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 developme, 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 coe from independe 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 stateme:
Just like in the early days of the web, we believe companies must work together to build an open, ieroperable 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 coe 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 importa step in Epic’s long-term path to transform Fortnite io an open metaverse; Where it is a big 3D social space with a lot of differe 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 coe browsing in the Fortnite lobby io a YouTube-like experience. Sweeney said that 40% of users’ gaming time is now spe on coe created by third parties.
Currely, Fortnite, which according to Sweeney had 100 million mohly active users during the holidays last year, is a closed ecosystem; This means that creators can only use Epic tools to create coe 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 io Fortnite. But even in 2023, Sweeney said he has a lot of faith in the future of ieractive and collaborative game engines.
Epic has managed to transform Fortnite from a battle royale game io a Roblox-like ecosystem with many games from independe 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 mohly active users, and even if only a small fraction of them bring their games to Fortnite, there’s a tremendous amou of coe coming io 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 curre tough times of the gaming industry. Of course, this could also concerate more power in the hands of Fortnite, but Sweeney envisions a much more deceralized future for Fortnite. In an ierview 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 coracts. They are like iernet websites.
He says that the rece news about Unity is the first step in realizing the idea that differe 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 coe 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.
Currely, it is not possible to publish a game made with Unreal Engine on Fortnite; An issue that Epic iends to solve in Unreal Engine 6, but this version is years away. Sweeney coinued:
Ierestingly, the release of Unity games in Fortnite will happen before the release of independe 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 manageme platform that it announced last moh. The platform allows developers to manage their digital stores across multiple platforms, all from within the Unity engine. At the time of its iroduction, this feature was a way to simplify the manageme of differe stores and payme processors. According to Matt Bromberg, preside 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 corol for developers is the most importa thing we can do to help the gaming ecosystem.
Source: The Verge
