Happy Monday! And welcome to The Game Business Micro.
The Micro is our mini-news and analysis episode of The Game Business Show. Whereas our main shows on Tuesday and Thursday are free, the Micro is for paid subscribers only. It comes out once a week, and features a bit of analysis of the big stories from the previous seven days.
This week, I discuss Epic’s State of Unreal address, and share some quotes from a recent interview with Kim Hyung-tae, the CEO of Stellar Blade developer Shift Up.
Enjoy!
Epic issues AAA and Roblox warning as it reveals Unreal Engine 6
In Brief: Epic boss Tim Sweeney called on the video game industry to connect together and change how it makes games to counter a future where “Roblox grows and eats gaming”.
During the firm’s State of Unreal Address, he said: “What you have [with Roblox] is a centralized platform that has a single gatekeeper that commoditises everything and takes more than 70% of the revenue generated by 450 million users. That’s a real challenge.”
He talked about how the next generation of gamers are more socially connected, and that modern AAA games are costing too much to make and not generating enough in return.
“We’re going to all need to change the way we build things,” he told the audience. “We’re going to need to build better games. We’re going to need to build them more efficiently. And we’re going to need to design upfront and build for connected games, where all of our player bases are connected socially and our economies are connected, so that players, instead of seeing these as isolated products, see them as part of a global ecosystem that all game developers participate in together.”
What You Need To Know:
Unreal Engine 6 will allow developers to create games of all sizes and deploy them across Fortnite, traditional game platforms, and their own multi-product ecosystems. It will bring together Epic’s normal Unreal Engine with the Unreal Editor for Fortnite products.
Epic said that Unreal Engine 6 will allow Fortnite skins (plus other assets) to be used in other UE6 games via a system called Smart Assets.
Unreal Engine 6 will integrate Claude, Gemini, and others AI tools as ‘creativity and productivity multipliers’. UE6 will also move the gameplay programming model to Verse.
Unreal Engine 5.8 has added a plugin that will enable developers to connect models like Claude directly into existing Unreal Engine productions.
UE 5.8, which is expected to be the final Unreal Engine 5 update (but that may change), features a string of new additions, including improvements for games on Nintendo Switch 2.
Since Epic launched Unreal Editor for Fortnite, the firm has paid out over $1 billion to creators.
Having already added Star Wars to UEFN (where creators can make their own Star Wars games), The Simpsons is the next IP to be added to the platform.
Meanwhile, the company reminds us that the Epic Games Store now has more than 6000 games from more than 3000 partners. Player spend on third-party PC games on the store is up 57% in 2025, reaching $400 million.
My Take
Tim Sweeney is great at generating a headline. In one relatively short closing remark, he addressed the unsustainability of AAA development, suggested the next-generation will want entirely different games, and declared war on Roblox.
Of course, he was generalizing. The industry has moved on plenty since the 1990s when the audience for video games was largely confined to a handful of demographics. Everyone is a gamer now, and that means there is a variety of different futures for this business. Yes, hundreds of millions do want Roblox-like social experiences. But there are also hundreds of millions who do not. Yes AAA game development is unsustainable, except for the AAA games that aren’t.
Regardless, Sweeney’s speech is, of course, a sales pitch. He pointed to all the problems facing video game companies. And how do we fix these problems? Why, Unreal Engine 6, of course.
