Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, Fortnite has humble beginnings. In 2011, we'd just been in the final days of finishing one of the Gears of War games, and... We wanted to explore ideas for new games. And we had a general idea that we would like to build some smaller games, online games, in order to learn more about that space and not just have one single massive game in production at all times and only one.
And so everybody in the company was given a week to form a team and work with whichever co-workers they wanted and build a game. Using Unreal Engine. So you can actually build something pretty interesting in a week. And one of the teams built the very first version of what became Fortnite.
The very first version of it had a different art style, but it had the idea at the core that you're going to build forts by day using this building system. Then night would come, and you'd defend the forts against zombies. And the longer you could go, the more elaborate forts you could build, and the more survival waves you could withstand, and it would get cooler and cooler with time.
And, you know, that game was in development for a very long time. We always saw the potential. Just the building aspect of it was incredibly fun. But we made different pivots at different times. At one point, we moved to the current Fortnite art style away from kind of more of a realistic style. Made it, you know, more in the Pixar vein of, you know, cool stylized characters.
People come to Epic because they want to work with the best people in the world. Artists bring a lot of different personal art aspirations and style capabilities, and many of them are very multi-talented. It can produce photoreal content or highly stylized content.
And a lot of the best artists on Fortnite were a lot of the best artists on Gears of War to change styles but continue doing awesome work. We'd realized that Fortnite could be really mainstream and it could be a game people play for a long time.
That was the goal. So, you know, a few of the artists got through and defined the new art style and we moved to it. And at different points, it evolved towards being kind of like a light MMO, like Destiny, with rather complex RPG and stat systems. And that evolved into a, you know, kind of an MMO-like tower defense game.
MMO only in that persistence of items and stats, you know, which became Fortnite's save the world mode. Yeah. which we launched in early 2017, and it was a moderate success. It paid its budget, and we'd come out ahead. And then at the same time, the Battle Royale genre was booming. PUBG had just come out. Tons of people at Epic were playing that.
They were like, oh, this would be so cool if it had Fortnite building. And so we assembled a team in a war room, you know, like 30 people in one big room. And, you know, they worked insanely hard for four weeks to build Battle Royale. So the nice thing is all the content for Fortnite had been built over the previous seven years.
They had a huge library of content, but no gameplay of the type they wanted. So they had to build it all in that four weeks and ship it and... That put Epic on an exponential growth curve where we went from 300 employees to thousands of employees and went from about $100 million in revenue to billions of dollars in revenue and became the center of the gaming world at the time.
Since 2012, we've been building online backend systems to support player accounts and login and all of the different systems that are needed to make a multiplayer game. And we've been building them to be scalable. And by some miracle, we built them stably enough that they were able to scale up.
And so the online team was responsible for patching that code, spent a year of intense work getting it to scale from like 40,000 concurrent users to 15 million.
concurrent users yeah i mean they're scaling they're scaling that's a lot that's immense but they'd done such an awesome job of building the foundations that uh it was tractable it was doable if it if they hadn't done that then the company would have died you know fortnite just wouldn't have been playable and the whole thing would have failed i mean there's just so much detail there that makes all the difference because i mean uh that's what spotify has talked about that
You know, the trend nowadays for building online services is microservices. There's not one big server that handles all the interactions with Fortnite. There's game servers running 100-player game instances for each Battle Royale session, and then there's... an account server and many instances of it all talking to a shared database.
And there's hundreds of different microservices talking to each other. And so scaling is a matter of identifying what are the bottlenecks in that system and making sure that each one can scale and has enough redundancy to be able to handle the load. Thank God for Amazon Web Services and cloud hosting, because Epic went to 15 million concurrent users without buying any server hardware.
We were able to Just call up Amazon and say, we need more. And there was a period of time there where Fortnite was undergoing this exponential growth, and we'd find, like, one week we ran out of servers in Brazil during a heavy weekend of play, and next week we had an even heavier weekend of play, and there were servers to handle it.
Like, somebody at Amazon had dropshipped, you know, millions of dollars of server hardware to... into Brazil and turned it on just in time for fortnight to need it. Um, and you know, there are a lot of unsung heroes, uh, in that story. Many of them we've never heard of.
Fortnite makes billions of dollars a year. And that's the majority of Epic's revenue. We have a robust business around Unreal Engine licensing, Rocket League and Fall Guys, and some other tools like the Fab Content Marketplace. But the majority of it is Fortnite.
Because we've chosen to reinvest heavily in building what we think is the future of technology, we're spending more every year than we're making. And for a bit of time, we were spending over a billion dollars a year more than we were making, and we found that to be unsustainable, and we went through some painful layoffs at that time.
And then we stabilized, and now we're spending several hundred million dollars a year more than we're making, which we can very well afford to do because we have billions of dollars in the bank. thanks to a combination of the profits we made when we were a very small company with a very big game, and because of the investment we've raised.
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