Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Every game’s going to have its own gameplay rules and a lot of games are going to have stuff that only works in them. But there’s a huge set of games that have in common the idea of a cosmetic system that does not affect gameplay outcomes but is purely cool looks and cool appearances. Most of the major multiplayer games have them. And if you look at games, you could probably bundle together about 70% of them and say they’re similar enough that they could actually interoperate, that you could own an outfit in Fortnite, own an outfit in Roblox, and own the same outfit in maybe Call of Duty and maybe 100 or 200 other games and actually expect they would work together. And you find other kinds of items are probably interoperable too. Like Fortnite has car outfits, so you can buy different appearances of a car. And when you find a physical car in the world of Fortnite, if you’re the first person to get into it in that session, boom, it takes on your chosen car cosmetic and now you have a cool car that’s identifiable as yours. We realized early on with Fortnite that the key to making Fortnite work as a creator economy was to open up the revenue from the item shop to all of those sources of engagement. Right. There are two big things happening in Fortnite that make it work as a product and as a business. One is the game modes, Fortnite Battle Royale, and all of the user modes and everything else are sources of engagement. People play there because it’s super fun and because they’re playing there, they’re willing to buy cool stuff to make their character look cooler. And so you have all of these sources of engagement, but the sources of engagement don’t make money directly. You can’t spend money in Fortnite Battle Royale to buy a game item. The gameplay is not paid to win, and it’s all just a game. So we make money from the item shop and the item shop only adjusts because of the sources of engagement. If you weren’t playing Battle Royale, trust me, nobody would want to buy a Fortnite outfit. If you weren’t playing any Fortnite games, why would you buy Fortnite outfits? And so you have all the revenue in this item shop economy and all of the engagement in this engagement economy. And the thing that magically makes the Fortnite creator economy works is revenue sharing, item shop spending according to sources of engagement by engagement. If you buy an item and you’ve played 40% of your time in Battle Royale and 60% of your time in these user modes, the amount you spent, the portion of that that’s profit can be separated out and paid out to all the different creators who participate in that economy. And that’s why Fortnite scaled up to a $400 million creator economy so far, and it’s growing. It’s amazing.…

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