Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney took to the State of Unreal stage yesterday to deliver a rallying cry of sorts to the games industry, which he described as being “in a time of both crisis and also opportunity”. And guess where the opportunity is? But we’ll come back to that.
Sweeney closed the show by referencing the “huge” number of games – blockbuster games – he says he sees releasing but that are “failing” to find audiences large enough to survive.
“We’re seeing often hundreds of millions of dollars of [development] costs followed by tens of millions of dollars of revenue, and the costs are continuing to grow,” Sweeney said at the start of his talk. “It feels to many like a tidal wave is sweeping over the triple-A game business.”
“On the upside, there’s a new generation of gamers coming in with new tastes in games, and they’re playing at a higher rate than any previous generation,” Sweeney said. “The biggest games, like Fortnite, are once again growing and thriving. But underneath this, there’s a serious challenge to triple-A developers, and that’s that a huge number of the new releases of major games are failing now.”
He believes this is partly the result of generational changes in how people interact with games and the types of experiences they want. Games are increasingly socially driven, he said.
“In the old days, it was: you decide to play a game, you download it, you may play it by yourself or maybe play multiplayer with strangers. Nowadays, it’s much more about you getting together with your friends and then deciding what to do together online, to play a game or experience.” This favours “long-established” games, he said, which probably explains why PlayStation’s top five most-played games in the US in 2025 were exactly the same as they were in 2024: Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto 5, Minecraft, and Roblox, in varying orders.
Of those games, it’s Roblox that seems to particularly aggravate Sweeney, perhaps because it presents a direct sort of competitor to the user-generated games and experiences Fortnite also offers.
“One view of the future is that Roblox grows and eats gaming,” Sweeney said. “A lot of people are saying this online. What you have there is a centralised platform that has a single ‘gatekeeper’ that commoditises everything and takes more than 70 percent of revenue generated by 450 million users. So that’s a real challenge to game developers,” he added.
The other thing Sweeney sees is the economy of games shifting to people buying things inside them, rather than buying the games themselves. That and the war of attention games are waging with not only other games, but social media apps like TikTok.
“The final trend that’s affecting gaming is that the market for players’ attention has become extraordinarily competitive, more so than I’ve ever seen before,” Sweeney said. “We were competing with lame television and other things. Nowadays, there’s all kinds of social media platforms as well as things like prediction markets that trend almost into vice – all competing for people’s times, all very effectively.”
Sweeney’s vision for a “brighter future” is, unsurprisingly, one that revolves around Epic’s products and especially the Unreal Engine, which is what it wants to unify the games industry with.
“We’re going to all need to change the way we build things,” Sweeney continued. “We’re going to need to build better games. We’re going to need to build them more efficiently. We’re going to need to design upfront and build for connected games, where all of our player bases are connected socially and our economies are connected, so that players, instead of seeing these as isolated products, [they] see them as part of a global ecosystem that all game developers participate in together.”
Indeed, Epic intends to be the first to demonstrate that idea in action. As part of the same show, the developer talked about the upcoming Unreal Engine 6 allowing Fortnite skins and other assets to be usable in other games, and vice versa. These so-called “smart assets”, which aren’t just limited to Fortnite, are designed to work across different games, provided they’re all running on Unreal Engine.
Epic Games is not itself immune from the ills of the games industry. The company laid off more than 1000 developers in March. In recent years, Epic expanded to support the explosive growth of Fortnite, but a drop in Fortnite player engagement is partly what caused that wave of layoffs. At the time, Sweeney also called out issues affecting the rest of the industry as well as Epic itself, like the declining console hardware sales.