// PC GAMER — GAMING
Tim Sweeney on the future of games, AI, and whether Valve will ever join forces with Epic: 'It's now clear that nobody's going to end up with an absolute monopoly'
The Epic Games CEO discusses his vision for "Team Open," his objections to Steam's AI disclosure requirement, and the huge problems facing AAA game development.
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At Unreal Fest in Chicago last week, Epic unveiled its masterplan for Unreal Engine 6. Rather than the usual talk of fancy new rendering features, the company is pitching the next version of its industry-standard game engine as a great unifier that will enable "content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines" and speed up development with AI integration.
After his closing keynote, in which he outlined his hands-across-the-digital-ocean vision, I spoke with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to get more clarity and insight into Epic's vision for the future of gaming.
This interview has been edited for length, and arranged by topic.
In his Unreal Fest closing remarks (embedded below), Sweeney said that Unreal Engine developers can take on the likes of Roblox by connecting their games' social systems and economies. We started our conversation there.
PC Gamer: I understand your diagnosis of the games industry's problem, that it can't keep putting out $400 million AAA games that flame out, but I'm less certain about your "Team Open" solution, where games and their economies are interconnected. It reminded me a little of the blockchain promise, with people saying you'd be able to take a sword from a Ubisoft game into an EA game. But nobody actually wants that, it doesn't solve a problem for the player. What does games-within-games and an interconnected system deliver for the player?
Tim Sweeney: Well, the main benefits are for the player. Let's start with social. It's a lot more broken than most people realize. If you're only playing one game with your friends all the time, then A) you're in a situation that works fine, and B) you've self-selected friends that happen to work with that platform and social ecosystem. In the old days, before Sony and Microsoft talked to each other, that was you playing with all people on the same console platform, and today it's across consoles.
But if you go from Fortnite to Apex Legends, you can't bring your existing friend connections over, if they're across platforms. Right now, there's different completely separated social ecosystems on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Steam on PC, and then bespoke developers' social ecosystems. Epic has one, and it's awesome, and it's open to third-party developers. Most publishers have their own. EA has one, and Activision has one, and so on.
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