Fortnite hosts Unity games; Cooperation with traditional competitor

According to reports, Fortnite is going to host games made with the Unity engine. This is the result of Epic Games’ cooperation with its big rival in the field of game development, namely Unity Technologies.

This change will allow games made with the Unity engine to be included in Fortnite alongside Epic Games’ collection of experiences, as well as content from independent creators made with the Unreal Editor for Fortnite tool. As a result, this opens up Fortnite to a lot more games.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a statement:

Just like in the early days of the web, we believe companies must work together to build an open, interoperable and fair metaverse. Working with Unity helps us developers make fun games, reach a larger audience, and succeed.

Sweeney added at the Unity conference:

Thanks to the amazing networking technology developed by Unity, which connects other engines to Unity through a network protocol, Fortnite will be open to all Unity games. Starting next year, Unity developers will be able to publish their games directly to Fortnite to join the content discovery system alongside games made with Unreal Engine and participate in Fortnite’s economy, which is moving towards an open metaverse economy.

Fortnite’s endless ambitions

This change is an important step in Epic’s long-term path to transform Fortnite into an open metaverse; Where it is a big 3D social space with a lot of different experiences and you and your friends can work in it. Epic has been working on this idea for years; Including focusing more on creator-made experiences and turning content browsing in the Fortnite lobby into a YouTube-like experience. Sweeney said that 40% of users’ gaming time is now spent on content created by third parties.

Currently, Fortnite, which according to Sweeney had 100 million monthly active users during the holidays last year, is a closed ecosystem; This means that creators can only use Epic tools to create content for it, and they cannot simply transfer their games to Unreal Engine and release them on other platforms or import experiences created in other engines into Fortnite. But even in 2023, Sweeney said he has a lot of faith in the future of interactive and collaborative game engines.

Epic has managed to transform Fortnite from a battle royale game into a Roblox-like ecosystem with many games from independent developers. By the end of last year, 70,000 creators had released nearly 200,000 “islands” (Fortnite’s term for user-made experiences). But Unity has more than 1.3 million monthly active users, and even if only a small fraction of them bring their games to Fortnite, there’s a tremendous amount of content coming into the platform. This collaboration can provide a new way for developers to find an audience and monetize their games; Something that could be vital for smaller studios in the current tough times of the gaming industry. Of course, this could also concentrate more power in the hands of Fortnite, but Sweeney envisions a much more decentralized future for Fortnite. In an interview with The Verge, he says:

Fortnite is still a big thing that’s completely run by Epic, but there will come a day when you’ll be able to go from within what’s called Fortnite to sites that are completely owned by other companies. We have no role in them, we don’t get any income from them and we don’t have any commercial contracts. They are like internet websites.

He says that the recent news about Unity is the first step in realizing the idea that different engines can work together. Now it doesn’t matter whether you build your island with your own Fortnite tools or with Unity. Sweeney says there’s a review process to make sure content meets rating standards and works well, but in the future, when the system is fully open, only things hosted by Epic themselves will be reviewed, and anyone can put anything anywhere, and people will access it just as they surf a web browser.

Currently, it is not possible to publish a game made with Unreal Engine on Fortnite; An issue that Epic intends to solve in Unreal Engine 6, but this version is years away. Sweeney continued:

Interestingly, the release of Unity games in Fortnite will happen before the release of independent games made with Unreal Engine in Fortnite.

The second piece of news is that Unity is going to add Unreal Engine support to its digital store management platform that it announced last month. The platform allows developers to manage their digital stores across multiple platforms, all from within the Unity engine. At the time of its introduction, this feature was a way to simplify the management of different stores and payment processors. According to Matt Bromberg, president and CEO of Unity, the addition of Unreal Engine support “gives developers more choice for building and managing their stores.” He says:

Ultimately, what the team and I most agree on is that having more choice, more places to build, and more control for developers is the most important thing we can do to help the gaming ecosystem.

Source: The Verge