According to a report by the Japanese media outlet 4gamer, Epic Games, the parent company of the Unreal Engine, recently held an in-person event in Tokyo called Unreal Fest Tokyo 2025. Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney attended the event and delivered a speech, during which he revealed the Unreal Engine’s long-term development plans as well as a series of business metrics related to the monetization of user-generated content (UGC) and the Epic Games Store.
Image source: Epic Games
In recent years, the Unreal Engine has seen tremendous growth. On the one hand, a large number of Unreal Engine 5-based titles have hit the market, demonstrating excellent compatibility with major titles such as *ARC Raiders* and *Black Myth: Wukong*.Ma Xiaoyi, Senior Vice President of Tencent Group, also mentioned several months ago that a large number of in-house products within the Tencent ecosystem are transitioning to UE5. On the other hand, amid the ever-growing UGC wave in recent years, Epic’s *Fortnite* has become one of the largest UGC ecosystems in the world in terms of commercial scale.Consequently, every move Epic makes attracts a great deal of attention from the outside world.
Tim noted that Epic Games currently provides developers with a range of development tools, including Unreal Engine, MetaHuman, and RealityScan. In October 2024, Epic also launched “Fab,” an integrated asset store, and opened a cross-platform marketplace that allows assets to be provided for tools other than Unreal Engine, such as Unity and Godot.
Speaking about Epic Online Services, the company’s online infrastructure, Tim noted that Epic currently has over 900 million registered accounts, with more than 6 billion connections between friends.
Starting next year, Epic will roll out the “Epic Social Overlay” feature across all platforms—including PC, mobile, and consoles—with cross-platform support.This feature is an integrated social functionality component from Epic; developers can incorporate major social features—such as friend lists, party formation, and achievement systems—into their games in just a few days. Furthermore, Epic will cover the associated operational costs and security measures, allowing developers to use the feature completely free of charge.
Epic Social Overlay
As for the Epic Games Store, Tim revealed that since the store’s launch, Epic has paid out a cumulative total of $2.1 billion (approximately 14.8 billion RMB) in revenue shares to developers. Tim believes that Epic has built an ecosystem that benefits developers.For each game, 100% of the first $1 million in annual sales is returned to the developer, after which the revenue share remains at 88%. If developers do not use the payment methods provided by Epic, they receive 100% of the sales revenue.
Tim also revealed that the mobile version of the EGS Store has currently been installed 53 million times and is expected to surpass 70 million by the end of the year.
Regarding the "Fortnite" UGC ecosystem, which has been the subject of widespread public attention, Tim also released a series of statistics. Content created by third-party creators for "Fortnite" has accumulated a total of 11.2 billion hours of playtime, and 260,000 games have been created within the platform to date.
Tim noted that since launching “Creator Economy 2.0” in 2023, Epic has paid UGC creators up to $722 million (approximately 5.1 billion RMB) in revenue shares. Epic also continues to offer more monetization options, such as creating new revenue opportunities through the sale of in-game items.
In closing, Tim outlined Epic Games’ long-term vision. Tim Sweeney firmly believes in the potential of “interoperability” in the metaverse,He believes that in the past, players primarily played standalone games in isolation, but Epic hopes to break down these barriers, allowing players to freely move between different game worlds while carrying over the items and characters they’ve earned in-game, thereby realizing the next generation of gaming experiences.
To this end, Epic has developed Verse—a proprietary language that is easier to learn than Unity’s C#—as well as foundational technologies such as the Scene Graph, which facilitates unified content management. The company is committed to integrating these features into the next-generation Unreal Engine 6, a project expected to be completed in about two and a half years.This is consistent with Tim Sweeney’s statement in May of this year that “UE6 is two to three years away from launch.”
It’s worth noting that Epic Games recently made a high-profile announcement regarding a deep partnership with Unity to bring Unity games into the *Fortnite* ecosystem, as previously reported by Teahouse. This move is seen as one of the first signs that the two gaming engine giants are moving toward “full interoperability.”
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