Tim Sweeney

What Tim Sweeney said

1. Lex Fridman Podcast · Apr 30, 2025

   Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467

   8 moments · 46 min

   4:12
   1. 29:53

      Indies have a better shot by avoiding crowded genres

      “A much better chance of success is in releasing something that hasn't been done before, being really unique and reaching an audience”

   2. 2:32:51

      Fortnite shares shop revenue with creators based on engagement

      “the money you spent, the portion of that that's profit can be separated out and paid out to all the different creators who participate in that economy.”

   3. 3:28:41

      Apple's app fees suppress software competition

      “Why should Apple be adding a 30% junk fee to all commerce you do?”

   4. 2:26:45

      Fortnite's backend took a year to scale to 15 million users

      “the online team was responsible for patching that code, spent a year of intense work getting it to scale from like 40 000 concurrent users to 15 million concurrent users”

   5. 1:55:10

      Game engines can supply context AI video lacks

      “I think a lot of people in the industry are overly optimistic about the rate of progress of AI for video and other things like that.”

   6. 4:06:08

      Social games are concentrating playtime and investment

      “when you have a large number of gamers migrating to a small number of games, the effect of that is increasing revenue for those games, increasing reinvestment.”

   7. 17:22

      ZZT grew from a text editor through player testing

      “I took notes about what they got stuck on and what they enjoyed and where they felt bored and just iteratively polished the game until I felt it was good.”

   8. 3:13:28

      Verse aims to make concurrency invisible to game programmers

      “the key is that you're running these updates speculatively and you're not committing their changes to memory until you're sure that they're free of conflict.”