Epic CEO: Our Company Is Now Financially Sound; Gamers Gravitate Towards Live Service Multiplayer

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.

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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.

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