this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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For the most part, I quite like Sweeney. He's one of gaming's quiet visionaries - almost the opposite to loudmouths like Peter Molyneux - and seemed to take a very "gamer first" approach to game development. CliffyB's autobiography gives a very positive account of him too.
His approach to business is quite concerning though. Whether it's complaining that the barriers to developing for Linux is too high while simultaneously cutting 10-12% of his workforce, to articles like this where Sweeney talks about the Fortnite ecosystem - it's just becoming increasingly anti-gamer. Fortnite is part of the ecosystem, not the ecosystem - no wonder we're being driven towards AI slop in games, because everything else is getting choked off.
Am I preaching to the converted? Probably. Maybe I'll just play the Epic Megagames series as far as Gears of War and pretend the last fifteen years or so never happened
Epic has supported Linux via grants to platforms like Lutris and by promoting the alternative launchers, among other things, so its approach is not that dissimilar to Valve supporting Wine rather than funding or developing native Linux ports. Epic laying people off is very disappointing, but at least not worse compared to the other big corporations having done the same.
On AI, most of the time, yeah, I believe AI is used quite lazily to create soulless assets, especially for asset flips. It wasn't like that with Vader though, was it? The community mostly loved him and had fun. I typically don't use my mic when gaming, but him dynamically commenting on the world around him and the players got me to seriously consider connecting a mic. Vader's voice itself was also used with permission from the copyright holders.
Have you played Fortnite? It's not just a game anymore. It's more like a launcher in that it lets you play various games that are very distinct from one another, like Lego Fortnite or Rocket Racing, with the main shared components being the Unreal Engine and the shared economy (e.g. owning a skin for Fortnite Battle Royale granting you a version of the same skin in the Lego games).
I don't think Sweeney has ever claimed that everything has to happen in Fortnite though. My understanding is that he envisions more cooperation between game creators (similar to Epic's collaborations with Disney and many others), powered by open systems like EOS, which would allow gamers to interact and carry items over from game to game.
AI Vader was a lot of fun. It was a great use of the technology.
You're right that Fortnite is sort of a launcher on its own now. The community developed games don't hold a lot of appeal for me, but some people like them.
Right, I'm not a fan of the community-made ones either. I do love Lego Fortnite and Rocket Racing though. Festival can be fun as well.