Epic Games shared some big announcements for game developers at Unreal Fest Seattle 2024, revealing the new features of Unreal Engine 5 and reducing the royalty fee for games that launch on the Epic Games Store at the same time as other stores.
However, before all these announcements, Epic founder, CEO, and main stakeholder Tim Sweeney addressed the viewers with an interesting speech. First, he remarked that following last year’s layoffs, Epic is now solid from a financial standpoint and has registered record numbers for Fortnite and the store. Secondly, Sweeney discussed the growing importance of live service multiplayer in an increasingly complex gaming market where even big games may struggle.
I’m happy to tell you now that Epic is financially sound and that Fortnite and the Epic Game Store have hit new records in concurrency and success. Fortnite hit 110 million monthly active users last holiday, an all-time peak. And this is all happening in the context of a game business that’s rapidly changing in a way that we’ve only seen a few times in our lifetimes as game developers. It’s a generational change. One of the manifestations we’re seeing right now is a lot of games are released with high budgets and they’re not selling nearly as well as expected, whereas other games are growing incredibly strong.
What we’re seeing, the real trend here is that players are gravitating towards the really big games where they can play with more of their friends. This is a manifestation of Metcalfe’s Law, the idea that the value of a network, a game, or a social experience grows in proportion to the number of friends that you can connect to. In the world of gaming, that means you and your friends getting together and playing games, chatting by voice, attending concerts, and doing all other kinds of cool virtual things online.
This trend, some people will call it the metaverse. We’re not all in agreement on what this means. Some people, when they hear the word metaverse, think of what Facebook is doing with VR and now AR. Some people use the metaverse to describe everything they don’t like about the current Fortnite season. But when you look at what’s happening in the world of Fortnite, it’s new and it’s exciting and it’s something that’s never happened at this scale in the history of entertainment, with an original story that’s evolving with original content and also all the world’s brands participating. Musicians reaching users, Disney and Star Wars, and others all coming together to create a world-class entertainment experience that’s ever-evolving and live, and that’s that’s really what we think that the future of gaming is about.
While Sweeney has a point when he says that an increasing number of players value the live multiplayer experience, it’s equally true that several big live service multiplayer games have disappointed badly. Examples include the likes of Crucible, Babylon’s Fall, Anthem, Marvel’s Avengers, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and most recently, Concord. Not even IPs as powerful as Marvel’s and DC’s were enough to prevent these failures. As such, while Epic may not be interested in making another single player game for the time being, many other developers certainly are, and they are bound to find success if they create a quality experience.
In other Epic news, Sweeney’s company has just sued Google and Samsung because of their auto blocker feature.
