They will always be the Unreal Tournament company to me. Unreal and Return to Na Pali are still two of my favorite games to this day. Honestly wish someone would make games like those again.

Unreal is a game company which also sell their engine. Unity is just in the business of selling their Engine.

The difference is Unreal is eating their own dog food.

Unreal getting paid only when a user makes money [1] also compounds the dog-fooding. I believe that is how a company should be run - align your interests directly with the users'.

With Unity, the price per seat means only people who leave will send a signal, which will be too late. They are not incentivized to make day-to-day work efficient, which is why there are a million small bugs.

[1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq - "This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD."

Licensing their engine is just a side business for Epic and I’d bet on average their not getting anything even close to 5% (all their bigger clients should have custom agreements). But that’s fine for them since they’re making loads of money from Fortnite with much less effort (than you would need to make anything similar from just a game engine).

I’m not sure how the overall quality compares, but I’d expect Unity’s users to be way more critical even if it had more bugs just because of all the indie/small developers who’d fall below the 1mil threshold for Unreal but have to pay for Unity.

I agree $40 per month for Plus (<$200,000 pa sales) seems steep for someone just trying out selling something, discouraging all those young hopefuls.

They are more or less the Fortnite company. The Fortnite money printer churns out cash directly into the maw of the Epic Store money incinerator. This might turn out to be a great strategy in the long run but either way, they wouldn't be able to pursue it on this scale without Fortnite.

Epic games states that Fortnite has 350 million accounts and 2.5 billion friend connections. It seems like this is the next step of social networking and I'm sure the connections are much more authentic than Facebook's.

>It seems like this is the next step of social networking

Many years ago I was playing Runescape and a friend quipped that MMOs are basically Myspace with a game attached to it. And I think he was right. MMOs live and die by the network effect. Runescape had 150 million user accounts something like a decade ago, if not even before that. I'm sure World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, and League of Legends had at least comparable numbers.

I think if this were the next step of social networking, then it would have already happened. Perhaps it already did? We just call them gaming communities. If that's the case, then video games have created competing social networks that exist at the same time and aren't just being eaten by the biggest one.

The "metaverse" is already here - and has very little to do with VR.

You'll find it on Steam and Epic and other gaming platforms.

I’d assume most connections for most people on FB are with people they actually know in real life. Surely they must be more ‘authentic’ on average?

Friend of a friend versus person I play games with a couple hours a week?

Easy choice as to which is more authentic.

I would still expect that most people on FB have a higher number of ‘authentic’ relations there on average than someone who plays Fortnite has in-game. Unless all of your friends/family play it all the time as well.

I guess it depends where do you live, though. Where I’m from Messenger is still the most popular messaging platform so most people (unless they have very strong feelings about FB) have an account.

Location/demographic probably does have a rather large impact.

There are very few close relationships that I have on Facebook. I have it because I needed an account for a while, and haven't deleted it so that it can function as a placeholder should anyone try to impersonate me.

Meanwhile, almost all of my friends have a presence on Steam - including some who I rarely if ever do or have seen in person.

The great thing about this is that all the code / features they dogfood in Fortnite gets major improvements. Network play for example got a lot better simply because Fortnite ironed out lots of small, latency and scalability issues.

*parity. "Equality, as in amount, status, or value." https://www.thefreedictionary.com/parity

Looked like an intentional wordplay

  parity: Equality, as in amount, status, or value.
  parrot: One who imitates the words or actions of another, especially without understanding them.

Which fits in with the rest of their comment