Epic Games has announced a partnership with Unity – the company behind the eponymous game engine. As part of this partnership, the two companies are working together to bring games developed using Unity Engine into Fortnite. Along with giving their games exposure to a massive audience that Epic boasts consists of over 500 million registered accounts worldwide, the developers will also get to participate in the Fortnite Creator Economy.
The partnership will also involve Unity bringing in support for Unreal Engine to its cross-platform commerce platform. The announcement for this happened at Unity’s Annual Developer Conference – Unite – and will provide more choices for developers that make use of Unreal Engine when it comes to managing various things like payment providers, digital catalogues, and web shops across PC, mobile and web.
“We’re excited to partner with Epic Games to create more opportunities for game developers around the world,” said Unity CEO and president Matt Bromberg in the press release. “Choice and open systems create growth for everyone in the gaming ecosystem.”
“Just like the early days of the web, we believe that companies need to work together in order to build the open metaverse in a way that’s interoperable and fair,” said Epic Games CEO and founder Tim Sweeney. “Working alongside Unity we’re helping developers build fun games, reach bigger audiences, and find success.”
This partnership was likely the result of both Epic and Unity wanting to compete with one of the biggest UGC-based (user generated content) titles in the world – Roblox. Epic had previously taken this step when it had announced Unreal Editor for Fortnite back in March 2023. Through this initiative, Epic had essentially opened the doors to just about any developer to make their own video games that can then be published directly into Fortnite.
Sweeney had previously also spoken about how the major next step in engine development for Epic would be to bring Unreal Engine and Fortnite together to an even greater extent. In an interview from earlier this year, Sweeney confirmed that development at the company had been split into two teams – one for Unreal Engine 5, and another for Unreal Editor for Fortnite.
“The idea is that the shipping version gains more and more features over time, but maintaining backwards compatibility with old versions and continuing to improve and approach the ultimate version of it as we go,” said Sweeney. “And we’ve been doing this experiment entirely within the world of Unreal Editor for Fortnite for now. We want to test this and iterate with Fortnite creators in just the metaverse usage case before we make it available to all of our partners using Unreal Engine for all of their projects.”
Ultimately, these two teams coming together will end up forming what Sweeney believes to be the foundations for an Unreal Engine 6. “It’s a few years away, we don’t have an exact time frame, but we could be seeing preview versions of it perhaps 2 to 3 years from now. And we’re making continuous progress towards it,” he said.
