty of internal correspondence from the companies involved is made public.

Among these documents are a couple of spicy exchanges between Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, and Valve's CEO Gabe Newell, COO Scott Lynch, and project manager Erik Johnson (first spotted by Simon Carless at GameDiscoverCo). The context for both exchanges is broadly speaking store pricing and specifically the commission that Valve takes on Steam sales, which are some of Sweeney's favourite topics. The first chain in 2017 is sparked specifically by a leaked comment from Steam's developer forum, in which Valve's Sean Jenkins mistakenly said Steam may start restricting the keys it gives to developers:

On August 12, 2017, Gabe Newell emails Tim Sweeney: "Anything we doing to annoy you? We’re guessing Sean Jenkins' public dumbness might be part of it."

Sweeney replies to Newell and Valve's Erik Johnson saying he's not annoyed "and I've never heard of Sean Jenkins" (poor Sean). Then Sweeney adjusts his flight goggles and gets ready for takeoff on one of his pet peeves: the 30% platform fee on Steam. "There was a good case for [such fees] in the early days," writes Sweeney, "but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee."

Sweeney opines that, if you were to strip away the top 25 selling games on Steam, "I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made." The maths to get there is 30% to Valve, 30% on marketing, and 15% on servers / engine costs, so "the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990s."

If either Valve employee replied to Sweeney, it's not in this disclosure. Which might be why, when we get to December 2018, Sweeney is in an even more ornery mood. At this time Valve had introduced a royalty change that almost seems custom-designed to get Sweeney frothing at the mouth: it reduced Valve's cut on the most-successful games down to as low as 20%. Not only is Sweeney all about the little guy but, at this exact moment in time, he's gearing up for the launch of the Epic Games Store and the antitrust fight between Epic and Apple (still ongoing).

Sweeney is emailing Gabe Newell and Scott Lynch, and begins by outlining his problems with Apple, before telling them about the imminent launch of the Epic Games Store. This is a direct competitor to Steam and, credit where it's due, Epic put its money where Sweeney's mouth was by launching with a flat 12% platform fee. Sweeney wants Valve to respond to this, mainly because it'll strengthen Epic's hand against Apple, but he's clearly not had too many lessons in the gentle art of persuasion:

"Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people," writes Sweeney. "We're all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?"

The next day Valve's Scott Lynch simply sends this email to both Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson with one-line commentary: "You mad bro?"

I imagine, at that exact moment, Tim Sweeney probably was quite mad. It should also be noted that, while some may see Lynch's response as rather flippant, it was of course never meant to be seen outside of Valve. And Sweeney has just emailed two senior Valve types, told them he's launching a direct competitor to their platform, criticised how Valve operates its store, ranted a bit about Apple, ranted a little bit more about Apple, and then called them "assholes." I mean, it's a bold move Cotton.

The Wolfire lawsuit is much wider than just these emails, and Carless does raise the interesting question of who exactly is funding the smaller company against Valve. Litigation on this scale is eye-wateringly expensive and, while Valve has large pockets, it's not clear where Wolfire is getting the money from. It's currently asking the court to resolve the suit as a class action claim, and has re-stated its core arguments about pricing, during which amusingly enough it backhands the Epic Games Store ("publishers have little incentive to offer games on EGS and consumers have little incentive to use the platform").

The suit honestly doesn't seem enormously coherent in what it claims about Valve, with various different elements of how Steam works being conflated, and I'm not sure it's going anywhere but, hey, not a lawyer. Still, thanks to this we've found out what happened behind closed doors when Epic was launching its big Steam competitor: at Valve, they were laughing.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly suggested Scott Lynch was replying to Tim Sweeney directly. He was commenting on Sweeney's email to Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson.

Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 2 was supposed to go live today, and it still might, but if you're waiting eagerly to jump back into the game you'll likely have noticed that it hasn't happened yet. And it won't for a while: Epic said it ran into an "unexpected issue" during downtime, and it seems to be having problems getting it fixed.

Word of the problems first came to light earlier today. "Hey everyone, we encountered an unexpected issue during our maintenance and we need to extend downtime at least 8 additional hours," Epic's Fortnite Status account tweeted. "We apologize for making everyone wait longer than usual to drop into Chapter 5 Season 2 of Battle Royale. The team is working through this as quickly as possible, and we’ll provide another update when we have more info."

Seven hours into that eight-hour stretch, another update said work was continuing, but more time was required: "Players will be able to pre-download an updated version of v29.00 in approximately 5 hours," Epic tweeted.

That puts the target time at roughly 9 pm ET, but to my reading that doesn't necessarily mean the game will be live at that point—only that players will be able to get the update ahead of its return.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took a moment to tweet a little joke about situation:

A few followers took issue with the tweet, suggesting that Sweeney wasn't treating the situation with an appropriate level of seriousness, but for the most part people seem to be rolling with it in good nature. Some players on Reddit expressed relief that Epic caught the problem now, rather than after the update went fully live; one mused philosophically, "Maybe Chapter 5, Season 2 was the friends we made along the way."

Of course, there are some real victims here too:

The nature of the problem isn't known at this point, but it's clearly a significant issue: Lengthy downtimes leading up to the launch of new seasons is nothing new, but double-extended delays like this are a rarity. Hopefully Epic will be able to meet the latest deadline, but even if it does, it's fair to say that some players are going to have to wait until tomorrow before they get back into the action.

Update: Just two days after terminating Epic Games' iOS developer account, Apple has reversed course and says it will be restored.

"Apple has told us and committed to the European Commission that they will reinstate our developer account," Epic said. 

"This sends a strong signal to developers that the European Commission will act swiftly to enforce the Digital Markets Act and hold gatekeepers accountable. We are moving forward as planned to launch the Epic Games Store and bring Fortnite back to iOS in Europe."

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said the reversal represents "a big win for European rule of law, for the European Commission, and for the freedom of developers worldwide to speak up."

If you thought the legal beef between Epic and Apple was over, it's time to think again. Epic said today that less than a month after approving its App Store developer account, Apple has now terminated it, leaving the Fortnite developer unable to bring its planned Epic Games Store to iOS devices.

Epic said the termination of its developer account is a "serious violation" of the European Union's Digital Markets Act, which compels Apple and other companies to allow third-party storefronts on their devices. Enabling those storefronts is something Apple has resisted for years, and even when it announced its intention to comply with the DMA, Apple did its best to make it all a net negative, saying it "is introducing new safeguards that reduce — but don’t eliminate — new risks the DMA poses to EU users."

Still, it seemed like a done deal. "We are bringing more opportunities to developers across all platforms and we’re so excited about what’s to come.… including bringing the Epic Games Store to iOS in Europe," Epic tweeted triumphantly on February 16. "Dev account secured, let’s go!"

Ah, but no. "To our surprise, Apple has terminated that account and now we cannot develop the Epic Games Store for iOS," Epic wrote today. "This is a serious violation of the DMA and shows Apple has no intention of allowing true competition on iOS devices.

"In terminating Epic’s developer account, Apple is taking out one of the largest potential competitors to the Apple App Store. They are undermining our ability to be a viable competitor and they are showing other developers what happens when you try to compete with Apple or are critical of their unfair practices."

What's really interesting about all this, though, and straight-up bizarre, is Apple's justification for killing Epic's dev account. Basically, Apple doesn't trust Epic not to hose them around in the future, a position it says is justified "by a litany of public attacks on Apple's policies, compliance plan, and business model" fired off on social media by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. As "just one example" of evidence, it cited this tweet from February:

"Your colorful criticism of our DMA compliance plan, coupled with Epic's past practice of intentionally violating contractual provisions with which it disagrees, strongly suggests that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules," Apple's Phil Schiller wrote in a February 23 email to Tim Sweeney, shared in Epic's blog post. "Another intentional breach could threaten the security of the iOS platform, as well as the security and privacy of users."

Apple's admonishment does not appear to have convinced Sweeney to tone it down, however.

I am not a lawyer but it all seems very weird and frankly schoolyard-ish to me. Has Tim Sweeney said mean things about Apple? Yes! Did Epic strategically pick a fight with Apple because it wasn't happy with the App Store's terms? Again, yes! I don't think it's unfair to say that Sweeney's been a headache for Apple for at least a few years now. But in my eyes, all that pales next to the European Union declaring in no uncertain terms, "Hey, you gotta let 'em do this."

The only possible rationale for Apple's move that I can see—and again, not a lawyer here—is that the EU said Apple has to allow third-party storefronts on iOS devices, but it maybe didn't say it has to provide them with developer accounts. As someone with fond memories of beefing with my younger sister when I was 12, I have to admire that kind of technical end-run around the rules if that's the case. But as a grown-ass man watching billionaires sink mountains of cash into firing spitballs at each other over who gets to play in the sandbox, it all seems a bit ridiculous. And by "a bit," I mean "very." In the real world, my dad would've yelled at both of us by now and the whole thing would be settled.

Clearly that's not going to be the case in this catfight: Neither Apple nor Epic have shown even the slightest willingness to compromise in their dispute (or even to tone down the rhetoric), and insulated as they are from any real consequences thanks to their virtually limitless piles of money (although Epic has been showing signs of strain on that front), we can expect this seemingly finished fight to continue for a long time yet.

Epic has launched a Fortnite tease that is tweaking Apple's nose about new rules set to come into force in the EU. The brief clip shows Peely, the Fortnite banana mascot, floating backwards into the void while making the "I'm watching you" gesture with two fingers. It adds a shoutout to the EU's new Digital Markets Act (DMA) and adds "Apple, the world is watching."

This is the latest stage in a global faceoff between Apple and Epic as the Fortnite developer (and platform holder) battles to open up the walled garden that is iOS. Epic's attempts in the US mainly ended in failure, but in the EU it's a different story and the DMA means Apple must allow customers to access thirdparty app stores and payment methods. The DMA is not just about Apple but all large tech companies that act as gatekeepers to online services, and aims to make it easier for companies to compete on large storefronts without having to jump through hoops that solely benefit the platform-holder. 

Epic has used Fortnite symbolically throughout this fight, withdrawing it from the App Store in 2020 (with an advert parodying Apple's classic 1984 commercial). In its various actions Epic has argued that Apple operates an anti-competitive monopoly that gives developers and players no choice but to go through iOS and cough up 30% commission. 

For its part, Apple has announced how it intends to comply with the provisions of the DMA and the chutzpah is kind of amazing: among other things it is demanding install fees above a certain number of users, and that developers wishing to use their own payment services provide a stonking proof of credit. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games and a man never shy of sharing his opinions, is positively fulminating at what looks like a bad faith attempt to skirt the EU's demands.

"Apple's plan to thwart Europe's new Digital Markets Act law is a devious new instance of Malicious Compliance," thunders Sweeney. "They are forcing developers to choose between App Store exclusivity and the store terms, which will be illegal under DMA, or accept a new also-illegal anticompetitive scheme rife with new Junk Fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don't process."

Sweeney is referring here to a new developer charge of $0.50 for every install an app has above the one million mark: even if that app is free to the end user. He says Apple's "twisting this process to undermine competition and continue imposing Apple taxes on transactions they're not involved in.

"There's a lot more hot garbage in Apple's announcement. It will take more time to parse both the written and unwritten parts of this new horror show, so stay tuned."

Sweeney is not alone in his incredulity at what Apple is proposing here. A particular bone of contention is the requirement that, if you wish to process payments via a thirdparty store on iOS, you'll first have to provide a €1,000,000 letter of credit, which obviously precludes the vast majority of developers from ever doing so. Incidentally this led to a rather sweet anecdote from Sweeney, who recalled that "Epic was founded with a few thousands dollars in funds that I earned through mowing lawns" and such rules would obviously stop this kind of startup from competing in any meaningful way.

"Under what possible theory of antitrust regulation is it acceptable for a monopoly to decide what companies are allowed to compete with it, and on what terms they can compete," asks Sweeney. "Apple makes a mockery of free market competition."

The US Supreme Court has ended the legal battle between Apple and Epic, for now at least, by refusing to hear either side's appeals in their long-running dispute over iOS store policies (as reported by Reuters).

Apple had appealed against a lower court's ruling which ordered certain changes to iOS policies, while Epic had appealed against the same court's ruling that iOS policies around distribution and monetisation were not in violation of federal antitrust laws. The Supreme Court justices gave no reason for their decision to deny both appeals.

"The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States," said Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. "A sad outcome for all developers.

"Now the District Court’s injunction against Apple’s anti-steering rule is in effect, and developers can include in their apps "buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP"."

While Epic may have lost the war, the ruling about Apple's anti-steering rule was the one battle it did win: Apple has to let app developers direct users to non-iOS means of paying for content.  The company has to comply with the court's ruling but, in an unsurprising turn of events, has chosen to go the route of malicious compliance: Apps can now direct users outside of the iOS payment ecosystem but, drum roll please, Apple is still demanding a 27% cut of any purchases. In its own words:

"Apple’s commission will be 27% on proceeds you earn from sales ("transactions") to the user for digital goods or services on your website after a link out (i.e., they tap "Continue" on the system disclosure sheet), provided that the sale was initiated within seven days and the digital goods or services can be used in an app."

Yes, that does kind of make it pointless. And guess who's fuming. "Apple filed a bad-faith 'compliance' plan for the District Court's injunction," said Sweeney. "It totally undermines the order."

Sweeney lists various issues with Apple's intended plan. He calls the 27% commission on web purchases an "Apple tax" that "kills price competition", and says Apple's made the process deliberately isolated from the usual "payment flow" on iOS. This means users have to log in to a separate browser session and "search all over again for the digital item they wanted to buy". The system as-is also serves up a warning to users that Sweeney calls a "scare screen".

You'll never guess where this is going. Yep, the man with lots of lawyers is not going to take this lying down. "Epic will contest Apple's bad-faith compliance plan in District Court," ends Sweeney. Apple has made no comment on the ruling, nor has its CEO Tim Cook. 

It's been a long old road to get here. Epic first filed an antitrust lawsuit in 2020 that accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly by forcing iPhone users to install all apps and make all purchases through its App Store (with a typical 30% commission). When it reached court in 2021, the central antitrust accusations were rejected, but the judge did find that Apple was in breach of competition law in its refusal to let developers direct users to alternative payment systems that bypassed Apple's own. Epic's argument is basically that, if developers can do this, that opens the door to more competition, lower prices, and a net gain for consumers.

This ruling went through the US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco last year, and was mostly upheld, which led to more appeals, which has led to the Supreme Court basically saying we're done here. 

As far as this lawsuit goes, we are. But this is only about the US. A new European Union law that comes into effect in March will force Apple to allow downloads from outside the App Store, while the EU is also currently engaged in an antitrust case against Apple (again, the main focus being that developers can't direct users to other payment methods). Clearly the war of the Tims will wage for some time yet.

Fortnite (a game which by all accounts probably doesn't need the help) could come to Steam, but on one condition: the platform does away with its 30% cut.

As spotted by Gamesradar, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney laid out the conditions for bringing Fortnite to the platform in a response to a Tweet, writing: "We’ll compete, and we’ll also put Fortnite on any serious store that gives all developers an awesome deal … the end of these ridiculous 30% fees is near." Steam takes a 30% cut, so it's a pretty obvious shot across the aisle.

While it's a little funny that Sweeney is implying Steam isn't a "serious store" here, it should be noted that he isn't technically wrong. 30% is a high price for the privilege. Back in 2021, a state of the industry survey at GDC found that only 7% of respondents thought a 30% cut was justified. 

However if Fortnite came to Steam, it likely wouldn't be shelling out 30% of its profits for the privilege. If you're a big earner, Valve will only take 25% (past the $10 million mark) or 20% (past the $50 million mark). That's something Valve's been criticised for in the past—but given its current hold on the market, the resentment hasn't really done much.

Epic Games has plenty of problems that keep it from achieving Steam's massive popularity, but it does have the high ground in this particular debate. Epic's baseline cut is 12%, and there are programs in place that allow devs six months of 100% profit as long as they commit to Epic Games Store exclusivity. Cynically, this may be more down to the fact that Epic Games is less popular (and needs to convince devs to use it). However, from a sheer numbers perspective it's generous by comparison.

This also isn't the first time Sweeney's come down on Valve. Back in March, he said Steam had caused a "real problem for the industry" in how it set up its multiplayer games. "They have a classic lock-in strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and they use the fact that they have the majority market share in order to encourage everybody to ship games that have a broken experience in other stores."

On the other hand, Valve promotes games in ways that are (typically) handy for the consumer. In October, it was revealed that the store doesn't sell ad space at all—instead, the storefront uses either algorithmic methods or hand-curated full page takeovers and spotlights, which are selected based on how well the game's doing.

This can even be good for devs sometimes, skimming-off-the-top aside. Dave the Diver had a meteoric rise to popularity despite having a humble team, hitting the storefront like a torpedo. Other times, Steam's methods force even veteran studios to try and flip negative Steam reviews with embarrassing copy-and-paste comments, something that's become an industry standard for smaller studios too, as Steam grows ever more dominant.

Friends, I have a confession to make. You might have seen one or two stories on our website about Baldur's Gate 3, an overall pretty solid RPG that practically everyone on staff here has been pouring hours and days of their lives into. But not me. I've been distracted by another venerable series, a contemporary of the original Baldur's Gate games and the first game I ever remember laying my hands on. I've been playing Quake 2.

Nightdive's Quake 2 remaster, to be specific—an incredibly thorough and caring touch-up of the original id game from 1997, and the follow-up to the studio's equally excellent Quake 1 remaster from 2021. It's fantastic, and—unsurprisingly—Nightdive has no intention of stopping there. Over on Twitter (X, whatever), studio CEO Stephen Kick is (once again) angling for Epic to let him give Unreal the same treatment. 

Kick's tweet came after former Unreal designer Cliff Bleszinski jokingly lamented the absence of an Unreal remaster in the wake of Nightdive's work on Quake 1 and 2. Kick was right in there, tweeting at Epic boss Tim Sweeney that Nightdive would "be honored to be the caretakers of Unreal, you've seen what we've done with Doom & Quake, it'd be in good hands".

It sounds like an excellent idea to me, but we probably shouldn't hold our breath. Kick prefaced that tweet with an acknowledgement that Bleszinski had "stuck his neck out" for Nightdive in the past, a reference to Bleszinski's attempt to get Sweeney to let Nightdive take a shot at Unreal a few years ago. It doesn't seem like the Epic boss agreed, though, given that Kick is still tweeting about the matter in 2023.

But we can at least take heart that Nightdive doesn't seem likely to let the matter lie. Kick last made noises about remastering Unreal after Nightdive's Quake 1 remaster released in 2021, and now he's back—as if he has a reminder set up on his phone—to prod Sweeney again with the Quake 2 remaster fresh in everyone's memory. I really hope Epic caves eventually, but if not, well, Kick will remind the company a week or two after Quake 3 remastered, I guess.

The long-running legal beef between Apple and Epic Games is headed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Apple has filed a notice requesting a stay of a lower court injunction against it while it prepares to appeal a 2021 ruling on "anti-steering" practices that ordered the company to allow developers on the App Store to use non-Apple payment options.

The case began way back in August 2020, when Epic theatrically sued Apple over "monopolistic practices" on the App Store. A month later, Apple pushed back, and for the most part it came out on top when the initial ruling was handed down a year later. But Epic landed one good shot when the court declared that Apple's policy of requiring developers to use its in-app payment system was a violation of California's Unfair Competition Law.

The ruling effectively meant that Apple would have to change its policies to allow developers to use whatever payment processor they wanted—so, for instance, Epic would be allowed to offer Fortnite Vbucks for sale directly to gamers on iOS devices, rather than selling them through Apple's system, which takes a 30% cut. Epic and Apple both quickly appealed, and the ruling was put on hold until the appeals process could be completed.

In April, the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the 2021 ruling, and after petitions from both companies to reconsider that ruling were rejected, Apple filed notice (via GamesIndustry) that it's taking the case all the way to the top—that is, the Supreme Court of the United States.

Apple said in its most recent filing that the imposition of a sweeping, across-the-board injunction was an inappropriate remedy to a lawsuit filed by a single plaintiff, rather than a class action: "The [appeals] panel never explained why this supposed harm to Epic and its subsidiaries justified an injunction applicable not only to Epic and its subsidiaries, but also to all other US developers."

It also claimed that the appeal panel's ruling on its App Store payment practices "departs from Supreme Court and Circuit precedent," and potentially conflicts with federal laws. Class action lawsuits and universal injunctions "are receiving close scrutiny from Supreme Court Justices, legal scholars, and knowledgeable observers," Apple said, and the Supreme Court is now "poised to take up the important legal question of whether and when a court may issue a universal injunction" outside of a class action context, as has happened in this case.

"This case is important, not only for Apple and its business model, but also for thousands of developers and millions of iPhone users around the country," Apple said. "This Court should not allow a single-plaintiff action to dictate Apple’s policies nationwide while serious legal questions remain unresolved."

In response to Apple's filing, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said on Twitter that the App Store policy as it stands "censors developers who want to tell consumers about better deals on digital goods out-of-app."

"Remarkably, Apple’s brief takes the position that even if their activities are illegal under California’s Unfair Competition Law, they should be free to enforce the illegal policy against all other developers besides Epic, forcing each dev to fight them in court separately!" Sweeney said.

Epic has not filed its own appeal to the Supreme Court, but given the way both companies have chased each other up the judicial chain, it may yet do so. Of course there's no indication as to when any of this will happen, but it's reasonable to assume that a final ruling could be many months away.

Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney has weighed in on the discourse about blue checkmarks on Twitter, saying that people supporting the "Block the Blue" campaign are "losers and goons" who are trying to exclude people from "cool kid events."

It's fair to say that Twitter has been a goat rodeo since Elon Musk took control of the company in late 2022, but things took a turn for the even stupider last week. After months of waffling and fake-outs, Twitter finally eliminated legacy verification checks, meaning that the only people with the little checkmarks on their accounts were those who were paying $8 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription. 

A few of the old check-holders remained: Xbox men Phil Spencer and Larry Hryb, for instance, kept their blue checks because they're affiliated with the official Xbox account, which now has a gold check, signifying that it's verified as "an official organization on Twitter." For the most part, though, the "verified" blue checks were gone.

Rather than encouraging people to sign up for Twitter Blue, though, the new program had the opposite effect. Celebrities immediately and easily turned their backs on the whole thing, leading right-wing figures who had previously complained about being 'censored' on Twitter started complaining that the new program they'd embraced now had no value. Many seemed genuinely baffled by the notion that celebrities and other high-profile Twitter users want nothing to do with it: "Hollywood celebrities are showing exactly who they are right now - arrogant elitist snobs worth $200 million dollars who won't pay $8 because they think they're better than everyone else," one said, missing the point in genuinely stunning fashion.

Out of all this chaos arose the #BlocktheBlue campaign, which is a sort of boycott aimed at improving the quality of the Twitter experience by auto-blocking Twitter Blue subscribers. The idea actually goes back to last year, when dril, one of Twitter's best-known (and straight-up best) users, said he would "absolutely block on sight" anyone subscribed to Twitter Blue. 

With any usefulness of the blue checkmark now gone, it's now more than just a joke—you can actually get a Chrome extension that will auto-block any Twitter Blue subscriber who appears in your feed. But Sweeney, who founded Epic Games in 1991 and now has an estimated net worth of $7.6 billion, doesn't think that's the way to go.

"People in this #BlockTheBlue pressure campaign are losers and goons," Sweeney tweeted over the weekend. "They're the cool kids from junior high who worked to exclude we nerds from cool kid events, plus the losers who joined in to gain cred. The elite-only verification system sucked, been criticizing it since 2018.

"An online community like this should be a meritocracy, where everyone has an equal chance, and merit is earned rather than anointed by a corporation. Old school Twitter had found a great expression of merit with following & retweeting. The best rose to the top. Then someone well-meaningly built a system for preventing impersonation through verification. But they broke the meritocracy with a policy deeming verification only for elite 'noteworthy' users, while letting Twitter employees hand out verification to their friends as a perk."

Sweeney clarified that he doesn't think the new system is much better: What he really wants to see is "proper identity verification as a service like old Twitter had, but opened up to everyone affordably like new Twitter (or free)," saying that such an option would represent "the best of both worlds." He also said that ideally, Twitter's verification, curation, and subscription systems would all work independently of one another.

"My criticism isn't directed towards folks who choose not to subscribe, but advocates of boycotting every person on Twitter who isn't boycotting Twitter," Sweeney said. "That seems extreme."

I'm not so sure it is. The value of blue checks was gutted by the subscription program, which lets anyone with eight bucks and a phone get one—and in turn makes sharing space with them that much less desirable a prospect. Sweeney bemoaned what he predicted will be increased political polarization as a result of the campaign, which he said aims to "bully people who signed up for democratized Twitter verification into leaving so they can feel like part of your 'in' group," but I think it's more an inverse of the famous XKCD comic on free speech: If you invite the worst sorts of people into your home, you shouldn't be surprised when everyone else leaves.

Musk's response to the #BlocktheBlue campaign over the weekend has not inspired confidence in his ability to chart a rational way forward: Rather than addressing legitimate criticism, he began returning blue checks to some celebrities, without their knowledge or permission, in order to dissuade people from auto-blocking blue-checked subscribers. This resulted in figures including Jamal Khashoggi, Anthony Bourdain, Chris Cornell, and Norm MacDonald—all of them dead—suddenly appearing as active Twitter Blue subscribers. It's the sort of thing that would be tremendously embarrassing for anyone with a sense of shame; in Musk's case, however, it had little visible effect aside from sparking a brief, entirely one-sided beef between him and dril, who spent the weekend changing his Twitter handle in order to dodge the blue check—which, in a fitting coda to this whole ridiculous ordeal, is why dril is currently named "slave to Woke." 

Epic Games recently acquired ArtStation, which among other things is one of the biggest websites that artists use for sharing their portfolios. That means it's also a target for AI companies looking for lots of categorized visual art to use as free training material for their machine learning algorithms. Although Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney hasn't taken any kind of hard stance against generative AI systems in general, he says he doesn't like that companies are ingesting people's artwork without permission.

"They're scraping the web to find people's artwork and then using it, and not getting their explicit say-so on the thing," Sweeney told PC Gamer in a call earlier this week. "And a company shouldn't do that sort of thing, right? Maybe that's in bounds for research, but when you're selling a commercial product that's used to generate commercial artwork, you shouldn't do that."

Last year, Epic created a "noAI" tag artists can apply to their ArtStation works to explicitly prohibit their use in AI training. A number of users felt the company should've applied that tag to all artwork by default rather than leaving it up to users to add it, but for now, it exists as a way to make a proactive statement.

"Choosing not to use the tag leaves copyright law to govern whether or not the artwork was fairly used," reads ArtStation's AI policy page, which was last updated in February. "AI's use and its place in copyright law is new and unsettled, leaving open many questions about copyright law's enforceability against use of work in AI. Adding the 'NoAI' tag empowers you to clarify that regardless of the state of copyright law, use of your work in AI is not permitted."

The use of generative AI in the creation of artwork posted to ArtStation is not prohibited by the site's rules, although it has introduced a filter for users who don't want to see AI-generated images, and tells artists: "The works on your portfolio should be work that you created and we encourage you to be transparent in the process."

Image generators like Midjourney and chatbots like ChatGPT are the most public-facing, controversial applications for machine learning models right now, but it's "a much, much larger field," as Sweeney puts it, and one Epic is already involved in.

"For example, our real-world content scanning at Quixel and 3Lateral, that go around and scan real-world objects, is based really fundamentally on using AI and machine learning to produce very high quality 3D imagery from 2D photographs," Sweeney told me. "Everybody's gonna use AI in lots of ways. Most of it will be just to improve the way we do things today."

When it comes to the more "disruptive" uses of AI, like image generators, Sweeney says he intends to strike a balance between protecting creative work and letting artists engage with new technology at their will.

"At Epic, we see ourselves as being on both sides," said Sweeney. "We're creatives ourselves. We have a lot of artists in the family. We're a tool company, too. We support a lot of game developers. Some of them will use AI, some of them will hate AI, and we want to be a trustable neutral intermediary that doesn't get in the way of industry development, but also isn't going off and hoovering up everybody's art data."

As AI tech and copyright law evolve, that in-between stance may feel some strain: If scraping art for AI training were determined to be legal, for instance, the "noAI" ArtStation tag and whether or not it's applied by default would become much more significant. 

Beyond just image generators, it's becoming clear that some form of AI is going to touch everything we do on computers, whether we want it to or not. A company I sometimes point to as an interesting but less-sensational example of machine learning tech is using it to automatically rig 3D models for animation. Not long ago, Rocket League cheaters were using a godlike bot that had been trained with a machine learning algorithm. Now Discord's sticking ChatGPT in our servers.

I squeezed in this question about AI during a bigger conversation with Sweeney about the Epic Games Store and its new self-publishing tools, which you can read all about here. I also asked about Epic's exclusivity strategy going forward: The short version is that Epic Games Store exclusives aren't going away, but expect Epic to focus on fewer niche games and more big publishing deals.

The Epic Games Store is now open for self-publishing. For $100, the same fee Valve charges for Steam submissions, anyone can submit a game for inclusion in the Epic Games Store library. Epic's system is similar to Steam Direct, which Valve introduced in 2018, and will probably result in Epic's library ballooning over the next year.

There are a few notable differences between Steam and Epic's self-publishing rules, however. In some ways, Epic's game submission guidelines are more permissive than Steam's, but Epic also has two big rules that Steam doesn't. Paraphrased, they are:

• No pornographic games
• Multiplayer games must have crossplay with other PC stores

The first of those was expected: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said in 2019 that the Epic Games Store won't sell porn, whereas Valve has allowed adult games on Steam since 2018—one of the store's most wishlisted games right now is an explicit sex game. Before and even after making the decision to sell adult games, Valve has struggled with where to draw the line (one thing it currently prohibits is "sexually explicit images of real people") and Epic will likely have same issue: Is an erotic text adventure porn? How erotic is too erotic? Epic will have to decide.

The second rule there is a requirement rather than a prohibition: If you release a multiplayer game on the Epic Games Store and Steam (or another PC store), you have to make it possible for everyone to play together, regardless of where they bought it. Epic offers a free solution for cross-launcher multiplayer called Epic Online Services, but says that developers can use their own online system if they prefer. 

Steam does not have such a requirement for multiplayer games, and its free multiplayer API, Steamworks, does not work on any store except Steam. Sweeney has a bone to pick with Valve over that. In a call this week, the Epic CEO told me that "Steam has created a real problem for the industry" with Steamworks.

"They have a classic lock-in strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and they use the fact that they have the majority market share in order to encourage everybody to ship games that have a broken experience in other stores," Sweeney said. "And we were bitten by this early on with a number of multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn't work on our store, so they had either a reduced set of multiplayer features or none, or they were just limited to a much smaller audience back in the launch days of the Epic Games Store, so you had a lot of multiplayer games that really felt like they were broken. And remember, Call of Duty went through a debacle launching on the Windows Store a while back in which you could only matchmake with other Windows Store players, and that is not how PC should work."

The Epic Online Services API also supports crossplay between PC and consoles—it's the same technology Epic built for Fortnite—but console crossplay isn't a requirement for EGS submissions, just crossplay between PC stores. 

A potential consequence for us is that we'll see more multiplayer games use their own friends lists—or Epic's system—rather than fully integrating with Steamworks. That's already a common sight, though: Many multiplayer games on Steam require separate accounts or only partially use Steam's API. Rainbow Six Siege, for instance, requires Ubisoft Connect. And PC multiplayer functionality of course wasn't tied to the store you bought it from in the pre-Steam era (I'm not sure how you would've made me play Command & Conquer: Red Alert exclusively at Fry's Electronics).

Beyond those two rules, Epic may also be pickier during its "quality and functionality" review process. According to Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison, someone will play each submitted game for 20 minutes to determine whether or not it launches properly and is actually the game depicted on the store page. Valve has a similar process, but has said in the past that, for the most part, it doesn't want to make judgment calls about quality or taste. Epic won't get too specific, but it sounds to me like it does plan to make subjective judgments in the review process. When giving an example of a game that might be rejected, Allison used the term "asset flip," which commonly refers to low-effort clones that replace the art from popular games with free or low-quality assets.

On the flip side, Valve has restrictions that Epic doesn't. Unlike Steam, the Epic Games Store has no ban on blockchain games. Epic also allows developers to use their own payment processing for in-game transactions, which bypasses Epic's revenue cut, whereas Steam requires in-game transactions to use the Steam Wallet. And although Steam did lower its revenue cut to 20% for the biggest publishers, it hasn't matched the 12% cut that Epic made so much noise about back when the Epic Games Store launched in late 2018.

Outside of the submission guidelines, a big question for developers and PC gamers is how well the Epic Games Store interface will handle a potential deluge of new games. When it introduced Steam Direct, Valve prioritized the development of Steam features that helped users discover games they might be interested in, such as the Discovery Queue. The Epic Games Store will continue to get interface updates, but as a matter of principle, Allison says that Epic will not track user behavior and use it to algorithmically recommend games. Epic has said in the past that it's more interested in supporting the game discovery that already happens outside of stores, such as on Twitch and YouTube. 

Epic talks a little about upcoming EGS features in the Epic Games Store 2022 Year in Review blog post that went up today—the company says it's most focused on performance improvements this year. 

Epic also announced in that post that it will continue its free games program throughout 2023. Epic has been giving away games on the Epic Games Store for years now, including some big ones like GTA 5 and Death Stranding, which is one of the ways it reached 68 million monthly active users in 2022. Sweeney and Allison also spoke to me about Epic's exclusivity strategy going forward.

Yesterday Mojang drew a line in the sand, saying that NFT integration is "generally not something we will support or allow." This was prompted by a slew of unofficial Minecraft-adjacent NFTs alongside the appearance of play-to-earn servers for the game, which Mojang puts down to bad actors exploiting the gaps in official policy.

Given that NFTs generally seem a bit skeezy and that Minecraft's audience remains overwhelmingly young, this has to go down as A Good Thing.

A Twitter user commented on the Minecraft decision, tagging in Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and saying: "hey Epic Games, it’d be really nice to see the same opinion from the Epic Games Store. Please get rid of every last one of those games on the store "

Sweeney is an interesting guy because, alongside his obvious technical brilliance and understanding, he's deeply invested in fighting for certain principles of openness and what the role of platform holders should be (particularly when it comes to revenue splits). You don't have to like Sweeney, and he certainly says some ripe stuff on occasion, but the guy and his company are committed to what they believe and will go to bat for it, as the ongoing legal battle with Apple shows.

Sweeney responded to the call to ban NFTs on the Epic Game Store by re-stating some of the principles he believes should underlie such a store. He has been consistent about where he stands, and it's not the first time he's addressed the topic.

"Developers should be free to decide how to build their games, and you are free to decide whether to play them," Sweeney wrote in response. "I believe stores and operating system makers shouldn’t interfere by forcing their views onto others. We definitely won’t."

Somewhat predictably, this went down like a cup of cold sick. Sweeney's comment was met by a barrage of counter-points alongside more general complaints about the nature of NFTs themselves, such as their environmental impact. He responded to one asking why this stance was different to, for example, banning discriminatory or hateful content.

"These are all editorial and brand judgments," responded Sweeney. "A store could choose to make no such judgments and host anything that's legal, or choose to draw the line at mainstream acceptable norms as we do, or accept only games that conform to the owner's personal beliefs."

The main competitor to the Epic Games Store is of course Steam, which has already banned NFTs. The technology and 'web3' in general remain unpopular with the general online audience, even if there are plenty of ape-loving acolytes, and giving them a bit of a kicking is always going to be a crowd-pleaser (just look at the response to Mojang's announcement).

Sweeney does have a point though, inasmuch as he doesn't see it as Epic's role to go around telling developers not to use blockchain tech, and nor does he believe Epic should use its position to restrict their sale. The counter is that many of these projects are at the moment scammy, and that Mojang was arguably forced into action: to pick one example, the unofficial Minecraft NFT game Blockverse disappeared with more than $1.2 million in January. And there's no shortage of wider examples of NFT-related malfeasance or even outright criminality.

The fact remains that just because this is where the tech is now does not mean that this is how it will be forever. Whether Epic's stance will remain consistent in the face of the general audience disdain for the tech remains to be seen.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says a newly-announced cryptocurrency called Fortnite Token is "a scam," and warned that the company is preparing legal action to shut it down. The creators of Fortnite Token have pushed back, however, describing it as a fan-created project "with no specified owner or company structure behind it."

Fortnite Token first appeared at the end of 2021, and there was no mistaking its attempt to tie itself to Epic's mega-hit battle royale:

Despite that big, bright "F," Fortnite Token maintained a relatively low-profile presence until today, when Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney apparently caught wind of a May 29 invitation to "start minting your NFT creations on nftoken site and sell on OpenSea," and replied bluntly, "That's a scam."

But rather than pulling the plug and heading for the hills, the crypto-team stood its ground. "Fortnite Token isn't a scam cryptocurrency project," it replied. "Instead, this is a fair-launch, community-driven, Fortnite game fans-created cryptocurrency project with no specified owner or company structure behind it or a CEO deciding on its future."

Sweeney, who seems to have a lot of free time on his hands for a guy who's the CEO and principal shareholder of a multi-billion-dollar company with, one would assume, a fairly beefy legal department, picked up the gauntlet. "That's not how trademarks and copyrights work though," he answered. "You can't use the Fortnite name and images without permission to market an unrelated product."

He did, shortly thereafter, invoke the spectre of the Epic legal department, repeating the assertion that Fortnite Token is a scam and adding that "Epic's lawyers are on it."

That wasn't the end of it, however. Sweeney dug back through Fortnite Token's tweets and replied with some variation of "this is a scam" to no fewer than nine of them, going as far back as early February. Yet while Sweeney obviously takes a very dim view of Fortnite Token, his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency in general appears to be undiminished. 

"When new technology emerges, some put it to good use, and others put it to bad use," he tweeted. "It would be terribly shortsighted to ban an entire field of technology for such a reason."

That fits with Sweeney's past position on the subject: He said in October 2021 that while Epic won't be incorporating cryptocurrency in its own games, it "will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group."

"As a technology, the blockchain is just a distributed transactional database with a decentralized business model that incentivizes investment in hardware to expand the database's capacity. This has utility whether or not a particular use of it succeeds or fails."

Epic's position stands in stark contrast to that of Valve, which in December 2021 banned "applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs" from Steam. Unfortunately, Epic's friendly policy toward blockchain games doesn't appear to be off to a roaring start: The Epic Store's first NFT game, Grit, is a cowboy battle royale that's a little more "what in tarnation" than "yeehaw, partner!""

Epic Games declined to comment on the matter beyond Sweeney's statements on Twitter.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has revealed that Epic will, later this year, release the Unreal Editor for Fortnite. "The full capabilities that you’ve seen [in Unreal Engine] opened up so that anybody can build very high-quality game content and code and deploy it into Fortnite without having to do a deal with us," Sweeney says in a new interview with FastCompany. "It’s open to everybody."

What exactly this means can probably best be summarised as Roblox-ifying the Fortnite creator ecosystem. Sweeney is a big fan of how Roblox operates and, despite it having a lower media profile than Fortnite, it is one of the only real 'metaverse' contenders out there—and its appeal lies almost entirely in user-created content.

"Our aim is to make it a first-class outlet for reaching the consumers, just like you might look at the mobile app stores and consoles and Steam as ways to reach users. Now people are also looking at Fortnite, and at Roblox, as ways of reaching users. Along with that, we’re building an economy, and it will support creators actually building businesses around their work and making increasing amounts of profit from the commerce that arises from people playing their content."

Whether Fortnite will take a different approach to renumerating creators is the interesting part. Sweeney's absolutely outspoken about gatekeepers creaming off large fees, and has certainly put his money where his mouth is (Epic is engaged in various actions against tech giants, all involving antitrust issues about distribution channels). The big criticism of Roblox that really sticks is that it financially exploits creators by keeping a huge chunk of the profits from their work. So a low commission, or even no commission at all, looks like an open goal for Fortnite.

Sweeney truly believes in the metaverse, and don't take my word for it. Last year a court ruled that he really meant all that stuff he said about it in the Epic versus Apple antitrust case: "The Court generally finds Mr. Sweeney’s personal beliefs about the future of the metaverse are sincerely held." When Sweeney's banging on about you ordering a Gucci top after examining it in AR, he means it.

"It’s a shame that the metaverse is so over-hyped right now," says Sweeney. "There’s all this gas and blockchain and this, but you add up the users and we found [there are] about 600 million people playing metaverse types of experiences socially with their friends."

Sweeney's pitch is, essentially, that people are misunderstanding the metaverse. He talks about it in terms of a long and ongoing project that's formed of multiple different strands and open to all companies, without gatekeepers—but is clear-eyed about the fact that it will be a battle to ever realise that.

"That’s the big focus of worldwide antitrust efforts–ensuring each market participant can compete fairly in their market without monopoly ties," says Sweeney. "That’s going to open the path to the open metaverse. Without that, even if you did build the open metaverse, Apple and Google would still end up dictating all the terms to everybody.

"I think it’s not just the foremost economic issue and the world economy now, I also think you can’t have a free world if you don’t have freedom online and freedom on platforms. If you have two corporations controlling all world discourse and kowtowing to governments–especially oppressive governments–to act as agents on their behalf and spy on users and sources of opinion and dissent, then I think the world you end up with isn’t one we’d want to live in. I think it would be quite a horrible place. So, I think it’s a first-class social issue that we don’t let any of these giant mega-corporations control online commerce, discourse, and control the metaverse. Really."

The full interview is well worth a read: you can say what you like about Sweeney, but he's more upfront than most big tech CEOs and clearly believes what he's saying. He's also honest about the fact that certain ideas, like universal ownership of avatars, might be awesome but remain complete pipe dreams.

"Unfortunately right now [crypto is] bundled up with a lot of speculation and a lot of outright scams," says Sweeney. "And a lot of efforts are scammy by construction in that the thing they’re pursuing doesn’t achieve a plausible version of the stated goals. You know, like the blockchain avatar economies for example, there are a bunch of companies aspiring to make avatars that you universally own, but none of them I’ve found, not a single one, has actually made any effort to foster actual adoption of these avatars by any actual games or ecosystems. They just want to build this thing and sell people avatars, but they’re completely useless in practice.

"I firmly believe there’s going to be a multi-trillion dollar economy around digital goods in the future. But I think so much of the crypto currency effort, especially touching the gaming space, doesn’t address that problem of utility. They’re showing you digital goods you can’t do anything with except to say that you own it. You can cryptographically prove that you own it, but who cares?"

It's a good point, because not a single game company has yet come up with a good answer to that question. Despite this, Sweeney thinks the tech will be some sort of "backbone" in future, albeit not realised as it is today—which is probably why the Epic Games Store "will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech.

Fortnite is back on iOS devices, sort of, and we have Microsoft to thank. Epic and Xbox have announced that Fortnite is now playable for free through Xbox Cloud Gaming. The news means Fortnite can again be played on iOS devices like iPhones and iPads despite being removed from the Apple App Store during the legal battle between Epic and Apple.

All you need to stream Fortnite is a Microsoft account and a computer, iOS, or Android device with an internet connection. As of today, it doesn't require an Xbox Game Pass subscription. On iOS, you just have to open xbox.com/play, and you'll be prompted to add the Cloud Gaming bookmark to your home screen. Then you're good to go. 

Streaming Fortnite through a browser is something you could have done for a few months with a GeForce Now membership, but this makes it a lot easier. I tested it on Xbox Cloud Gaming a few minutes ago on my iPhone 13 in a Safari browser, and I lost in thirty seconds. The internet isn't great here, so I'll blame that and not my Fortnite skills.

You can play with native touch controls (if you're on a phone or tablet) or connect a Bluetooth controller. Strangely, there is no keyboard and mouse support for playing on a computer; then again, this is technically the Xbox version of Fortnite and not the PC, which would explain why you don't need an Epic account to play it. 

Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney took to Twitter to share his excitement and take another dig at Apple. 

"Monumental news, everyone!" Sweeney wrote. "Fortnite is now available to play FOR FREE, streaming to web browsers on iPhone, iPad, and Android via Xbox Cloud. No subscription required, no 30% Apple tax."

The "30% Apple Tax" was one of the primary objections to Apple's control over iOS software distribution that led Epic to openly break Apple's rules and later sue the company.

Long story short, Apple takes a 30% cut of all in-app purchases, which means whenever someone bought V-bucks in Fortnite on iOS, Apple got a cut. Epic implemented its own in-app payment system to get around the fee, and Apple, in turn, removed Fortnite from the App Store for "violating the App Store guidelines." Epic argued that Apple's policy is anti-competitive and took the company to court. It didn't win, and as of now, Fortnite remains blacklisted on iOS.

This Xbox and Epic collaboration is interesting in part because, during one of the depositions in the Apple case, Epic said it wasn't bringing Fortnite to Xbox's streaming service because it represented competition. Funny how things change.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney described the Steam Deck in 2021 as an "amazing move by Valve," praising it as "an open platform where users are free to install software or their choosing." But he more recently delivered some bad news for Fortnite fans who hoped to play the battle royale game on Steam Deck, saying that Epic does not have plans to update it for the handheld.

Fortnite isn't on Steam, but it should still be able to run on the Steam Deck, which despite the moniker is an open-platform handheld that you can do whatever you want with. It's a small Linux PC, if you want to treat it that way.

That led Twitter user Storm178 to ask Sweeney if plans are afoot to update Fortnite and its  Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye implementations so that it'll run in Proton, the compatibility software that enables Windows-based games to run on the Linux-based SteamOS.

"Fortnite no, but there's a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti-Cheat compatibility with Steam," Sweeney tweeted in reply. When asked why not, he replied, "We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones."

Sweeney's suggestion that Easy Anti-Cheat (which is owned by Epic) is a reliable solution for other games on Steam Deck, but not for Fortnite, is surprising, although not entirely unreasonable given that Linux is open source and thus subject to fiddling and customization in ways that operating systems like Windows are not. Still, it's not the sort of thing you might expect Sweeney to admit. In subsequent tweets, he expressed that it's the size of Fortnite that makes it more vulnerable than other games.

"With regard to anti-cheat on the Linux platform supporting custom kernels and the threat model to a game of Fortnite's size, YES THAT'S EXACTLY RIGHT!" he tweeted. "The threat model for anti-cheat varies per game based on the number of active players and ability to gain profit by selling cheats or gain prominence by cheating. Hence anti-cheat which suffices for one game may not for another game with 10, 100, or 1000 times more players."

That hasn't ended the conversation on Twitter, where numerous Fortnite fans are saying that Sweeney is in fact undermining confidence in Easy Anti-Cheat, and imploring him to reconsider. Things are somewhat more downbeat on the linux_gaming subreddit, where several users claim that Sweeney is either indifferent to, or actively hostile toward, gaming on Linux.

"Epic will never act in a way that will benefit Steam or the Steam Deck (and therefore Linux)," doublah wrote. "Even if they would also benefit from having Fortnite on another platform, they just do things out of spite for Steam at this point (like their policy on NFT and crypto games)."

(Shortly after Valve said it will not allow games with NFTs or cryptocurrency on Steam, Sweeney said the Epic Games Store "will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech.")

I don't buy into that conspiratorial angle myself—I'm not a programmer but I think the greater likelihood is simply that, as Sweeney said, trying to protect a game as popular as Fortnite from cheaters across multiple custom Linux distros is too much of a headache for the payoff of having it on the Steam Deck, which will likely be relatively small for now.

Epic declined to comment further on Sweeney's tweets.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says the world needs one unified game store, and that Epic is working with developers and service providers to help make it happen.

"What the world really needs now is a single store that works with all platforms," Sweeney said in an interview with Bloomberg. "Right now software ownership is fragmented between the iOS App Store, the Android Google Play marketplace, different stores on Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch, and then Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store."

Epic's plan to clean up that confusion is to come up with a system enabling users "to buy software in one place, knowing that they'd have it on all devices and all platforms." How it will go about bringing together that disparate assemblage of technologies and competing platforms is an unaddressed question, but it's reasonable to guess that it has something to do with the metaverse, the ill-defined concept of online worlds that we're pretty sure is a bad idea, although Sweeney himself is a dedicated (and legally acknowledged) adherent.

Sweeney has been publicly advocating for more open online storefronts since mid-2020, when Epic sued Apple over "monopolistic practices" on the App Store. But speaking at the Global Conference for Mobile Application Ecosystem Fairness in South Korea, he insisted that there are more important reasons to force online storefront openness than just money.

"Apple locks a billion users into one store and payment processor," Sweeney said. "Now Apple complies with oppressive foreign laws, which surveil users and deprive them of political rights. But Apple is ignoring laws passed by Korea’s democracy. Apple must be stopped."

South Korea recently passed a law mandating alternative payment options on major digital platforms including the App Store, preventing platform holders from forcing developers to use their built-in payment systems. According to the Korea Herald, Google has come into compliance with the new law but Apple has not yet indicated if, or even how, it intends to.

"I’m very proud to stand up against these monopolies with you," Sweeney said. "I’m proud to stand with you and say I’m a Korean."

This isn't the first time Sweeney has declared his affinity with Korea: He made a similar statement in August, shortly after the Korean court ruling on digital storefronts.

Nor is it his first sweeping declaration about the cultural and moral significance of Epic's dispute with Apple and Google. In November 2020 he was criticized for comparing Epic's rejection of their terms of service with historical fights for civil rights. "There were actual laws on the books, and the laws were wrong," he said. "And people disobeyed them, and it was not wrong to disobey them because to go along with them would be collusion to make them status quo."

A US court also ruled in September that an Apple policy preventing apps from advertising their own payment systems is anticompetitive and would have to be changed. Apple appealed that ruling but was not granted a stay, meaning that the court-ordered policy change must go into effect in December.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is constantly going on about "the metaverse." It's part of the reason Epic sued Apple over its iOS App Store policies: It's hard to build a virtual universe that works the same across all platforms if one of those platforms has a bouncer at the door demanding a 30% entry fee. But it's also fair to wonder whether Sweeney's affection for a term coined in a sci-fi novel really constitutes a business plan. Does Sweeney truly believe in this metaverse stuff? 

According to the US District Court: Pretty much, yeah.

"The Court generally finds Mr. Sweeney’s personal beliefs about the future of the metaverse are sincerely held," today's Epic v Apple ruling reads.

As for what the metaverse actually is, well, the Court understands it to be a "digital virtual world where individuals can create character avatars and play them through interactive programmed and created experiences." It's the virtual world of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, where the term originated—Ready Player One is the more modern reference—where users can have "social experiences" and "game experiences" within an online environment that's authored not just by its operators, but also by its users. Second Life, VRChat, and Roblox come to mind, though only the latter is actually mentioned by the Court. (That's probably for the best, given the stir a nude banana has already caused.)

Fortnite also has metaversey qualities by this 'kitchen sink' definition. It's a battle royale game, a place for social experiences like movie trailer premieres and concerts—there's a big season-ending event happening this weekend—and its Creative mode allows users to build their own experiences. (It's weird to think that Fortnite used to just be a co-op shooter I didn't care much about. Now it's got a Martin Luther King Jr exhibit.) 

I'm thinking, however, that what appears on screen is the wrong focus when talking about "metaverses," even if Sweeney himself said that a metaverse is a "realistic 3D world" that mixes games and socializing. (He was not immediately available for an interview about the ruling.)

My understanding is that Epic's metaverse vision—which Sony has backed with hundreds of millions of dollars—is less about Travis Scott concerts and more about making platforms irrelevant. The goal is to build a network that allows people to play, socialize, create, buy, and sell digital stuff regardless of whether they're on their phones or PCs or smart fridges, and regardless of whether they're logged into their Steam accounts or their Epic Games Store accounts or their Bank of America accounts. All of that is great for Fortnite, which Epic wants to transition into more of a creative platform (sharing profit with creators), but I don't think the idea that Fortnite is the metaverse reflects Epic's true ambition. 

Epic's goal of broader platform-irrelevancy is visible in the online services that it offers game developers for free. Epic's account services, for example, are designed to "bridge friend connections across platforms and devices." To explain why it gives all this away for free, even to developers who don't release their games on the Epic Games Store, Epic says that everyone benefits from "growing a cross-platform account base and social graph available to all." Of course, Epic stands to benefit a lot from controlling this platform that transcends platforms.

Apple's current App Store policies are getting in the way of that vision, though. First of all, Apple's 30% take of in-app transactions isn't ideal if you're trying to make the differences between platforms disappear. Either Epic makes 30% less money on iPhone Fortnite V-Bucks purchases, or it raises V-Buck prices for the iPhone version only. Right now, Apple wouldn't even let Epic include a note in the Fortnite iOS app letting users know that they can buy V-Bucks elsewhere, never mind put its own payment processing system into the app (which is what Epic did to get Fortnite kicked off the App Store last year).

Secondly, Apple doesn't allow iOS apps to sell other apps, which has stopped Epic from releasing a mobile version of the Epic Games Store on iOS, and presumably from pursuing some more-fully-formed vision of its metaverse that goes beyond Fortnite and V-Bucks.

Today's Epic v Apple ruling helps Epic out with one of those problems. The ruling overwhelmingly sided with Apple, but if it were the conclusion of an anime fight scene, Apple's victory laugh would be cut short when a razor-thin red line opened up across its face, revealing that it only dodged 99 of 100 katana slices. 

Within two months, Apple has to start allowing iOS apps to advertise their own payment systems. At minimum, Epic will be able to put a link in the Fortnite iPhone version which opens a URL where they can buy cheaper V-Bucks. They might get away with putting their payment processing system directly into the app again—and that's the minimum Epic says it will accept—but the injunction isn't totally clear on the issue. The Verge has a good breakdown of the ways in which it can be interpreted.

Epic didn't get everything it wanted, but this was just the first attack in the metaverse wars, and I'm surprised that Epic managed to land any strikes at all. Plus, we learned that Tim Sweeney is, in the opinion of the United States District Court, Northern District of California, not bullshitting us about this metaverse stuff. 

In the ruling, the Court also attempted to define "videogame," which may be even harder than defining "metaverse." I think it did a pretty good job!