Tim Sweeney

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.