I feel like it really marks a new era for Microsoft under Satya Nadella, Alex Kipman, Phil Spencer, and a number of other people who are really committed to the platform being a healthy ecosystem for everybody and not just an extracted business like you see on the Facebook or Google side.
Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There's a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.
The genre thing is overrated, and the platform decisions are overrated. It's what we see on 'Fortnite': so many of these gamers play on a variety of devices, so you can't say they're a mobile gamer or a console gamer. They're just a gamer.
Everyone has friends that are limited to one platform and ecosystem, whereas what we've built with 'Fortnite' is a friends system that works across seven platforms. You can have friends across Xbox and PlayStation and PC.
We see that as 'Fortnite' evolves, it's evolving beyond being a game.
'Fortnite' has, I think, the most positive gamer community that's ever emerged from a game at this scale. I think it's partly because of the great community and partly because of the tone set by the game.
Fortnite, because of its visual style, it's widely acceptable to just about everyone. It's open up to a much wider audience than a realistic, military-style simulation.
Games like 'Fortnite' are way more fun to play with your real-world friends, and they're so accessible that anybody can play.
When you search for Fortnite on iOS, you'll often get PUBG or Minecraft ads. Whoever bought that ad in front of us is the top result when searching for Fortnite. It's just a bad experience. Why not just make the game available direct to users, instead of having the store get between us and our customers and inject all kinds of cruft like that?
If you really care about a game, spending a couple of minutes setting up payment is perfectly reasonable. It's certainly happened with 'Fortnite.'
The awesome thing about 'Fortnite' is it's brought a huge volume of digital commerce to Epic.
We feel the game industry is changing in some major ways. 'Fortnite' is a harbinger of things to come. It's a massive number of people all playing together, interacting together, not just playing but socializing.
In many ways 'Fortnite' is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers; they're playing with friends and using 'Fortnite' as a foundation to communicate.
If you throw a frog in boiling water, he'll just hop out. But if you put him in warm water and slowly amp up the temperature, he won't notice and end up boiled.
I have immense respect for Unity because they played a key role in establishing this indie revolution, empowering a huge number of people to get into game development.
The YouTube revolution isn't a revolution in content consumption, although there's a huge number of content consumers. It's about how anybody with a camera or a smartphone can create a video and share it with the whole world.
I was really worried about the Windows RT project and these other efforts where Microsoft was creating versions of Windows that would be locked down and could force you to only install software through the Microsoft store.
Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10 as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce.
Epic has prided itself on providing software directly to customers ever since I started mailing floppy disks in 1991.
While Hollywood's computer graphics quality is world-class, their production pipelines are a mess of non-standard tools and labor-intensive processes driven by the mantra of maximizing quality regardless of cost. It's very Balkanized.
