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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And they create basically harassment campaigns at times against developers who use Epic Online Services. Developers do that so they can connect their players across platforms and have friends across platforms and voices across platforms. But suddenly that's trying to be turned into a negative effect.
Thanks. Yeah, that was an interesting time. Sony had a long-running policy preventing cross-platform play. And we had a long series of conversations, which got pretty harsh towards the end. But Sony ultimately came around, and they opened up PlayStation. And through a series of private conversations, they did the right thing. Not only that, our partnership with Sony has increased exponentially.
you know, since that argument back in 2018. And we've gotten closer and closer and done ever more things with, you know, Sony, you know, brand IP, like the characters in God of War and other games coming into Fortnite. And, you know, all kinds of crossovers, massive Unreal Engine adoption and Sony for making games, for making movies at Sony Pictures, music partnerships with Sony Music.
That's been an absolutely wonderful relationship. I think That stands as an awesome example of a company that, because of historic reasons, got stuck with a policy that no longer made sense for the future. And following a serious discussion with a close partner, righted it and did an awesome thing. And now Sony is much better off and Epic's better off. And all game developers are better off.
And the whole console industry, I think, is a lot stronger now than it would have been if, you know, these silos had continued playing out. And despite the kind of potential concern that, like, maybe blocking platform play with Xbox gave Sony an advantage, you know, Sony has actually grown in market share relative to Xbox since that time.
And so you can't say that anything but goodness came of that time. And I think a better version of Apple would have received... the email I sent to senior Apple management and been like, huh, there's an issue here. We should have a discussion. We should reconsider this. We should listen. And, you know, they didn't. And that's why we're in the midst of a five-year battle with Apple.
And in, you know, the, hopefully, still the early days of a 15 plus year partnership with Sony.
Let's back up and talk about the principles at work here. Apple forcing other companies to use their payment service is a coercive decision by Apple.
If Apple convinced other developers to use their payment service by offering benefits or a better deal or funding or any other positive incentive, then that would be perfectly fine. One is... preventing competition, and the other is actual competition. Epic has never forced any developer into any sort of exclusivity relationship.
Rather, we've offered developers payment or incentives or marketing or any number of things of value to them in exchange for coming to our store exclusively. And it's their game. So it's entirely... rightfully up to them to decide how to distribute it and to make decisions about their business. It's their game. If they want to distribute it through Steam, they can.
If they want to distribute it through Epic exclusively, they can. If they want to distribute it through both, then they could do that as well. And if we pay them money or other things of value in exchange for them coming exclusively to the Epic Games Store, I think that's their right. And this isn't an example of Epic...
an underdog with a tiny fraction of Steam's market share working to proactively compete with Steam by offering a better supply of games. And some consumers who prefer Steam might prefer that the game be on Steam, but the developer in each case has decided that they believe they would benefit more by doing this exclusive deal in exchange for benefits than by being on Steam. And, you know, like...
One of the key exhibits in the Epic Google trial was its opening exhibit, which was trying to point out to the jury in the trial the benefits of exclusives. Like, imagine a new store popping up. The store has a big sign outside of it. We're the new store. We have everything that the other store has, and it's at the same price. Are you going to go to the new store? No.
Nobody's going to switch from Steam if Steam has all the same games as the competing store and everything's priced just the same. And so we looked at initially two ways of competing with Steam strongly. We wanted to sell games at a better price than Steam.
By agreeing on the amount of money we pay each game developer, if the game's going to sell for $50 and we take 12%, we'd actually lower the price and potentially even lose some money to offer a better deal. We tried to pursue this, but very quickly, every developer told us that they wouldn't agree to better pricing because...
If they did, then Steam would stop giving them marketing featuring and benefits, and the console makers would be mad, and all their relationships would be harmed. So there's an undercurrent of powerful platforms and ecosystems encouraging developers not to compete on price. So not being able to compete on price, we decided to compete on supply by doing exclusive deals.
And we signed a lot of them, paid developers lots and lots of money. I think we distributed over a billion dollars in net expenditures to developers beyond the... the revenue we actually made from games in order to get a whole lot of exclusive games. Some were successful, some weren't.
Borderlands did awesomely on the Epic Games Store, and we and Gearbox felt that it did just as well through Epic as it would have done on Steam because the players who wanted Borderlands wanted Borderlands, and they came and got it.
Whereas a lot of other games, some smaller games especially, that didn't have a dedicated audience that was absolutely going to play the game, typically benefited from exposure on Steam. They were reaching an audience they wouldn't have reached organically.
And so some of them, in the end, we and they concluded that they did worse by being on the Epic Games Tour exclusively in terms of reaching fewer customers. And so we had these limited-time exclusives. When they ran out, they put their games on Steam, and lots of data was gathered to understand what worked. And so this worked well for some games, didn't work for other games.
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