Epic Games doesn’t just operate Fortnite, Rocket League, and a PC gaming storefront. It’s also the caretaker of Unreal Engine, a set of tools powering everything from The Witcher 4 to the next Halo. CEO Tim Sweeney spent his time on stage during Unreal Fest 2026 this week in Chicago pitching Unreal Engine 6 as the alternative to a gaming ecosystem dominated by closed platforms like Roblox.
Sweeney said traditional AAA gaming is facing a “time of both crisis and opportunity” as the old ways of doing things fail. “We’re seeing often hundreds of millions of dollars of dev costs followed by tens of millions of dollars of revenue,” he said. “The dev costs are continuing to grow. It feels to many like a tidal wave is sweeping over the AAA game business.”
Despite laying off 1,000 of his employees earlier this year, Sweeney claimed Fortnite is thriving again, and games like it are positioned to dominate in a marketplace where newer players place a premium on socializing together. “The other big change is the economy is shifting from buying games to things in games,” he added. “Whether you’re a fan or not, it’s undeniable.” The final threat to conventional models around gaming, according to the executive, is the ever-more competitive war for attention. Roblox is winning that war. Sweeney thinks other game makers need to embrace Unreal Engine to survive that onslaught.
“There’s two big predictions for the future as these problems reverberate throughout the industry,” Sweeney said on stage. “One view of the future is that Roblox grows and eats gaming. A lot of people are saying this online. You know, what you have there is a centralized platform with a game keeper that takes more than 70 percent of revenue and has 450 million users on board. So that’s a real challenge to game developers.”
He continued:
But we believe in a very different future. A much brighter one for the people in the room. That is a future of high-quality gaming, rising to the challenge and linking up our content, linking up our communities, and linking up our economies to deliver fun and to serve gamers with great games in a way we’ve never done before. To accomplish that, we all need to change the way we build games. Build better games, more efficiently, and build for connected games, where all players are connected, and economies are connected, so players, instead of seeing these as isolated products, see them as part of a global ecosystem that all game developers participate in together.
You know, we want to work with all of you and with all the game developers to achieve this together. The thing with Unreal Engine 6 is our technological foundation for it, and we believe this is a big challenge that we all have to rise to. We need to win the competition for players. I’m not only against other games but also against YouTube, TikTok, and everything else that people are doing online. This was very much on our minds when we set about building Unreal Engine 6.
Sweeney has been talking about a version of this global ecosystem for a few years now. Previously, it was tethered more closely to a vision for an interoperable metaverse. The Epic cofounder is laying out a more subtle vision for collaboration and cooperation here between big companies that rely on Unreal Engine to make their games. Unfortunately, this new framework is also married to an influx of new generative AI integrations in the upcoming version of Unreal Engine. Some notable developers are already re-evaluating collaborations with Epic over the controversial tech’s inclusion.
Is an alternative to Roblox where one company still controls the tools the best game developers can do? Maybe not. Though one thing Epic does have on its side is much more generous revenue-sharing terms and anti-trust legal battles that continue to poke holes in monopolies in the mobile gaming landscape. “We have the opportunity to form up Team Open and to define the future of gaming together again,” Sweeney said today. We’ll see who ends up joining him.
