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
Hopefully they're a standards body, but there might be multiple phases of it, so that if you choose to ship a standalone game, you can still choose to have Fortnite items work in your game, and have your game items work in Fortnite, and have your item economy integrated with the overall metaverse economy, and make...
And solve the really core problem of the game industry that Matthew Ball has been documenting over the past few years.
Well, that's really about productivity. Because to be successful with a game, you have to have a great game. If you're building a type of game that nobody's ever built before, you might be able to build a smaller, simpler game than if you're competing in a massive genre that has huge expectations.
But it's all about enabling somebody to do that in a reasonable amount of time that they can spend and to be able to finish it and chip it and maintain it successfully. The tools are a big part of that. Having the tools be as productive as possible. There are a lot of other facets as well. Having a content marketplace is a big thing.
Just off-the-shelf piles of content, some free, some paid, built by other creators, can enable a small indie team to... to build a big game and just be able to focus on the unique content of the game, being able to write their gameplay and lay out their environments the way they want, but not have to build every tree and rock.
Because somebody's already built one, and theirs is probably perfectly suitable for your game. And over time, there'll be more and more. There's also a lot of indie developers living as content creators. They'll be releasing content on Fab Marketplace or the Unity Asset Store and earn a living for that. But specialization of labor is a really, really valuable thing.
In the early days, pretty much one person would build one game. That's how a lot of the games were built in the 1980s. Over time, you had a separation where artists became specialized and then programmers, and then gameplay programmers and engine programmers. Now you have technical artists, and you have dozens of different specialties contributing to AAA. 3D game now.
And the more we can modularize those bits of content, so you could get something off the shelf rather than having to build it, or have the engine synthesize it for you, the more we can enable creators to create stuff fast and successfully.
Sure. Well, let's start from a very basic principle of computing. The first computer I owned was an Apple II Plus, designed by Steve Wozniak and marketed by Apple, and then an IBM PC. And in those days, anybody could write code. You're computer literally turned on with a programming language prompt in front of you.
You had to actually do work to not write a program and to instead run somebody else's program. That was incredibly empowering. And anybody could write a program. Anybody could put it on a floppy disk. Anybody could share it with their friends. Anybody could make copies of that, put it in a store. They could sell it. They could build a business around it. And they were completely...
able to, without seeking any big tech corporation's permission, do whatever they want, even from IBM. Remember, IBM was the dominant computer company on Earth at the time that they released IBM PC as an open platform. And, you know, so it's really been firmly implanted in my mind that this was a magical and wonderful time of... unmatched economic progress for technology in the entire world.
Over time, the big companies have realized that they could shut down and just block software makers from releasing software on their own and block software makers from doing business with customers directly. And I've always viewed this practice as terribly abusive because when you buy a computer or a phone, you spend good money on it.
It's your money you spent on that phone and now you own that phone. And there's absolutely no reason that Apple should block you from installing apps directly from other developers directly, if you want, going to their webpage or writing your own apps without their permission and running them yourself without having to get a developer account, without having to go through their bureaucracy.
And there's no reason that any consumer who gets an app shouldn't be able to do business directly with the developer of the consumer. You already bought that phone. Why should Apple be adding a 30% junk fee to all commerce you do? And why do they selectively apply it to some things and not others?
I've always viewed this as deeply abusive and that it shuts down the competitive engine that once fueled the app and software economy. It's still a vibrant competitive engine on Windows and on the internet, but it's no longer with mobile apps because these stores have popped up everywhere. And they don't provide any useful value to the user.
Yes, they're a search function-defined software, but there's no reason other companies couldn't build a better one. And I bet if you had Steam, or if you had Valve build Steam for iPhone, I bet Steam for iPhone would be a much better app store than the iOS app store, and a lot of people would use it.
And that Apple would be forced to build a better app store in competition and that everybody would improve their products as a result. But, you know, Apple and Google shutting down the competitive engine that drives the software economy has massive implications for everything. And, you know, one of them is reshaping the nature of mobile apps to be really offensive to gamer sensibilities, right?
If you go on console, the best console games you see listed on the storefronts, the best console games that you see reviewed are awesome games that really have a lot of creative merit. The ones that sell the best are really enormous values for their money. and are the product of an immense amount of work. You don't see that on iPhone.
The top apps on iPhone, the top games on iPhone at almost all times are these ridiculously greedy, high-monetizing whale games, which are pervaded with pay-to-win and loot box practices. They have sort of a legalized form of gambling. And these games are not driven by fun. They're driven by manipulation of the players to greedy ends. Yeah.
And it's very hard for the fund-based games to actually succeed there. And the costs of operating these online games now are enormously high. So you have a game that's based on fun. It's not loot box heavy. You have to pay 30% of your revenue to Apple in order to just get access to the platform. And 30% is way, way, way more than most game companies make in profits right now.
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