Top 60 Tim Sweeney Quotes

Microsoft has been taking a series of steps for a while now to close down the Windows ecosystem. They can’t do it all at once, because there would be an industry uproar. But one little step at a time, they’re trying to take it all over.

We’re not just limited by technology but by our ideas and our experimentation and how quickly we can try things.

Epic Games and Microsoft have been close partners for more than 25 years.

Whenever there is somebody at Epic who is capable of doing something better than me, I let them at it.

That’s the great things about games as social experiences. You play with all your friends across social groups. You see young girls as well as young boys playing. These are kids in school, people in offices, in pubs, all having fun together.

I would play games long enough to discover what games were doing and how they were doing it. And then I’d spend the rest of my time building.

I believe Microsoft has every right to operate a PC app store and to curate it how they choose.

It turns out that the most powerful use of technology is to connect people together socially.

In many ways ‘Fortnite’ is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers; they’re playing with friends and using ‘Fortnite’ as a foundation to communicate.

All signs point to there being many virtual and augmented reality competitors, and not just a single, dominant company.

If you look at why people are paid to do things, it’s because they’re creating a good or delivering a service that’s valuable to somebody. There’s just as much potential for that in these virtual environments as there is in the real world.

I think the most interesting things happening in VR are going to be somewhere in between what you call a traditional game and what you call a traditional movie.

There are major benefits to building a game once and improving it over a long period of time based on user feedback and behavior. It’s kind of depressing to have to build a game once, take all the user feedback, and then spend the next 3 years building another game.

You can’t build an engine that’s just good for one type of game anymore. The economics don’t work.

We are a game developer ourselves, and we built everything we need for our games. We share everything we built, including our game engine.

This Metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else. If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government and be a god on Earth.

Microsoft’s intentions must be judged by Microsoft’s actions, not Microsoft’s words. Their actions speak plainly enough: they are working to turn today’s open-PC ecosystem into a closed, Microsoft-controlled distribution and commerce monopoly.

Fortnite, because of its visual style, it’s widely acceptable to just about everyone. It’s open up to a much wider audience than a realistic, military-style simulation.

Open platforms encourage innovation. Whenever you have a closed platform, a monopoly on commerce, and all these platform rules, it stifles innovation.

I feel like it really marks a new era for Microsoft under Satya Nadella, Alex Kipman, Phil Spencer, and a number of other people who are really committed to the platform being a healthy ecosystem for everybody and not just an extracted business like you see on the Facebook or Google side.

It turns out having a fast car is an excellent hobby when you’re a workaholic because even when you don’t have any free time, you can always drive to work.

As soon as a critical mass of people in the world gained access to devices with high-end graphics and Internet connectivity, the rise of games like ‘Fortnite’ became inevitable.

It’s a big and growing problem, the amount of power possessed by Google and Facebook. President Eisenhower said it about the military-industrial complex. They pose a grave threat to our democracy.

It’s awesome to see other games picking up on battle royale, adding their unique spin to it, and advancing the state of the industry.

When gamers can play a game together with all of their friends, regardless of the devices they own, you have a much more compelling social experience. That applies to all multiplayer games.

I understand the concept of advertising. It makes sense. Companies want to reach customers with information about their products. It’s a completely legitimate and valuable notion.

I have immense respect for Unity because they played a key role in establishing this indie revolution, empowering a huge number of people to get into game development.

‘Infinity Blade’ has proven that iPhone owners are hungry for high-end games with cutting-edge graphics.

Onstage at Build, Phil Spencer said the Xbox is an open platform – which surprises me, because you have to get your game concept approved before you start developing it. Then you have to get every update approved. Microsoft has absolute control.

Both multiplayer games and online forums have this property of virtual anonymity. Other people can’t really see you; they don’t really know who you are. And so the sort of social moderating mechanisms in real life, and your desire not to offend people around you, don’t really adjust.

Everyone has friends that are limited to one platform and ecosystem, whereas what we’ve built with ‘Fortnite’ is a friends system that works across seven platforms. You can have friends across Xbox and PlayStation and PC.

On open platforms like PC, Mac, and Android, Epic’s goal is to bring its games directly to customers.

If you really care about a game, spending a couple of minutes setting up payment is perfectly reasonable. It’s certainly happened with ‘Fortnite.’

I believe that augmented reality will be the biggest technological revolution that happens in our lifetimes.

Keep in mind, the web existed for almost a decade before social networks became pervasive. Even though the technology was available to make a social network in around 1995, it simply didn’t happen until somebody had the idea to do it, do it big, and do it with a certain level of quality a decade later.

Videogames have existed for almost 40 years now, yet every year, we see major and unexpected advances.

Epic has prided itself on providing software directly to customers ever since I started mailing floppy disks in 1991.

The awesome thing about ‘Fortnite’ is it’s brought a huge volume of digital commerce to Epic.

When we’re building tools, we respect developers’ complete creative freedom. It can be used for the development for anything that’s legal.

Windows is the platform of choice for gamers. It’s the only choice for enterprise. If we want to have an open platform, we have to fight to keep Windows open.

I welcome Microsoft having a store on Windows; what I’ve always resisted was a push to close down Windows to competing stores.

My experience with Epic is handing off more and more power to the point where I can just sit back and look at our strategy or technology. I provide guidance without being responsible for any particular part of the company.

We want a direct relationship with our customers. To build a business and sell products to them.

Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There’s a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.

The thing that excites me most technologically is the ability to use VR not just for games and displaying our content, but also for creating that content. We’re putting a lot of thought into what the Unreal Engine editor looks like as a VR application.

We’re trying to make our software available to users in as economically efficient a way as possible. That means distributing the software directly to them; taking payment through Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, and other options; and not having a store take 30 percent.

We all remember the tech bubble of the late ’90s, but companies like Amazon survived. Wherever there’s strong, enduring value, it can last through that kind of turmoil.

VR as a display technology, as it’s miniaturized and made comfortable and mainstream, will be a replacement for all other forms of display technology, input and output. So for anybody who works with computers all day, this is going to be our future.

We feel the game industry is changing in some major ways. ‘Fortnite’ is a harbinger of things to come. It’s a massive number of people all playing together, interacting together, not just playing but socializing.

Epic will manually curate the Epic Games storefront rather than relying on algorithms or paid ads.

We need to avoid going down a path where we might find the doors slamming shut behind us.

I see a bright future for the future of computing and its implications for games.

AR is going to play such an infinite role in our lives that we have to establish clear ground rules respecting everyone’s rights. That means open platform and open ecosystems and protections that put user privacy first.

The genre thing is overrated, and the platform decisions are overrated. It’s what we see on ‘Fortnite’: so many of these gamers play on a variety of devices, so you can’t say they’re a mobile gamer or a console gamer. They’re just a gamer.

It’d be awesome if you could see an actual player’s faces projected onto an in-game character in a multiplayer game. Imagine how realistic that would feel.