Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…It’s clear that Epic wants developers to win, wants gamers to win, and wants Steam to do awesome also. And in the competition between Steam and Epic Game Store, create awesome stuff together. I mean, there just… it’s obvious to me if you don’t read this stuff online, but online, it’s like there is just negativity that I don’t think is constructive in general. I actually give a big sort of positive thank you and props for the push to multi-platform that was always there with… for Fortnite, perhaps before the pressure that Epic created on breaking the barriers of Xbox and PlayStation and PC and being multi-platform. I got a chance to play with Fortnite a little bit with you and all the people in the group. By the way, awesome interface, audio chat really fun. But you could see a couple of PC folks, a PlayStation person, the Xbox person all together. We can’t really tell what they’re using except for a little icon and it’s nice. It’s like all these barriers that we’ve created with these platforms are gone. Poof. And you creating the pressure with Epic Game Store and just everything you’re doing with Fortnite platform, it’s really nice. There’s no reason to create these silos because, ultimately, you should put the gamer first and let everybody interact with actual real-life friends and make new friends across the entire network of humans. So anyway, thank you for that. Thank you for creating that pressure. Thanks. Yeah, that was an interesting time. Sony had her long-running policy preventing cross-platform play, and we had a long series of conversations, which got pretty harsh towards the end. But Sony ultimately came around, and they opened up PlayStation, and through a series of private conversations, they did the right thing. Not only that, our partnership with Sony has increased since that argument back in 2018, and we’ve gotten closer and closer and done ever more things with Sony. Brand IP, like the character from God of War, and other games coming into Fortnite and all kinds of crossovers. Massive Unreal Engine adoption and Sony for making games for making movies at Sony Pictures. Music partnerships with Sony Music. That’s been an absolutely wonderful relationship, and I think that stands as an awesome example of a company that, because of historic reasons, got stuck with a policy that no longer made sense for the future. And following a serious discussion with a close partner righted it, and did an awesome thing, and now Sony is much better off, and Epic’s better off, and all game developers are better off and the whole console industry, I think, it’s a lot stronger now than it would’ve been if these silos [inaudible 03:53:54] to be playing out. And despite the kind of potential concern that maybe blocking platform play with Xbox gave Sony an advantage, Sony has actually grown in market share relative to Xbox since that time. And so you can’t say that anything but goodness came of that time. And I think a better version of Apple would’ve received… The email I sent to senior Apple management and been like, “Huh, there’s an issue here. We should have a discussion. We should reconsider this. We should listen.” And, yeah, they didn’t. And that’s why we’re in the midst of a five-year battle with Apple and in the… hopefully still the early days of a 15-plus year partnership with Sony. Come on, Apple, we love you, Apple. Do a little bit better. The second line of criticism that I mentioned, the exclusive contracts with some of the games, can you just speak to that because, in so much of the journey of Epic, you’ve been sort of against exclusivity?…

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