The Unreal and Epic Games Ecosystem | Develop:Brighton 2024

I'm hoping that the 3:00 slot is sufficiently past lunch that everyone's kind of digested and isn't going to fall asleep in my riveting presentation. Um, if that's a if you know if you are feeling a bit sleepy, just think about the awesomeness of Unreal Engine and it wakes me up every time. So, uh, give that give that a go. Is everybody having a tremendous develop? Yeah.
Yes.
Come on. It's uh this is the finest games conference in all of the nine realms and I've been coming here for like 15 years. It's um it's a beautiful thing. You'll get to hang out with your peers and your you know everyone else doing this amazing stuff and um and it's a privilege to be here. Thank you to to develop for having me. Uh this is me. Uh I've been doing this thing since the year began with a one. Uh that's it's a very long time. If anyone was here on the previous session, John McCormack who leads the uh who led the creative

director on um still wakes the deep. I worked with him. He was he was a artist on theme world back in the day thousand million years ago. Um be nice to everybody because every because you will still be working with these people in in in 20 years time. I I I I wish that for you more than anything. Today I'm going to be talking about uh Epic Games Ecosystem. Many of you will be aware of Unreal Engine. That's the thing that I spend most my my day talking about and it's the thing that I've got all the t-shirts for. Um, but there's a more there's there's more to Epic Games these days than just somewhere. So, let's talk about Epic itself just for a bit. It's huge. I can't see that at all. Never mind. This is the That's what happens when you use purple font on a black background. Everybody, Epic is 30 years old. It's bigger than you think. uh 4,000 people uh and around 15 15 countries is the the sun never sets on Epic Games these days. It's a

big organization. But the thing to understand is that we are a games developer. We make games. We we we make Unreal. We make other tools. But first and foremost, we are a video games developer. We are successful video games developer. Um that's that's the first thing to to understand. Epic makes games. We are we understand what it means to make games. We understand what what you what tools you need, what services you need. We understand what good tools look like. We we understand this because we have thousands of people working in this in our in our tools to make the products which drive the the our business. It's important that we understand just what real people need and we try and translate that stuff into tools that we provide to you. So we know that you need source code. We know that you need uh to to build your uh your games crossplatform. You know it needs to be easy to do that. We know that that parts of the industry take too much of your money that you are earning from

your players and we were trying to address that. So that's the first thing to understand. Second thing is to understand is this everything sounds more impressive when you translate it into Latin. That is a fact. But it means we succeed when you succeed. If there's one thing, if there's two things to understand about Epic, this is the second one. Our business model is built on the success of of the people who use our stuff. We are not here to sell you things and then moonwalk out the door. We are our business model is royalty driven. When the more money that you make from the games that you make using our stuff, then the more then then the better our royalty is at the other end the other end of the process. So we are actively positively incentivized for you to be to succeed to a greater and greater degree. It's really critical to understand that it is absolutely key to everything that we do. It's key to my job. It's it's a key to everyone's outlook as who works at Epic.

So our ecosystem is a lot more than just Unreal Engine. Even if that is at the heart, we have and we'll talk about all of these things. We have tools for for creating games. We have tools for helping you create content to include in your games. Uh whether that's 3D content or whether it's uh uh character based content. We have ways for you to market your games and we have ways for you to operate your games um split into roughly these purple on black background uh headings. So yes, ways to develop tools for developing Unreal Fab. We'll talk about all of these and tools for for operating Epic online services is the head of that list and and there's two ways to distribute games you've made using our stuff these days which we'll come on to. Right. So

because we're developers, we want we we understand what you expect out of a partner that you're going to build your business around. And some of those things are listed here. Unreal Engine is free to use until you have made a million dollars of revenue on your on your game. It is free to use. Only above $1 million do you do you do you pay a royalty. Many games of course smaller games may never reach that that go that that level. And that's fine. You pay us nothing, we we're everyone's happy. We're fine with that. Try, you know, go again. Once you have reached that threshold, then there is a royalty and the royalty is is no more than 5% and often less depending on circumstances. 5% of your of your revenue and if you sell on our marketplaces, whether that is your game on the store or whether it's through some of our content marketplaces, you pay a 12% revenue share on that, which is lower than most.

We think that's important. And this isn't just a bunch of tools that we've come up with and we've stitched together. This is tools which we have proven year after year, decade after decade are are match fit, battle ready, right? We know that these things work because we have used them. We have built many many successful games over the years, whether that's Gears of War, uh, Rocket League, these days, Fortnite, other other ones along the way. Fortnite's going okay. And and the Unreal Engine that you download from our from our launcher is the same Unreal Engine that we used to make Fortnite. Of course, Fortnite's got a whole load of its own code that the gameplay code and stuff tools and and um features that the team have added for their game. And that's exactly what you can do as well in your game. But but it is the same tech. So we provide

the tools that we provide work whether you are a small studio or whether they whether you're a large studio. For for a small studio you can use everything that comes out of the box as a turnkey solution for prov for and just build your game build on your game on top. Whether that's the tech, whether it's the assets you can buy from the marketplace, you can just use it completely vanilla, build your game to a very high standard. If you're a very big studio and you've got the chops, you got the people, you've got all the source code, you can get in there, make changes if you want. You can build new new tech on top. You can add new features, you can create, you can use your smart your your people's smarts to create USPS that that your game will have that no one else's does. and you just use our tech as a foundation. That's perfectly that's perfectly doable. That's what people do. Um, but in both cases, whether you're small or large, you can focus on making your game and not making your tech.

At the heart of our ecosystem is Unreal Engine. Everything we do is begins with begin with Unreal. We've been working on this tech for 25 plus years and a lot of other people have been using this tech to make their games for a very long time. And here's some examples. Uh just some recent examples. And here's a bunch of studios that we've been working with in the U5 era who've uh lent their lent their uh logo to our logo wall very proudly. Um some some of the greatest studios in the world have committed that to to to using our tech and they are you and they are producing amazing uh amazing games some of these most respected most creative innovative studios in the world including a bunch in the UK tons in the UK games like Steel makes in fact that were uh if you you'll see a Chinese rooms logo down there somewhere but what why is that why why do they

make this commitment? One of the reasons is that Unreal is not just our tool. It's it is your tool. That sounds like a marketing line, but it's really true.