Epic’s Sweeney touts a cross-platform play future for the games industry

Delivering a keynote to open Unreal Fest Europe in Berlin, Tim Sweeney talked about some of the successes for the Epic Games and the Unreal Engine over the last 12 months.

One of the company’s biggest successes is the reincarnation of PvE survival game Fortnite as a battle royale title, which has found mainstream popularity and picked up over 40m players across 6 different platforms.

One of the secrets to its success, Sweeney said, is cross-platform play, something he believes will be the source of a lot of games industry growth going forwards.

"Facebook is only interesting because you can connect with all your friends, if you could only connect with your friends on iOS, that would suck." he added.

With six different platforms, there are 15 different combinations. Of these, the team has made 14 of them possible, with crossplay between Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 being the only combination that doesn’t currently work.

"We still have some work to do to convince Sony and Microsoft that they should play nice together" said Sweeney with a dry chuckle. "We’re working on it."

In the future, Epic are intending to prioritise cross platform play, and also the act of bringing console quality experiences to mobile devices, something that he says is very possible for current generation mobile hardware.

Another popular Unreal title hit is Rocket League, which also has a lot of ambitions cross-platform play elements.