Fortnite is getting Unity games
Epic Games is partnering with arguably its biggest game development rival, Unity, to offer games created using Unity’s engine. Fortnite. The change will mean that Unity games could partner with Epic’s own suite of experiences as well as those created by third-party developers using Unreal Editor to Fortnite – and this opens the door to many more games available to play in Fortnite.
“Just like in the early days of the web, we believe companies must work together to build the open metaverse in an interoperable and equitable way,” Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, said in a statement. “Working alongside Unity, we help developers create games that are fun, reach a wider audience, and succeed. »
This change represents an important step in Epic’s long-term vision to transform Fortnite in an open metaverse which is a large 3D social space with a huge number of experiences to participate in with your friends. Epic has been following this path for years with Fortnite putting more emphasis on creator-made experiences and making navigating those experiences in the Fortnite lobby feel like scrolling through YouTube. You can even view experiences across the web and purchase new ones Fortnite held in your browser as well.
Right away, Fortnite is a closed ecosystem, meaning creators can only make games for the platform using Epic’s tools, can’t (yet) easily drop those games into Unreal Engine to bring them to other platforms, or bring experiences built on other engines into Fortnite. But even in 2023, Tim Sweeney said The edge how he believed the future of interoperable game engines was key to his vision.
Epic has had some success growing Fortnite from being a battle royale to a wide, Roblox-like ecosystem with games from outside creators. As of late last year, it had 70,000 total creators who had published nearly 200,000 “islands,” or Fortnitethe term for experiments. But the Unity editor, designed to help developers create their games once and run them on multiple platforms, offers more than 1.2. million monthly active users. Even a fraction of these developers also offer their games on Fortnite could add a lot to the platform.
The plan is to allow Unity games to come to Fortnite next year, Unity President and CEO Matt Bromberg says The edge.
The partnership potentially gives developers another potential way to find an audience and monetize their games, which could be a lifeline for smaller developers amid continued struggles and layoffs in the industry. It could also consolidate even more power in Fortnitewho is already a monster. But Sweeney actually envisions a world for Fortnite it’s much more decentralized – more like the open web.
“FortniteIt’s still this big thing that’s completely run by Epic,” Sweeney says. “But there will be a day when you can, from the program that’s currently called Fortniteaccess other sites entirely controlled by other companies. We have nothing to do with them. We don’t make any money from it. We do not have commercial agreements with them. They are like websites on the web. Today’s news with Unity is the first opportunity for the “rubber to meet the road” of engines working together.
For now, let a creator make a Fortnite usage experience FortniteWith Google’s tools or with Unity, Sweeney says there will be a review process to ensure it’s “up to standard and working properly.” But in the future, “as this evolves into a completely open system, we will only have reviews on the stuff that we host, and anyone will be able to put anything anywhere, and people will be able to access it like you do in a web browser today.” »
Allowing Unity games will “dramatically expand the developer base,” Sweeney says. “The challenge of creating content in Fortnite today you start from scratch. You cannot currently take an Unreal Engine game and deploy it in Fortnite – this is something Epic is aiming for with Unreal Engine 6, which is probably years away. Ironically, Sweeney says, “the release of Unity games in Fortnite will happen before releasing standalone Unreal Engine games in Fortnite.”
There’s also a second item in today’s news: Unity will bring Unreal Engine support to the business management platform announced last month, which allows developers to manage their digital storefronts across many platforms from Unity Engine. This was presented at the time as a way to make it easier to manage the complexities of different storefronts and payment processors.
Support for Unreal Engine on the platform gives developers “more choice in how they build and manage these stores,” says Bromberg. “Ultimately, I think what Tim and I don’t agree on more is that having more choices and more places where developers can build things and giving them more control over their destiny is the most important thing we can do to help the gaming ecosystem.”
