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Tim Sweeney

Abstract

Tim Sweeney (born 1970) wrote a shareware game called ZZT in his parents’ basement in Potomac, Maryland, in 1991, and mailed the disks himself. The company he named after it, Epic Games, built the Unreal Engine (1998), which became the standard tool for high-end games, and Fortnite (2017), which became the largest game in the world and the source of money to pick a fight. On August 13, 2020, Epic slipped its own payment system into the iPhone version of Fortnite, was thrown off the App Store within hours as planned, and sued Apple and Google over the 30 percent commission every app store charged. Epic lost most of the Apple case, won the Google case in front of a jury, and in 2025 got Apple held in contempt for evading the one order it had lost. Sweeney has spent the years since 2018 arguing, in court, in Brussels and on Twitter, that a phone should be as open as a PC. He has also bought about 50,000 acres of North Carolina to keep it from being built on.

Tim Sweeney
Tim Sweeney at the Game Developers Conference, 2008. Image: Microsoft Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

ZZT

Timothy Dean Sweeney was born in 1970 in Potomac, Maryland, the youngest of three brothers, and taught himself to program on an Apple II and then an IBM PC. At the University of Maryland he studied mechanical engineering and ran a computer consultancy, Potomac Computer Systems, from his parents’ house. In January 1991 it released ZZT, a game in ANSI text characters with a built-in editor that let players build their own worlds and share them, sold as shareware: the first episode free, the rest by mail order. It brought in about $100 a day, enough that he left the university before finishing and, in 1992, renamed the company Epic MegaGames, on the theory that a grand name would make a one-man business sound like a publisher. It became one: Jazz Jackrabbit (1994), a platform game by a teenager named Cliff Bleszinski, and a shareware catalogue that competed with id Software’s, the story told in Shareware and Public Domain.

Unreal

Sweeney began writing a 3D engine in 1995 to compete with id’s Quake. Unreal, released in May 1998, had coloured lighting, fog, large outdoor spaces and, inside the box, the editor Epic had used to build it, so that anyone could make levels and, with a licence, whole games. Licensing the Unreal Engine became the company’s second business, and the one that outlasted the shooters. Epic moved to Cary, North Carolina, in 1999 and dropped the “Mega”. Unreal Engine 3 (2006) powered a console generation and Epic’s own Gears of War, which sold millions on the Xbox 360; Unreal Engine 4 was made free in March 2015, with a 5 percent royalty on sales above a threshold; Unreal Engine 5 (2022) is used in film and architecture as well as games. The engine lineage is in Game Engines. In June 2012 Tencent bought about 40 percent of Epic for $330 million, and Sweeney used the money and the Chinese company’s example to turn Epic toward games run as services.

Fortnite

Fortnite shipped in July 2017 as a co-operative building game and, on September 26, 2017, acquired a free Battle Royale mode, 100 players dropped on an island until one is left, copied from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and built in two months. Free to play, funded by cosmetic purchases with a currency called V-Bucks, and available on every console, phone and PC with cross-play between them, it had 125 million players within a year and by 2018 was earning billions of dollars annually. It became the place where concerts happened (Travis Scott’s 2020 show drew 12 million concurrent viewers), where film trailers premiered, and where children spent the money that, in December 2022, the Federal Trade Commission ordered Epic to give back: $520 million in penalties and refunds for dark-pattern purchases and for collecting children’s data in breach of COPPA, the largest such settlement to that date.

The 30 Percent

Sweeney’s argument had been building since the App Store opened. Every store, Apple’s, Google’s, the consoles’, Valve’s Steam, took 30 percent of a developer’s revenue and forbade the developer from selling around it. In December 2018 Epic opened its own Epic Games Store on PC with a 12 percent cut, and paid publishers for exclusives to seed it; Valve had cut its rate for top-selling games to 25 and 20 percent four days before the announcement. On August 13, 2020, Epic pushed an update to Fortnite on iOS and Android offering V-Bucks at a 20 percent discount through Epic’s own payment system. Apple and Google removed the game within hours. Epic had lawsuits ready for both, and a video, Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite, a shot-for-shot parody of Apple’s 1984 commercial with Apple as Big Brother, ready to play inside the game that evening. Epic called the campaign #FreeFortnite.

The results were mixed. In September 2021 Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found for Apple on nine counts of ten, holding that Apple was not a monopolist in the market she defined, but ruled that its ban on telling users about cheaper prices elsewhere was unlawful and ordered it lifted; the Ninth Circuit agreed in April 2023 and the Supreme Court declined both sides’ appeals in January 2024. Apple then let developers link out while charging 27 percent on the resulting sales, and on April 30, 2025, Rogers found that it had wilfully violated her injunction, barred it from taking any commission on external purchases, and referred an Apple executive for possible criminal contempt over his testimony. Fortnite returned to the US App Store in May 2025. Against Google, a jury in December 2023 found the Play Store an illegal monopoly on every count, and the Ninth Circuit upheld the verdict in 2025. In the European Union the Digital Markets Act, which Sweeney had lobbied for, forced Apple to allow alternative app stores in 2024, and Epic opened one. The larger fight is in The Platform Antitrust Story and The Rise of the App Store.

Cary

Epic is private, and Sweeney controls it: after investments from Sony, the Lego family’s Kirkbi and, in February 2024, $1.5 billion from Disney, the company was valued at about $32 billion in 2022, and he still holds the majority. In September 2023 it laid off about 830 people, 16 percent of its staff, with Sweeney’s memo saying that Epic had been spending far more than it earned. He has put a large share of his fortune, estimated between $7 billion and $10 billion, into land: by late 2025 about 50,000 acres of North Carolina forest, including the 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness, bought to be conserved rather than developed, which puts him among the largest private landowners in the state. His stated ambition for the company is a shared open metaverse that nobody owns, and his stated model for it is the web.

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