“Fortnite has humble beginnings,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, during Summe Game Fest 2025. “In 2011, we just finished one of the Gears of War games and wanted to explore new ideas.”
That exploration began with a bold internal experiment. Every employee got one week to build a game with any coworkers they chose, using Unreal Engine. “You can actually build something pretty interesting in a week,” Sweeney noted. One team did exactly that - they created the very first version of what would eventually become Fortnite.
The concept? “You're going to build forts by day using this building system, then night would come and you’d defend against zombies.”
"It wasn’t flashy, and it didn’t look like Fortnite today. The original art style was more realistic, but the core idea was there: creation, defense, survival, and progression. And it was fun. Really fun."
Turning a Prototype into a Global Hit
As development continued, Epic pivoted several times. One of the most important moves was visual.
“We moved to the current Fortnite art style, away from a more realistic style.” Sweeney explained that the team chose a stylized, Pixar-inspired look to make Fortnite more accessible and enjoyable long-term. “We realized that Fortnite could be really mainstream. It could be a game people play for a long time.”
The game eventually launched as Fortnite: Save the World in 2017. It was a moderate success. But everything changed when the team saw the explosion of the Battle Royale genre.
“PUBG had just come out. Tons of people at Epic were playing that. They're like, oh, this would be so cool if it had Fortnite building.”
What happened next was historic. A war room of 30 people spent just four weeks building Fortnite Battle Royale from scratch using seven years’ worth of existing assets. The result launched Epic into a new stratosphere.
“We went from 300 employees to thousands. From $100 million in revenue to billions.”
Scaling from 40,000 to 15 Million Players
Behind the scenes, the team had already spent years preparing for this kind of scale.
“Since 2012, we’d been building online backend systems… and by some miracle, they scaled up.” Sweeney said the system went from 40,000 to 15 million concurrent users. “If they hadn’t done that, Fortnite just wouldn’t have been playable. The whole thing would have failed.”
One weekend, they even ran out of servers in Brazil. By the next weekend? “Somebody at Amazon had dropshipped millions of dollars of server hardware into Brazil and turned it on just in time.”
The Secret to Fortnite’s Massive Economy
“Fortnite makes Billions of Dollars a year,” Sweeney said plainly. But it’s not just about profit. Epic reinvests heavily into R&D. In fact, they once spent over 1B US-Dollar more than they earned in a year.
More impressively, Fortnite is now home to a creator economy worth over $400 million.
“We realized early on that the key to making Fortnite work as a creator economy was to open up the revenue from the item shop.” The system pays creators based on where players spend their time. If someone spends 60% of their time on a fan-made island, that creator gets a share of the item shop revenue.
The Vision: One Identity, One Universe
Sweeney doesn't hold back on what’s next: interoperability, social unification, and a real metaverse.
“Right now, every game is an isolated place. Different friends, different usernames, no cohesion.” He imagines a future where you can carry your identity, friends, and even cosmetics between games.
And not just between Epic titles. “You could own an outfit in Fortnite, and own the same outfit in Roblox, and maybe even Call of Duty one day...”
