That injection of cash allowed Epic to make some major changes, including dropping the monthly charge for its game engine and giving it away to anyone who wanted to use it. To get the money to change directions so drastically, Epic cut a deal with Tencent, selling it about 48% of the company’s outstanding shares, or roughly 40% of Epic, for $330 million. We recognized that the ideal role for Epic in the industry is to drive that, and so we began the transition of being a fairly narrow console developer focused on Xbox to being a multi-platform game developer and self-publisher, and indie on a larger scale.”

We were seeing some of the best games in the industry being built and operated as live games over time rather than big retail releases.

We realized that the business really needed to change its approach quite significantly. “We ruled that out fairly soon after ‘Gears of War 3’ was released. “It boiled down to a decision: What do we do with our company? Do we enter into a new generation of publisher agreement and continue the way we were?” he says. The Unreal Engine is proprietary software that the company created and regularly updates for use by other game developers to make their own creations. And even that wasn’t entirely accurate, because, for much of the company’s history, its big money maker has been the Unreal Engine.

To those familiar with video games, developer and publisher Epic Games isn’t simply the company behind “Fortnite.” The company may most recently be best known for its massive hit, but before there was “Fortnite,” there was “Gears of War.” The company was, for years, known as the creator of the popular Xbox exclusive shooter “Gears of War,” which was headed up by developer Cliff Bleszinski. That seems to be the lynchpin question in a series of lawsuits filed this month against “ Fortnite” creator Epic Games by a rapper, an actor, and an Instagram star.īrooklyn rapper 2 Milly, former “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” star Alfonso Ribeiro, and Instagram’s “ Backpack Kid” all filed suits this month against Epic Games, saying the developer copied each of their trademark dance moves, put them in “Fortnite” as an animation, and sold them to millions of players, without permission.īut can you copyright a dance? Who is Backpack Kid? What is “Fortnite?” There’s a lot to unpack here. When is a dance a dance and not just a move, and can you copyright it?

Epic games free dance move