Epic's Support-A-Creator program was launched as a one-time event, but it's now permanent and is available to all creators and all developers on the Epic Games store.
— Tim Sweeney
I can imagine an automotive designer or an industrial designer building a product in 3D, all in real-time. That's the way a lot of people are going to work in the future.
The great thing about VR is that the input is going to be so drastically better than mouse input or games with touch controls on smartphones. It'll make it much easier to build stuff and express yourself freely.
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.
Ultimately, I'm an optimist.
If you black out the background in AR, you could make an immersive VR experience, and if you make the view translucent so you can see through it, you just have an augmented view of the real world. I think that's the ultimate and best form of display tech we'll have.
'Infinity Blade' has proven that iPhone owners are hungry for high-end games with cutting-edge graphics.
Augmented reality will drive all things like chat, social networking, photos, videos, organizing data, modeling, painting, motion capture, and visual programming. Every form of computing will be combined together and unified in a single platform.
I believe that augmented reality will be the biggest technological revolution that happens in our lifetimes.
Whenever there is somebody at Epic who is capable of doing something better than me, I let them at it.
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.
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.
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.
I welcome Microsoft having a store on Windows; what I've always resisted was a push to close down Windows to competing stores.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The mobile gaming experience is fundamentally limited by this very small screen in front of you that occupies maybe 15 degrees of your field of view. The PC and console experience, you have a 45-degree field of view. VR is 120 degrees: your entire view space. The expectations of users on the platform will rise to levels we've never seen before.
As more and more people are automated out of the economy through robotics and self-driving cars and other technologies, there will be a way to create value for other human beings online. There will be a virtual economy for exchanging value, goods and services, entertainment experiences, and all that.
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.
While Hollywood's computer graphics quality is world-class, their production pipelines are a mess of non-standard tools and labor-intensive processes driven by the mantra of maximizing quality regardless of cost. It's very Balkanized.
Videogames have existed for almost 40 years now, yet every year, we see major and unexpected advances.
Hollywood is moving movie production into VR because it may be more immersive. We see a convergence of different forms of media. VR and AR provide next-generation viewing experiences for games, movies, and visualization.
My role is more like a chairman and founder. I am used to overseeing the company's heritage and our strategy.
Some folks actually talk a whole lot more than me, so I'm grateful for the people like Cliff Bleszinski. He talks about our games, and Mark Rein talks about our business strategy. I'm the shy programmer myself.
We want a direct relationship with our customers. To build a business and sell products to them.
I think it's necessary for VR to start with an early adopter audience that's highly engaged, and I think that means gamers. They're the ones who have the high-end hardware and the expertise and the patience to sort through the uncertainty of it all.
I see a bright future for the future of computing and its implications for games.
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.
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.
We are a game developer ourselves, and we built everything we need for our games. We share everything we built, including our game engine.
If you throw a frog in boiling water, he'll just hop out. But if you put him in warm water and slowly amp up the temperature, he won't notice and end up boiled.
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.
Asian online games are far ahead of Western games in terms of business model, but the Western games do have a real advantage in terms of production values.
We're not just limited by technology but by our ideas and our experimentation and how quickly we can try things.
We need to avoid going down a path where we might find the doors slamming shut behind us.
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.
While most game developers are focused entirely on what they're shipping in a year or two, a technology developer like Epic has to look much further out and plan many years ahead.
For the third generation Unreal Engine, we are building two versions of every model in our game. We are building a source model with several million polygons, between 2 and 6 million polygons. We use that model for all the lighting detail on the mesh. Then we go to the in-game version, which is usually about 10,000 polygons.
Once you have an augmented reality display, you don't need any other form of display. Your smart phone does not need a screen. You don't need a tablet. You don't need a TV. You just take the screen with you on your glasses wherever you go.
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.
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.
Open platforms encourage innovation. Whenever you have a closed platform, a monopoly on commerce, and all these platform rules, it stifles innovation.
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.
Within our lifetimes, we will be able to push out enough computational power to simulate reality.
Streaming is something that's going to require tons of billions of dollars of investment, building server farms close to users and 5G and everything else.
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.
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.
