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
We're not an oil well pumping oil out of the ground where we discovered oil. We are growing to be a future technology powerhouse, and we think the 3D space and the future real-time 3D simulations is going to be one of the major facets of technology for humanity, and we're all investing in that.
That's right. We're a company that can start working on a project knowing that we won't reach fruition or make any money from it at all for three years, four years, five years. We're totally okay with that. And that's the cycle that's fueled our growth over time.
It's constantly investing in the future and being a serious company that's doing serious R&D side-by-side with shipping and maintaining products and earning money from them.
Let me start with the present of gaming and why it sucks.
Fortnite is an awesome thing. You go into Fortnite, there's 100 million monthly active users there. A huge number of your own friends are there. You can play with them. Go from experience to experience seamlessly without leaving the app. There are 100,000 different islands you can play on, and some of them are really awesome. And there are constant new ones coming out and constant things to do.
If you want to play Roblox, you quit out of the Fortnite app, you launch the Roblox app. Different program, different friend system, different account names. Your username in Fortnite and your username in Roblox are different names, and they're not connected to each other. So you have to remake all of your friends and then find different...
you know, things to play, and now the controls are different, so you have to relearn how, you know, the joystick, mouse, keyboard, controller works in that experience, and you have to go from place to place, and you buy some stuff in Fortnite, and it's really cool, and you can use it anywhere in Fortnite, and then you go in Roblox, and you don't have that stuff.
You have to buy different stuff, and that stuff only works in Roblox, and same with Call of Duty. It's another isolated place. And same with World of Warcraft, and same with League of Legends, and every other, every place you go is its own unique place, different friends, different account names, different people, and there's no social cohesion between them at all.
And a long time ago, consoles set out to solve this problem by creating their console-wide friend system and accounts. your friend on PlayStation in one game is your friends on PlayStation in another game. But only on PlayStation. If you're on Xbox, you can't see PlayStation friends. And so you have two basically orthogonal and cross-cutting divisions of the world into fiefdoms.
which were not created with bad intentions, but arose and are separated, isolated islands. One is the platforms and their social services, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Steam, Epic, if you add it to the list. And the other is these different games people play.
And because of this weird historical artifact, we're left in a world where people can't seamlessly move from games to games, bringing their friends and their stuff. So the solution to this is to federate and connect all of the systems together.
All of the players on all of the different platforms can be recognized by their name and put the at sign in it so your Xbox names and your Fortnite or Epic names and your Steam names can all live together and interoperate together in a single space. So unifying the social ecosystems is one thing that needs to happen. The next and bigger challenge is to unify the economies too. Now,
I'm not talking about a sword you have in World of Warcraft should work in Fortnite. Every game is going to have its own gameplay rules, and a lot of games are going to have stuff that only works in them. But there's a huge set of games that have in common the idea of a cosmetic system that does not affect gameplay outcomes, but is purely cool looks and cool appearances.
Most of the major multiplayer games have them. And If you look at games, you could probably bundle together about 70% of them and say they're similar enough that they could actually interoperate. You could own an outfit in Fortnite, own an outfit in Roblox, and own the same outfit in maybe Call of Duty, and maybe 100 or 200 other games, and actually expect they would work together.
And you find other kinds of items are probably under-operable, too. Fortnite has car outfits, so you can buy different appearances of a car. And when you find a physical car in the world of Fortnite, if you're the first person to get into it in that session, boom, it takes on your chosen car appearance. cosmetic, and now you have a cool car that's identifiable as yours.
We realized early on with Fortnite that the key to making Fortnite work as a creator economy was to open up the revenue from the item shop to all the sources of engagement. There are two big things happening in Fortnite that make it work as a product and as a business. One is the game modes, Fortnite, Battle Royale, and all of the user modes and everything else are sources of engagement.
People play there because it's super fun. And because they're playing there, they're willing to buy cool stuff to make their character look cooler. And so you have all these sources of engagement, but the sources of engagement don't make money directly. You can't spend money in Fortnite Battle Royale to buy a game item. The gameplay is not pay to win, and it's all just a game.
So we make money from the item shop. And the item shop only exists because of the sources of engagement. If you weren't playing Battle Royale, trust me, nobody would want to buy a Fortnite outfit. If you weren't playing any Fortnite games, why would you buy Fortnite outfits? And so you have all the revenue in this item shop economy and all the engagement in this engagement economy.
And the thing that magically makes the Fortnite creator economy works is revenue sharing. Item shop spending according to sources of engagement by engagement.
If you buy an item and you've played, you know, 40% of your time in Battle Royale and 60% of your time in these user modes, the money you spent, the portion of that that's profit can be separated out and paid out to all the different creators who participate in that economy. And that's why Fortnite scaled up to a $400 million creator economy so far and is growing. It's amazing.
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