Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…That’s crazy. Another close to peak this time. Roblox is bigger than ever, and this trend is players consolidating into multiplayer experiences that they play together. And we’re seeing another trend overlaid with that, which is like when an awesome single player game comes out or a smaller multiplayer game comes out, people often will treat it as a vacation. They’ll go off and play that game for a while, then come back. And I think Wukong was an awesome example of that, a wonderful game from a brilliant team in China. They made a game that’s like no Western players had really seen that type of thing done before and it was awesome and it did well, but most players play it for a while and move back on. And that can be lucrative. But a business that’s building that kind of game is going to have to build a new one every few years and build a business around that, while the other games continue to accrete users. But when you have a large number of gamers migrating to a small number of games, the effect of that is increasing revenue for those games, increasing reinvestment. And there are things that Epic can do with a team of thousands of people building Fortnite internally, and tens of thousands contributing to Fortnite as independent creators. There are just things that can happen with that level of investment that can’t happen in a smaller game. And so there’s somewhat of an increasing winner-take-all dynamic where the biggest games reinvest more to make their games more fun, to gain fun at a faster rate than other games. And the industry is changing around that. So I think the lesson for the game industry now is that there are really two big opportunities being pursued. There are big games, or games that have the potential to be really big multiplayer experiences that keep players around indefinitely for very long periods of time, and then there are just really good and small-scale games that people are taking a break from their big games for. And the trend there is going to be towards efficiently developing those games. You can’t build one of those games with a $300 million budget, but if you can do it with a $40 million budget, you can make a lot of money. So I think that’s the main reshaping going on and think that it creates a rather bleak outlook for a lot of the category of single-player games that don’t have a huge audience to reach. But this is just one of the really trends of restructuring the business around the technology and changes of the day. Okay, this is going to be a ridiculous question, but aside from the games you’ve created, what are some of the greatest video games ever created to you? What video games have been either impactful to you in your life or maybe you’ve seen created and you’re like, “Huh, that’s a beautiful art piece.” It could be in a totally different realm. Obviously for me, I return often to the single-player domain of role-playing games of the Elder Scrolls series Skyrim. That was like a world that they created, a recent game, Baldur’s Gate 3, that was a really incredible piece of work and art and doing a lot of innovative stuff, again in the single-player domain. Is there games like that outside the ones you’ve created?…

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