Fortnite is getting Unity games

Epic Games is teaming up with its biggest game development competitor, Unity, to bring games made using the Unity engine to fortnite. The change will mean that Unity games can be featured alongside Epic’s own set of experiences as well as those created by third-party developers using the Unreal Editor for fortnite – It opens the door to making more games available to play within fortnite.

“Just like in the early days of the web, we believe companies need to work together to build an open Metaverse in an interoperable and fair way,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a statement. “By working alongside Unity, we help developers create fun games, reach larger audiences, and achieve success.”

The change represents an important step in Epic’s long-term transformation vision fortnite The open Metaverse represents a large three-dimensional social space with a large number of experiences to share with your friends. Epic has been going down this path for years with fortnite itself by increasingly focusing on Experiences made by creators And make browsing through those experiences in the Fortnite lobby feel like Scrolling YouTube. You can also check out experiments on the web — and New purchase fortnite Clothes in your browser too.

now, fortnite It’s a closed ecosystem, which means creators can only create games for the platform using Epic’s tools, and they can’t (yet) easily drop those games into the Unreal Engine to bring them to other platforms, or bring experiences built on other engines to fortnite. But even In 2023Tim Sweeney was saying Edge How much he believed in the future of interoperable game engines was key to his vision.

Epic has had some success with expansion fortnite From being a battle royale to a large-scale game, RobloxA game-like ecosystem from external creators. By the end of last year, that It had a total of 70,000 creators Which published nearly 200,000 “islands” or fortniteTerm for experiments. But the Unity editor, designed to help developers build their games once and run them across multiple platforms, contains more than… 1.2 million Monthly active users. Even a small portion of these developers are also bringing their games to fortnite It can add a lot to the platform.

The plan is to let Unity games come fortnite Next year, says Matt Bromberg, president and CEO of Unity Edge.

The partnership potentially gives developers another potential way to find an audience and monetize their games, which could be a lifeline for smaller developers amid ongoing… Industry conflicts and Layoffs. It can also incorporate more power into fortniteAnd it’s really huge. But Sweeney actually envisions a world for himself fortnite This is much more decentralized – more like the open web.

“fortnite“This big thing is still entirely managed by Epic,” Sweeney says. “But there will come a day when you can, from the software it’s currently called fortnitego to other sites completely controlled by other companies. We have nothing to do with them. We do not make any income from them. We have no trade agreements with them. It’s just like websites on the web.” Today’s news with Unity is the first opportunity for “rubber to meet the road” engines working together.

Currently, whether the creator has created a fortnite User experience fortniteOr with Unity, Sweeney says there will be a review process to make sure it’s “aligned with the assessments and working appropriately.” But in the future, “as this evolves into a completely open system, we’ll only have reviews of things we host, anyone will be able to put anything anywhere, and people will be able to browse it like you would in a web browser today.”

Allowing Unity games “will dramatically expand the developer base,” Sweeney says. “The challenge of building content in fortnite Today is to start from scratch.” You can’t currently use and publish in an Unreal Engine game fortnite – This thing is epic Aiming to use Unreal Engine 6which is likely years away. Ironically, Sweeney says: “Publishing Unity games in fortnite It will take place before the Unreal Engine standalone games are published in fortnite“.

There’s a second component to today’s news as well: Unity will bring support for the Unreal Engine to its trade management platform announced last monthwhich allows developers to manage their digital storefronts across multiple platforms from within the Unity Engine. This was introduced at the time as a way to ease the complexities of different storefronts and payment processors.

Bringing support for Unreal Engine to the platform gives developers “more options on how to build stores and how to manage those stores,” Bromberg says. “Ultimately, I think the thing that Tim and I couldn’t agree more strongly on is that having more options and more places where developers can build things and giving them more control over their destinies is the most important thing we can do to help the gaming ecosystem.”