Video games are becoming larger and more expensive, but the CEO of Epic Games also sees an opportunity for Fortnite.
What is happening with the AAA industry? For the gaming industry, it is a “time of crisis and at the same time of opportunities,” says Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, at the official Unreal Fest 2026 in Chicago. Big titles are not only getting better, they also cost more money and fail more often than they did many years ago. At the same time, the CEO sees the player numbers in Fortnite growing again.
“We often see development costs amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, followed by revenues of tens of millions of dollars, and development costs continue to increase. […] For many, it feels like a tidal wave is crashing over the AAA gaming industry.”
At the same time, he shows where he believes the industry should be looking for the next few years, and he is not entirely selfless in doing so.
More and more brands are relying on Fortnite:
Platforms instead of Games
What does the future bring? Looking into the crystal ball, the CEO sees Roblox, but also Fortnite as important platforms for the gaming of tomorrow (via PCGamer.com).
One perspective on the future is that Roblox is growing and swallowing the gaming industry. […] Many people express this online, but do you know what we have here is a centralized platform with a single gatekeeper that turns all content into a mass commodity, takes more than 70% of the revenues, and has 450 million users on board – and that is a real challenge for game developers.
For this reason, Epic Games is also increasingly transforming Fortnite into a gaming platform. The title is no longer just a simple battle royale with an exciting building mode. In the future, developers will be able to create games directly for Fortnite and the other games in the Epic Games universe with Unreal Engine 6.
We need to develop better games. […] We need to develop them more efficiently. We need to design and develop from the beginning so that our games are interconnected – that all our player communities are socially connected and our game worlds are intertwined – so that players do not see them as isolated products, but as part of a global ecosystem in which all game developers participate together.
What do you think? Would you play the next big MMORPG, for example, if you could only experience it as a game mode in Fortnite? Or do you find the development of video games into their own platforms annoying? Feel free to tell us in the comments! CEO Tim Sweeney has always been a big critic of the industry: The CEO of Epic Games criticizes Meta, Google, and Apple for supporting Donald Trump
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