Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney hopes to outbuild YouTube, outmaneuver Apple and outlast the metaverse hype

Although Epic Games’ leadership appreciates the parallels, CEO Tim Sweeney has mixed feelings about the analogy. He views Fortnite’s ongoing push to onboard creators as a stage of the platform’s evolution, rather than a means to an end. Epic Games is trying to build the metaverse, per Sweeney, rather than just create a destination for creators to entertain audiences and generate revenue.

At Unreal Fest 2025, Digiday spoke to Sweeney and Epic Games evp of the Fortnite ecosystem Saxs Persson for an in-depth conversation about Fortnite’s evolution, the platform’s approach to creator monetization — and how Epic’s legal battle against Apple helped pave the way for Fortnite’s future as a creator platform.

(Editor’s note: Epic Games paid for this reporter to travel and board at Unreal Fest 2025, but did not agree to specific coverage. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Some observers, including myself, have drawn parallels between the current state of Fortnite as a creator platform and the early days of YouTube. Do you think this comparison is fair?

Saxs Persson: I think most media platforms that have a social component will go through the same toddler and adolescent changes — growth pains and growth spurts and stalls — so, yeah, I think it’s very similar. We like YouTube as a comparison, because it’s not so much platform-focused as it’s creator-focused. 

Tim Sweeney: You mentioned YouTube. It didn’t sit right with me, and I think the reason is that, when you build a brand on YouTube, you’re really stuck on YouTube forever. Like MrBeast: What’s he going to do from there — start a TV station, make a movie? Whereas, with the evolution of our tech, we’re serving both the Fortnite creator community and the Unreal Engine community. They’re currently separate-ish, but they’re using common tools. 

With the next generation of technology that we’re evolving into over the next several years, you could build an experience in Fortnite, have it take off, and decide to release it as a standalone game — but not leave the Fortnite economy and player base behind. You can integrate the social features that we make available as Epic Online Services. And, in the future, when we have the cross-platform open economy, you could have an item shop that interoperates with the Fortnite item shop, and supports all Fortnite outfits and vice versa. So, Fortnite is not a place where you’re going to be locked into somebody else’s mode. It’s a place where you can launch a business, and it’s your business.

Was your legal challenge against Apple necessary to achieve this vision for Fortnite’s future?

Tim Sweeney: Yes. If Apple gets to determine the rules for the metaverse, then they’re going to set rules that turn developers into peasants in their fiefdom. They’re going to say, ‘you can’t make your own metaverse engine; you can’t operate your own economy. You have to do everything the Apple way.’ That’s just the rights part of it, which fundamentally is the most important thing.

But then, there’s also the economic aspect of Apple controlling everything. They’ve used their 30 percent paywall to extract almost all the profit from games. A lot of major game companies are operating at the scale of billions of dollars a year; they’re breaking even, or even losing money, because 30 percent taken off the top is almost all the profit that can ever be made from these games — and it’s even more so with ecosystems like Fortnite and Roblox, where we have really significant operating costs. It’s not just a game: We’re operating servers, we’re hosting everybody’s content. There’s huge moderation at scale, and just a lot of costs. You can look at Roblox’s finances: Roblox is making a gigantic amount of profit, and it’s all going to Apple.

There are currently two revenue streams available to Fortnite creators: the engagement payout and brand deals. What will be the next big revenue stream to be unlocked for Fortnite creators?

Saxs Persson: It’s making an assumption that there’s one needed; I don’t know if that’s true, and at least we don’t think so right now. The number went out today: $722 million paid out over the last 24 months. From an engagement share perspective, our economy is very healthy, and we’ve spent a lot of energy on trying to make sure that we reward things that the players love and come back to play. So, more than anything, we think, from a value perspective, that we’re able to offer fair compensation for creators in the ecosystem.

Tim Sweeney: I think [Fortnite] is the most effective and fair economy that’s ever been seen in gaming, if you look at Fortnite’s numbers versus other games’ numbers. For the most part, people don’t want to be drawn into this loot-box economy, where you’re spending more and more money to try to get something that’s elusive and not guaranteed. So, if you look at the other monetization vectors that are operating at scale in the entire game business, it’s a whole lot of vice that we’re happy to not have in Fortnite.

Fortnite recently launched a data application that helps creators access metrics for their experiences such as recommendations and minutes played. Was this new product intended to help advertisers feel more confident about Fortnite?

Saxs Persson: It’s part of the picture, but it’s not a specific consideration. What are brands really saying? They’re saying, ‘we can’t invest because we don’t know what the returns are,’ and part of that is because of the opaqueness of the data, right? So, I think transparent data helps on a range of different things, including sponsored deals. If a creator makes a deal with a brand for a certain amount of exposure, or whatever the brand is out to get — and then players play that island because they liked it — that’s great. That’s just the economy working as it’s intended.

Tim, two years ago, you told Digiday that you hate advertising in games. Since then, brands like Nike and Lego have developed a presence in Fortnite. Does this reflect a change in your perspective around ads in games?

Tim Sweeney: No. People love wearing Nikes and watching Star Wars, and I think we need to judge everything that we see in an app or a game by whether we want to see it, we’re happy to engage with it and it’s making the thing better. I think [Nike] Kicks in Fortnite make it better. It’s always funny to go in with a totally serious outfit and some ridiculous shoes, or vice versa. And I think all the crossovers and collaborations we’ve done in Fortnite just made the thing better, and there’s not an element there of selling out. If some lame brand comes to us and proposes doing something that’s going to be lame in Fortnite, of course, we say no. So, as long as it’s all contributing towards player fun, I support it. 

The risk here is that the ecosystem turns against players’ interests, and is wasting their time in exchange for money, as you see happening in a lot of places in the digital world nowadays. Everybody who’s thinking about these issues should read Cory Doctorow’s essay on “enshittification,” or basically the process in which good ecosystems tend to turn bad. These founder-led endeavors turn into hedge-fund style financial extraction schemes, and the end result just becomes terrible for users. We’ve seen that on almost everything: YouTube, where they play two or three ads while you’re trying to watch a stupid video, or the Apple App Store, where you search for Fortnite and the first result is “PUBG.” The critical thing in all of this is that the ecosystem serves the players, and if brands are participating in having islands, that’s cool — but they’d better not be getting in your way when you’re willing to do something else.