Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…Well, one of the critical things that Epic always worked hard to do was to make something different that nobody else was doing, and to try to satisfy a small audience rather than competing globally with the game juggernauts. Back in the 1990s, Epic was new, but Electronic Arts and Activision and the other big publishers had been around for a decade, and they were huge companies. It had giant retail distribution networks. If I tried to make a game and then convinced them to publish it, I doubt I could have had a chance. And I doubt that even if I had made a successful game, that I would’ve made much money from it, though they might have. And so the really unique angle to Epic then was shareware. And that was just the idea that if we distribute our game differently, then we can reach a much larger audience than these bigger competitors by virtue of this first episode of the game being free. It was kind of the advent of what later became free to play. And the logic of that is just as true now as it was then. It’s, if the thing is free and anybody can get into it, then it’s going to spread from friend to friend as people bring their real world friends into the games they’re playing and you have the opportunity to build up a community around that. So the other lesson there was just minimize the friction of people getting into your game, make it easy to get into and make it fun. I think the other, well, I was very fortunate. ZZT was a funny game. It was not much like any other game. It had much worse graphics because it was all just text characters, smiley faces and other Greek letters and things participating in this game simulation. They were kind of iconic representations of characters rather than real ones. And this was decades into the age of real graphical games with interesting graphics. And so it wasn’t even trying to compete in that area, but it was able to compete in a different area, which is that it wasn’t just the three games that I’d made and shipped as a trilogy that were successful and drove the success of the product. It was the fact that I released an editor and there was a whole community around it. And you see that trend has repeated itself, like there was, ZZT was one of it. Before that, there was Bill Budge’s Pinball construction set. That was a 1980s Apple game that let users build their own pinball tables. And since then, you’ve had some of the world’s most successful games follow that path. Like Minecraft, you can build your own stuff. s a 1980s Apple game that let users build their own pinball tables. And since then, you’ve had some of the world’s most successful games follow that path. Like Minecraft, you can build your own stuff. Roblox, now Fortnite Creative and Unreal Editor for Fortnite. Games that become platforms for other people to build stuff was a real opportunity. I think the big thing to realize for indie developers right now is there’s massive, massive competition in every major genre, and it’s very unlikely that unless you just happen to be the world’s best at a particular thing that you’re going to release a game in an existing highly competitive genre and win. A much better chance of success is in releasing something that hasn’t been done before. Being really unique and reaching an audience, even if big or medium size or small, reaching an audience and becoming really popular with that, making some money from it, and being able to reinvest and then expand towards your ultimate dream. I think the one shot go from idea to commercial success at massive scale is a lot less likely than the multistep process of continually build better and better stuff over time until you get into a position of excellence. And constantly try to do something that others aren’t doing.…

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