Tim Sweeney
Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 22 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Most of the pain a beginner feels while learning to program is not the difficulty of the craft but the failure of programming language design.
A lot of what they're facing isn't the challenge of learning a new art. It's friction introduced by failures of programming language design.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Society keeps rebuilding itself around credentials, but the companies that build great things hire the people who do great work, not the people with the certificates.
There's ever more pressure to rebuild society more and more around credentials. Do you have this certificate? Do you have that proof? But companies that are focused on just building great products and doing great things gravitate towards people who do the great work.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
A new developer should not release into an existing competitive genre: unless you happen to be the world's best at that one thing, you will not win.
I think the big thing to realize for indie developers right now is there's massive, massive competition in every major genre, and it's very unlikely that unless you just happen to be the world's best at a particular thing that you're going to release a game in an existing highly competitive genre and win.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Show 19 more
The company that wins a market is almost always its first or second entrant, and a latecomer only takes the lead when the incumbent has failed horribly.
But most of the time the company that's succeeding and winning in a market is the first or second entrant there. They've just continually buoyed their success.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Iteration speed is the decisive factor in making a game: a team that rebuilds every day ends up far better than one that rebuilds every week.
We'd constantly be improving the tools and just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games. The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you prove, you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way way way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Computer graphics is not the application of the laws of physics but the search for ever better approximations of them, because the exact laws are totally intractable.
You can't calculate every photon in the scene. You need really detailed approximations, and that's the field of computer graphics. It's about increasingly effective approximations of the laws of physics, which are just totally intractable.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Unreal Engine's deepest limitation is that game simulation still runs on a single core, because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded.
The biggest limitation that's built up over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run a single-threaded simulation. If you have a 16 core CPU, we're using one core for game simulation and running with the complicated game logic because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded programming.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
The industry is too optimistic about AI for video, and the consistency problem will not simply be remedied.
I think a lot of people in the industry are overly optimistic about the rate of progress of AI for video and other things like that. The real problem is consistency, like spurting out an image is really high quality, but with video over the course of seeing all the AI approaches have consistency issues going from one place to another. I don't think that those will just be remedied easily.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
The existence of boilerplate code is itself a failure of programming language design and of software modularity, not a job for AI to take over.
The topic of boilerplate code is an interesting one because the mere existence of boilerplate code is a failure of programming language and of the idea of creating software modules.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
AI writes code well only where a million repositories have already written it; getting it to do something genuinely new remains notoriously hard.
AI is really great at spewing out code that does something that a million GitHub repositories already do because it's learned the underlying pattern. It's notoriously hard to get to do something new that hasn't been done before, especially when it's a complex task.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
A compelling simulation of a human being could arrive within five years, and the technology is heading there whether or not it is a good idea.
What we're seeing with generative text AI is not only at a level that you could say that it's actually doing a pretty good job of simulating a human, at least humans at the text level, not at the emotional level yet, but at least at the level of words spoken and find more and more ways of training on more and more scenarios that you might have a very, very compelling human simulation going on in the next five years even. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I think the arc of the technology is inextricably heading in that way, and it's heading at a shocking rate.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
What a shared digital economy needs is interoperability, not cryptocurrency: a database or a standards body does the job, exactly as railway standardisation did.
What you need is interoperability. Interoperability can happen through a blockchain, it can happen through a database, it can happen through standards bodies with defining standards and protocols. And we've been doing it for hundreds of years since the railroads were standardized. And it's not something that totally requires a novel technological solution.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
The metaverse does not require VR: VR is hardware that may or may not improve the experience, and it has a much smaller audience than social gaming already does.
VR has a much smaller audience. I don't think you need VR to have anything like this. VR is hardware that may or may not enhance the experience for some usage cases.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
The metaverse is a harder technical problem than a web page, so it needs a language more powerful, safer and more scalable than JavaScript.
But the metaverse and 3D gaming in general needs something that's rather more powerful, more safe, more scalable, and more capable than JavaScript because the metaverse is actually a more difficult technical problem than a webpage.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
There is one right way to build a type system, the way that gives you mathematical proofs, and every other kind of type system is simply worse and should be rejected.
But there are other parts of programming languages that are not subjective but should be fundamental. And when you look at type systems, there is a way to do type systems that gives you mathematical proofs. And every other way of type systems that doesn't give you mathematical proofs is just worse and should ultimately be rejected.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Concurrency should stop being the programmer's problem and become the language designer's: it is better to impose vast pain on a few people than on a million.
And by doing this, removing this from being a programming problem for the programmer to deal with, to being a language problem for us language designers to deal with. And we're moving a vast amount of pain that would be imposed on a million people, instead to a vast amount of pain imposed on a small number of people to have to actually make this work.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Apple's 30% cut is a junk fee on commerce done with a phone the customer already paid for, and it has shut down the competitive engine that once fuelled the software economy.
You already bought that phone, why should Apple be adding a 30% junk fee to all commerce you do, and why do they selectively apply it to some things and not others? I've always viewed this as deeply abusive and that it shuts down the competitive engine that once fueled the app and software economy.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Running an app store costs about 6% of revenue, so charging 30% is something only a monopoly can do.
The all-in cost of operating the Google Play Store, stocking it, maintaining it, the software, the entire ecosystem is around 6% of revenue. So in a competitive market, would a company whose cost is 6% be able to charge 30%? Absolutely not.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
The malaise in the game industry needs no complicated theory: the games that failed recently simply were not fun enough to compete with everything else in people's lives.
And when you look at a lot of the games that failed recently, they just didn't deliver fun or they didn't deliver fun in a manner that was nearly competitive with the other sources of fun just in people's lives. And so at a basic level, we don't need a terribly complicated theory to explain a lot of the malaise in the game industry.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
A game is quadratically more valuable the larger the share of a player's real-world friends it can connect them to, and that is the number one trend in gaming today.
It is the number one trend for pervading the world of gaming today. And it says that your game is quadratically more valuable the more percentage of a user's real-world friends they can connect to.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
It is always right to ship a game late rather than bad, because a bad game is bad forever while a late good game is eventually released and is good.
A bad game is bad forever. A late good game eventually is released and is good.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
Humans together in a shared world are a naturally empathetic medium, while typing messages at each other is a self-reinforcing negative dynamic.
I think the lesson from all of that is that humans talking to humans and being together in the real world or a virtual world, is a naturally empathetic medium, which naturally leads to bonding, and though conflict sometimes occurs, it's just generally so much more promoting of our social norms and good interactions between people and positivity promoting.
Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 Said 30 Apr 2025
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