It’s a ruthless world. Fortnite didn’t do so well, they made it a Battle Royale thingy, added emotes and there you go, making hundreds of millions of dollars a month.
It struck me when I read about Alphonso suing: those Fortnite emotes are basically digital blackface. It’s really problematic because there’s a dramatic lack of diversity in big game companies. As long as you simply acknowledge culture with a nod, like previous games using dance moves without making money off of them, it’s totally fine. The second you make mad money off of them without trying anything to mitigate the move (cutting checks for artists, create a fund for education, I don’t fucking know), it’s just bad. It’s greedy.
It hurts because I have massive respect for Epic Megagames as they used to call themselves. Epic was everything to me in 90-94 on MS-DOS. I have pristine memories of playing Jill of the Jungle on rainy days, realizing that it’s a pretty good game. And then in 1998 they released Unreal, which I saw running on a 3DFX, with 5.1 sound, subwoofer and all the goodness on the last floor of a building in the Paris suburbs and it was life-changing. Tim Sweeney has been a terrific business man –and quite lucky–, making moves at the right time, from escaping the early 2000s PC hell to making tech demos for mobile to allowing Tencent to basically take over and offer Unreal Engine for free, which is used for so many games now (Street Fighter and Kingdom Hearts, 90s-me wouldn’t believe this shit).
Epic started as a mom and pop software shop. It is now “worth” $15B. You won, Tim. But it feels like you could have won without going down this road. A little humility and fairness would be good and not destroy your business either.