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- “Fortnite” is one of the most popular games in the world, with hundreds of millions of players.
- It turns out that one of those hundreds of millions of gamers is the billionaire CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney. He has logged more than 1,600 games from the battle royale behemoth, he told NPR.
- “I’m just going to play randomly with groups of people and they have no idea who I am and we just have a good time together,” Sweeney said.
- Visit the Business Insider SA home page for more stories.
The next time you grab a real victory from the jaws of defeat, it could be a victory stolen from the billionaire who runs Epic Games, the maker of “Fortnite.”
Tim Sweeney, who founded and runs Epic Games, has logged more than 1,600 “Fortnite” matches, he said in a new interview with NPR.
“I have a name that nobody knows,” he said. “I’m just going to play randomly with groups of people and they have no idea who I am and we just have a good time together.”
Sweeney’s work at Epic has made him extremely wealthy in recent decades, to the tune of around $ 5.3 billion (about R260 billion), according to Forbes estimates.
That’s partly due to the box office success of “Fortnite,” which rakes in billions a year, but also due to the company’s long history of success in the video game business. Epic Games has created a variety of major game franchises, including “Unreal Tournament” and “Gears of War,” in addition to producing and supervising the widely used Unreal Engine game creation software suite.
But “Fortnite” has been by far the company’s biggest success, and its success even spurred the creation of a new digital store: Epic Games Store.
That store, and Epic’s massive success with “Fortnite,” have been at the forefront of an ongoing legal dispute with Apple.
The game launched on the iPhone and iPad App Store on August 13, and it won’t be back anytime soon: A judge partially sided with Apple in an initial hearing, which is keeping games off iPhones and iPads for the foreseeable future. .
Worse still, the game cannot be updated. Anyone who plays “Fortnite” on iPhone or iPad will not be able to play the current season of the game, which began on August 27, nor will they be able to play with friends on other platforms.
And that’s all because, also on August 13, Epic added a new payment option to the game.
The new option said “Epic Direct Pay”. Instead of paying Apple, then Apple paying “Fortnite” maker Epic Games, you could pay Epic directly and cost less for the same.
By doing this, Epic intentionally circumvented paying Apple and Google their respective amount of products sold through their digital storefronts: 30%, an industry standard for holders of digital platforms such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and others.
In response, Epic sued Apple and Google. During the interview with NPR, Sweeney characterized the 30% cut that Apple and Google take as exploitation, and referred to both as monopolies.
“It’s not just Epic being exploited by Apple,” he said, “but all the developers who agree to that scheme are in collusion with Apple and Google to promote their monopoly. These stores are making much more money from creative work than the creators. “. “
Epic’s own digital store, Epic Games Store, sees a 12% cut in digital sales on both Mac and PC.
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