Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…And it was not yet cross-platform. Again, especially with a game like this. You want as many people as possible to play. You want your friends to play. And not all your friends are going to have gaming PCs. In a literally Epic move, the company and Tim see this happening, realize that these internal game projects are not getting any traction. The Unreal Tournament team, I think they knew at this point that wasn’t going to ship. By the way, the title Fortnite inside of Epic started in 2011, so it’s been six years of development and you have this other Unreal Tournament team that I think had already given up at this point. It was clear that it was not going to ship. Paragon is taking a crap ton of resources to make that a reality. That’s the internal status of the company when PUBG hits. PUBG hits, within two months, the Unreal Tournament team hops over into the Fortnite assets. I remember they’re all developing on the Unreal Engine. They all know how to work with the assets and the code here. They build and launch a new mode of Fortnite called Fortnite Battle Royale that is a Fortnite graphic cartoony take on this Battle Royale concept that PUBG has just taken massive. They ship it in September 2017. Within 2 weeks, they get 10 million active players. This is bonkers. Ten million players are probably what Doom got in the whole life of the game. Within six months, they have 125 million active players. Incredibly, there are some dynamics here. Like you mentioned Ben, there’s less violence. It appeals to kids more, especially it appeals to parents more who are willing to let their kids play this.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.