Epic Games: milestones in a game developer evolution
Epic Games has revolutionized the video game market. It brought the industry to a new level in which electronics manufacturers are focused on whether they will be compatible with games when designing new devices.
The founder of Epic Games is Tim Sweeney, who as a student, created video games for fun. However, the hobby grew into a real gameplay business. In 1991, Tim decided to start a consulting firm right on campus. However, things were not going well. On vacations and weekends, the young man visited his parents, and in his spare time, he developed a game on his old computer. That same year ZZT was introduced, and Tim reformatted the consulting firm into a game studio, which was later named Epic Games. Sweeney used Internet message boards to sell and promote his project, and this strategy yielded results. In just six months, Tim sold several thousand copies of the game.
However, in order to stay afloat and grow, Sweeney needed to compete with strong players who had funds and a large development team. And Epic Games had only Tim at the time. So the young man began looking for partners, and the first of them was Mark Raine, who had previously worked at Software. Raine took over the marketing part of operations and sales. Such a step was important for the company, whose staff soon expanded to 20 people.
In 1996, the studio introduced the game Fire Fight, created in partnership with a Polish company. This project was a great success, and the profit from it allowed expanding the team to 50 employees. Two years later Unreal was released, and in time it grew into a whole series of games, where the narrative was in the first person.
The year 2006 is considered a turning point in the history of games, as piracy begins to flourish. To avoid complications, Epic Games reformatted development for consoles. The first project was Gears Of War, which was available only for Xbox 360. This release brought the company $100 million, and two years later the world saw the second part of the project.
In 2012 the company decided to abandon the development of consoles and use the “game as a service” model. The investor was the Chinese giant Tencent, through the services of which the studio’s products were distributed.
In 2017, Fortnite was released, which at first was not warmly received by gamers. It was only when the company released a free mode a year later that the game gained worldwide popularity. Now Epic Games has a market value of more than $20 billion, and the company continues to grow.
