In an interview with PC Gamer, Tim Sweeney sounds like he wants to solve problems that really don’t need solving. In the interview, he talked about how the bigger gaming companies, in the midst of the current instability (a collapse spurred, in part, by all their own horrible mismanagement from which Epic Games is not exempt) would benefit from connecting their economies and social platforms.
“The whole engine of growth of social in the world today, […] is around users being easily able to connect with their friends, and that’s broken,” he said. “So, call number one is for all of the major publishers and platform operators to get together and connect our systems.” When Sweeney talks about “broken” social systems, he referred to the “friction” involved in bringing your friends along with you from game to game across different platforms and how his plan, called “Team Open,” would eliminate that friction.
“Right now, there’s different completely separated social ecosystems on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Steam on PC, and then bespoke developers’ social ecosystems,” he said. “It makes it really, really hard to switch from one game to another.” Is it Tim? Is it that hard?
He talked about how the so-called social problem is solvable because all the platforms roughly operate on similar text and voice infrastructure and that the issue is having to interact with each platform’s respective servers. He likened the problem to the earliest days of email and how people across companies couldn’t communicate until they got together to create a universal standard. “That’s what we need in gaming,” he said. So it sounds like he’s talking about a place where users have a singular identity and are able to communicate with others irrespective of the different game platforms they might be on.
Has anyone told Tim Sweeney that Discord exists? Because that sounds a lot like Discord.
What’s so frustrating about Sweeney is that in some respects he’s on the right track. In the interview he noted that none of the big publishers are going to achieve the monopoly they sought in the earliest days of the console wars. “Everybody should come to the. realization that the value of connecting is higher for everybody than remaining separate,” he said. But to Sweeney, cooperation doesn’t seem to mean walking back the decisions to not sell PlayStation games on PC or putting Gears of War E-Day back on the PS5 — y’know something consumers actually want. To him, cooperation means Voltron-ing the big guys together so players can what, share emotes across Call of Duty and Fortnite? “To the extent that games have cosmetic items, outfits, and emotes, and things like that, it would just be more valuable if they all worked everywhere,” he said. Wild to see the reheated corpse of NFTs come back in 2026.
It all just sounds like sour grapes. Epic Games Store can’t beat Steam…or anybody else for that matter and what typically happens when you can’t beat them? You try to join them.