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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a game they like and accept together with their friends, even if it's not the game that every one of them might be preferring to play themselves. That's certainly the case in different Fortnite groups I play with from time to time.
It's like one player might have been preferring to play COD, one might have been preferring League of Legends, somebody else something completely random, but it's just so fun to play together, we're doing that.
And that means that there's really strong Metcalfe's law effect, in which games which are able to attract a large percentage of your friends are more able to attract you, and not only attract, but also retain.
And so, you know, I think Matthew Ball's analysis of this over the years has really documented the trend towards, you know, you can call it the metaverse, or you can call it large-scale multiplayer social gaming.
He's really documented this trend, and over the past year or so, it's taken a really, really strong turn towards increasing rate of change, increasing numbers of players coming to Fortnite. We hit an all-time high of 110 million monthly active users about a year ago.
And another close to peak this time. Roblox is bigger than ever, and this trend is players consolidating into multiplayer experiences as they play together. And we're seeing another trend overlaid with that, which is like when an awesome single-player game comes out or a small and multi-player game comes out, people often will treat it as a vacation.
They'll go off and play that game for a while, then come back. And I think Wukong was an awesome example of that. A wonderful game from a brilliant team. In China, they made a game that's like... Western players had really seen that type of thing done before, and it was awesome, and it did well. But most players played it for a while and moved back on.
And that can be lucrative, but a business that's building that kind of game is going to have to build a new one every few years and build a business around that while the other games continue to accrete users. But when you have a large number of gamers migrating to a small number of games, the effect of that is great. Increasing revenue for those games, increasing reinvestment.
And there are things that Epic can do with a team of thousands of people building Fortnite. internally, and tens of thousands contributing to Fortnite as independent creators, there are just things that can happen with that level of investment that can't happen in a smaller game.
And so there's somewhat of an increasing winner-take-all dynamic where the biggest games reinvest more to make their games more fun. They gain fun at a faster rate than other games, and the industry is changing around that. I think the lesson for the game industry now is that there are really two big opportunities being pursued.
There's big games or games that have the potential to be really big multiplayer experiences that keep players around indefinitely for very long periods of time. And then there are just really good single-player and small-scale games that people are taking a break from their big games for. And the trend there is going to be towards efficiently developing those games.
You can't build one of those games with a $300 million budget, but if you can do it with a $40 million budget, you can make a lot of money. So I think that's the main reshaping going on, and I think that... It creates a rather bleak outlook for a lot of the category of single-player games that don't have a huge audience to reach.
But this is just one of the trends of restructuring the business around the technology and changes of the day.
I'm most impressed with the games that have created what appears to be a full living, breathing world. Games that give you the sense that you're just a part of it and there's a lot more happening and there's always more. It gives you the sense that you can go anywhere and do anything. Even though these games really do have finite limitations and there are places you can't go, it really...
creating that sense of wonder is just a magical thing like soda breath of the wild oh yeah yeah skyrim red dead redemption red dead is great yeah it's like there's an entire ecology simulator in there um i have a high school classmate that got into studying river ecology and he was commenting on like that like this this is one of the very few games that's hydrologically sound like yeah the way like they actually went to the effort of shaping the rivers to yeah
follow erosion dynamics and so on. It's the attention to detail. There's something there that's big. It's been funny journeying through the industry. I last designed a game in 1992. I'm not a game designer. I have a very open-minded view that the best game genre that will ever exist has not yet been invented. As we get more
technological capabilities and creatives, people use that and hopefully empowered by higher productivity tools and so on that we'll see more and more cool things emerge that we'd never dreamed possible. The idea of a world simulator is actually really interesting there. It's been tried a lot.
It's usually extremely slow and expensive to create, but over time, maybe we'll get better at that, and that will be a thing too.
Yeah. Civilization. It's mind-boggling. They build a game with that depth that can evolve so dependent on your actions.
That's right. The best games have a soul. You can really sense it. Call of Duty has a very different soul than Fortnite, and it just kind of exudes not only in what you see in the game, but also in how players interact with it and interact with each other online. That's a really fascinating thing. I wish it would be studied more.
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