Epic Games, headquartered in Cary, NC, is one of the most successful independent game studios in the world today. The company recently made its Unreal Engine 4 technology free for anyone to use, including educators and schools. For those who decide to make interactive products or games with the technology, Epic takes a 5% royalty. But anyone can use UE4 to make linear entertainment with no royalties involved.
Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of the company, has made a concerted effort to help aspiring game developers. Sweeney launched Epic Mega Games from his mother’s house over 25 years ago, mowing lawns to fund the mailing and promotion of his first PC game, ZZT, while a student at the University of Maryland. Epic has committed $5 million to developers using its Unreal Engine 4 technology. Sweeney talks about giving back, the company’s new open development approach and why virtual reality is the future in this exclusive interview.
How is Epic Games helping the smaller indie game developers?
We just announced a $5 million fund to help the community bring their projects to the next stage. We’re awarding grants to individuals and teams of between $5,000 and $50,000 each. The motivation for that is we saw a lot of teams were able to start out, build amazing stuff with the Unreal Engine, but to get to the next step they really needed funding of some sort.
What opportunities do you see for Unreal Engine 4 with Hollywood virtual reality projects?
The business model for our engine allows it to be used for linear content production without any royalties, so it’s widely available for Hollywood movie and television use without any strings attached. Our hope in this is that in the course of building these next generation linear experiences, all these teams will create amazing art assets that will then be utilized in games. And we’ll get this great synergy and feedback between all these different industries working together.
How big do you see virtual reality becoming over the next five to ten years as a business?
Virtual reality and augmented reality will literally change the world. They will be the next computing platform. There’s a market for billions of these devices because everybody who has a smartphone today will — perhaps in as much as decade from now — much prefer entertainment in a completely immersive experience that takes advantage of your entire field of view and has full body input through miniaturized cameras and other technologies. But we’re in the early days of it now. Let’s be clear, everything is in the development kit stage. It is for early adopters and what we’re seeing now is really just the Palm Pilot to the platform that will evolve into something iPhone-like in its quality.
What’s it been like opening up Unreal Tournament development to the gaming community?
Unreal Tournament as a game has largely been driven by the community. When we created the first game in 1999 we developed something like 30 maps, but the community quickly took the lead in creating hundreds of awesome maps, and many of the best pieces of content in the game were community created. This is really an exciting future development process that the game is no longer like the sole creative vision of a self-contained team, but it’s actually a community effort fueled by the participation of thousands of individuals in different capacities bringing together level designers and programmers and all sorts of other participants like 3D modelers and artists to extend the vision. When this process really works at scale, you’ll see a much greater rate of progress in the game than would ever be possible with a single team because you could never build a development team of 1,000 people contributing to a project within the economic constraints of the game industry. But by opening it up to the community, it’s certainly happening. And really this builds on a lot of other threads for Epic’s history of always opening up our major games to modding in the PC days. We’re trying to take it to the next level and we’re really happy with how the community has joined in so far. Over the next year, it’s going to really rise to the next level. Keep in mind that some of the most successful games today had their origin in the mod communities of other games. League of Legends was inspired by DOTA which was a mod of Warcraft and then Counter Strike from Valve originated in the mod community of Half-life. A lot of great innovations come from that model. What we’re doing with Unreal Tournament is going at it with much more intentionality to help the community achieve those things than we’ve ever done in the past, where some of those efforts almost arose by accident.
Is this a model Epic is looking at more these days with going straight to consumers versus the old fashioned way of creating Gears and working with Microsoft to release it as a disc?
Yeah, absolutely. The move away from retail and the idea of a game release as this singular big event is something we’re glad to see go away. We see the best opportunity for games to achieve their maximum is to be constantly improved upon over time through on-going conversation with the community basically. The original Unreal Tournament was like that after we released it as a retail game in 1999. We spent years refining it and improving it and it just grew over time as the game improved. This is the ultimate model for the game industry because it enables a much great period of improvement in the game. It’s interactive and driven by actual feedback and data from the community, as opposed to pure intuition from designers. We were constantly frustrated with Gears of War. We spent three years building a game. We’d release it. We’d get a lot of feedback from the community and we’re like, “Okay, we’ll try to do that three years from now when we build the next one.”
Over the years we’ve seen a lot of consolidation in the games industry. What do you feel has enabled Epic to be independent for so long, even before Tencent investment?
There are several elements you can look at that have been consistent with Epic throughout our history. One is that we’re both a game business and a technology business. Having this engine as a company gives us a lot more independence than a company that’s purely dependent on one publisher. When you rely on a singular business deal for all of your income, there’s always the risk that if something goes wrong, you’re drained of all of your resources and have no fallback plan. Whereas, we’ve had thousands of people using the Unreal Engine independently and it’s given us enough financial independence to always steer in the directions that we want. The other element that’s fairly unique to Epic is just the shear quality of developers we’ve been able to attract over the last 25 years of our existence. We have an enormous talent base here and it helps to attract more. We maintain a very high standard and that’s meant that we’ve been able to achieve really great games with every iteration. If you look at a lot of the companies that have once been great and later failed, it was because they’re dependent on one publisher and at one point they had one project that wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped, and that was enough to push them over the edge financially.
What are your thoughts on new opportunities tablets and smartphones have opened up for games like Epic’s Infinity Blade?
Every time a new generation of devices come along, like the iPad and the iPhone, new games are built around it that really take advantage of its control scheme and its capabilities from the very beginning. Infinity Blade has really been a dream in that regard. It’s a game that really wouldn’t make much sense on a traditional gaming machine, but you give it a touch screen device where you can move your fingers over the display surface, and it’s just magic. It gives you the perfect fluid controls for sword fighting.
It’s been great to see that evolve through several generations of Apple hardware, and now their resolution and performance we’re seeing on there is astonishing, getting up to the levels of consoles. That’s going to really change gaming a lot over the next few years.
What are your thoughts on Infinity Blade expanding into an arcade game experience?
They took the Infinity Blade game we made for your iPhone and translated it to an arcade screen. You have this gigantic screen, and you’re doing these touch screen controls to swipe around. It creates really almost an immersive feeling of sword fighting. That’s really cool. It feels like arcades should still exist. I really miss that experience.
Speaking of arcades, we’ve seen gaming go mainstream once again through social games and free-to-play games. What do you think of this trend?
Social networks are a great unifying force because you take people who have some interests in common, but not others, and they start to share their experiences. You get gamers dragging non-gamers into a game experience, and that’s really great for expanding our audience.
We’re also seeing social gaming expanding the genre of games that people play. We’re seeing older genres come back because of new people playing them. With non-gamers getting into gaming and having different expectations; it’s really broadening the gaming market to far more than the sort of players who play Gears of War, a really hardcore action game.
What role does Unreal Engine 4 play in this evolving gaming landscape?
The Unreal Engine is this unifying force. It’s this piece of technology that powers all games. It goes everywhere from iOS games, to social games, all the way to high-end console games. Having unifying development practices across all of the different devices means that game developers experienced with console gaming can move over and build a mobile game really easily.
That’s a lot of power, to see some technologies scale by two orders of magnitude and compute power from the low end to the high end. It really helps keep all game development on the same page. This is the game industry; it’s not five or six different industries for different genres. It’s all one big forest with developers moving around.
How do you see technology progressing as you continue to push Unreal?
Visual quality in games is continuing to improve at a really astonishing rate. We’re getting fairly close to what you see in movies, but it shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. The industry is powered by Moore’s Law, which says, “Every two years, computing power doubles.” We can translate that into graphics; they are twice as beautiful every few years.
With that, I think you’re going to see astonishing console-quality gaming experiences on your phone, tablet, everywhere; really easily accessible and incredibly detailed.
What role do you see these improvements in technology playing in emotionally connecting with an audience in a game?
The emotional connection between a game and players is the really difficult part; that’s where it’s really a matter of art much more than technology. The technology is really limited. We cannot simulate accurate human characters in the game. We combine a combination of prerecorded animations and recorded dialog, and splice it together in response to the character in a fairly crude way.
When designers take that limited technology and turn it into a really immersive experience that engages the player, it’s really a magical experience. The industry has really been progressing slowly in that area, and it takes really major leaps every time we want to improve the audience engagement, especially when you have a game that’s ultra-realistic. The player’s expectation is that these are real human characters that you’re interacting with, and we have very high expectations.
What do you enjoy about making games?
To me, as a programmer, it’s all been about this magical process of writing some code, and you spend some time on it. It’s really difficult, technical work, but then suddenly it appears on the screen, it works, and you can play it. That feedback—just every few years you get a moment that’s almost a revelation, where you think of some new idea or algorithm you can program in the computer, spend time on it, and see it working. That’s magical.
With the first Unreal 1 game we shipped back in 1998, there was a time when I thought through this algorithm to simulate volumetric lighting, the manner in which colored lights light up fog around them and create a really detailed, foggy, illuminated scene. I thought through the math of all that, did a bunch of equations on paper, translated them to the computer, and then ran it. “This might work, or it might not.” And there it was, and it just looked perfect. It’s those moments that are really magical for a programmer.
