A few days ago, a Zhihu answered "burst". Someone sent a heavenly question on Zhihu: "why do people still indulge in games at the age of 30 or 40?" For a seemingly commonplace question, I didn't expect that one of the answers won 27000 approvals and more than 1500 comments.
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Source: Zhihu
Who's epic? Why does it dare to directly answer "it's none of your business" with the official account today, when the major official accounts strive not to make mistakes, and it seems to have won a lot of popularity?
That may start with epic's unique charm.
|Wonderful game
As a game company founded in 1991, it has always taken an unusual path. Even in the game industry, the company's operation mode and the personality of its founder are unique:
Other major game manufacturers have been listed. However, the only one, even though it has received a large amount of venture capital and strategic investment, has not been listed for more than 30 years since its establishment, and it is basically the sole the final say;
Other major manufacturers are eager to launch more than a dozen similar games every year, with increasingly similar styles, which makes people feel repetitive and boring. However, it has only concentrated on three games in recent years, which have been highly praised;
More importantly, other large factories have the flavor of "big company", with strict management and external blockade. However, the only one still operates in the way of "small workshop". For example, there are almost no restrictions on players' self-made mod and fan fan content and websites involving trademarks and IP. It completely rejects any game creativity and content submitted externally
What's more outrageous is that many of the Games sent to players every month are serious AAA works, which indirectly leads to the loss of money in their own game mall. I'm afraid other game manufacturers can't do it in their life.
This game company is Epic Games.
The number of games it has developed in the past 30 years is very small, but each is a high-quality product: Fortress night, which many people know, can be called the only phenomenal game in recent years. It not only has a large number of players, but also jumped out of the classic category of the game. It has successfully held cross-border activities such as film press conferences, premieres and live concerts on the server for many times, becoming the prototype of "meta universe" that has attracted much attention in recent years.
Little is known that the company's predecessor released the first game "ZZT" in 1991. It has been on sale for 22 years and finally sold the last copy in 2013. It can be said that it is the industry's most "long-lived" single game.
In the past decade, although Epic Games has accepted the strategic investment of Tencent and Sony, as well as the private investment of many of the most famous funds in the financial industry, the equity of Founder Tim Sweeney is still more than 50%, and the company is still "controlled by him".
Not to mention Sweeney himself is also a well-known God in the industry. Although he is in charge of a company valued at $32 billion and his net worth has reached tens of billions, he still does it himself. Writing code for the company's products and personal hobby projects, and attending parties and talk shows in the game circle are all his regular meals.
But as long as he doesn't like it, whoever it is, it's even better than Apple He also dared to challenge: because he was dissatisfied with Apple's pumping method in IOS mall, under his leadership, epic directly took apple to the antitrust court and fought 300 rounds, becoming the "Knight" in the hearts of small and medium-sized developers in the game industry, especially those suffering from Apple's pumping.
Tim Sweeney photo source: wiki commons knowledge sharing license
|Reinvented the wheel and created a game
Epic Games started when Tim Sweeney was a teenager.
Tim Sweeney's eldest brother Steve is 15 years older than him. He used to work in the technology industry in San Diego, California. He has a house by the sea and a cool car. Sweeney often goes to play with her brother during school holidays.
However, in San Diego, what really made him fall in love with was not the beautiful scenery and cool sports cars, but his brother's IBM computer. During his time with Steve, he learned assembly language and basic programming. According to Sweeney, he spent more time programming in school than sleeping, taking classes and doing other things.
Later, Sweeney was admitted to the mechanical and electrical engineering major of the University of Maryland. When he was programming in college, he was very dissatisfied with the mainstream editor and programming language on MS-DOS, so he decided to write one by himself.
However, like many engineers' hobby projects, Sweeney didn't want to do it any longer. Bored, he decided to change the cursor of this editor into a small smiling face. Instead, this editor is no longer an editor at all, and its interface has become a scene similar to a game.
This editor is the later ZZT.
ZZT game picture source: Epic Games
At that time, Sweeney also founded a computer technology consulting company. However, we should see that we were busy writing editors every day and turned them into games. The business of this consulting company cannot be good. Sweeney had planned to shut down the company, but he didn't keep up with his studies and the company didn't do well. In the end, he made such a game, which was too fruitless... So he decided to try to sell the game.
Unexpectedly, after ZZT was released in the form of shared software, it soon attracted the attention of many computer users. Consumers not only in this state, but also in other States sent him checks in the hope of buying the official version.
ZZT game picture source: Epic Games
ZZT is really a game, but don't forget that it was originally an editor - that's the most interesting thing about ZZT.
At that time, many computer users had a considerable degree of programming knowledge. In ZZT, what these users see is not a simple game, but a development environment with great potential. Just like today's popular minecraft and roblox, ZZT is not only a game, but also a tool with low threshold and freeing players' creativity.
ZZT is regarded by many old players as the first game developed by object-oriented programming. The essence of the editor is that it can be used as a game development tool. Users can modify the ZZT program, develop external modules, and even their own games.
At the beginning of 1992, ZZT sold 20 or 30 copies a week, and Sweeney made about $100 a day. Seeing his son's "successful career" at a young age, his father Paul was deeply gratified. The civil servant took the initiative to undertake the responsibility of game production (mainly copying to 3.5-inch floppy disk) and delivery. Until more than 20 years after the release of the first generation of the game, Paul still served as the "chief operating and delivery officer" of epic classics, a subsidiary brand of his son's company.
After winning the first battle, Sweeney first tasted the pleasure of game production and decided to transform the consulting company into game development. The name was also changed to epic megagames. He said the name was chosen to deceive customers into thinking that the company was particularly large.
In 2013, Paul Sweeney sent the last physical copy of ZZT game from his home, which was also the address where his son started his business.
In this way, the first game of Epic Games, ZZT, has also become the "longest life" in the whole game industry. There may not be one of the longest selling word games.
Due to its high customizability, up to now, ZZT has more than 3000 self-made modules, which makes this game a pioneer in the development of user-made game modules. Sweeney also claimed that he knew many people who later engaged in game development, who were once module developers of ZZT.
Last copy of ZZT entity source: Zack hiwiller
|The story behind the illusory engine
After the game company was officially put into operation, Sweeney recruited more like-minded partners. In the two years from 1993 to 1994, as the manager and "cheerleader" of the company, he supported his colleagues to continue to develop more products and acted as the producer of some external cooperative development projects.
In 1994, James SCHMALZ, the founder of digital extreme, a Canadian game company, wanted to develop a 3D game. SCHMALZ is a game genius and a great God of programming. He writes Games directly in assembly language, and the tools are very rough and crude. Sometimes he even writes demos directly on paper. When Sweeney saw SCHMALZ's demo, he couldn't help admiring that this person was really a genius, and he was distressed that his tools were too bad, so he kindly invited him to cooperate with him again (before epic released the pinball game developed by digital extreme), and promised to write code in person to create a useful level editor for him.
What Sweeney really wants is not only to develop the best 3D FPS game, but also to follow the footsteps of his idol Carmack and develop the best 3D game engine.
Screenshot of the previous version of the unreal engine level editor source: gamespot
In 1995, the most important project in the history of epic megagames was finally officially approved. Before that, the development team of a game of the company usually had only three people at most, which could be completed by one person at a time. The company could carry three or four game projects to develop at the same time. The 3D FPS game not only needs a large number of developers and painters, and the team size has reached 20 or 30 people, but also Sweeney's choice of the path of parallel development of the game and engine has also brought huge risks and significantly increased the cost.
Mark rein, one of the company's executives, even blew up his credit card at that time. "For the development of this game, we have basically smashed up the profits of all previous games," Sweeney revealed.
After the three-year development period, epic megagames finally officially released unreal and unreal engine used in the game.
"Unreal" has been highly praised by game evaluation media and players. After its release, its weekly sales volume once surpassed that of "StarCraft". It even fought with the RTS game developed by Blizzard Entertainment for a month, and finally ranked second. Three years after its launch, the game's life cycle sales finally locked in 1.5 million copies.
"Unreal" is the work of two game geniuses SCHMALZ and cliff "cliffy B" bleszinski. The unreal engine is the crystallization of Sweeney's four-year efforts. About 90% of the code of the whole engine was written by himself.
It can even be said that the real core of the whole illusory project is on the illusory engine.
After the release, Carmack, as a competitor, praised the major innovation breakthrough of the unreal engine in game technology, including the adoption of 16 bit high color and the realization of similar volume fog effects: "the floodball, volume fog and composite sky effect are all what I plan to achieve. However, today, epic's unreal (engine) has been one step ahead of me."
The PC version of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's stone" shows the material projection and flood effect ability of the unreal engine in the unreal arena version. Source: Electronic Arts
Carmack's endorsement soon made the unreal engine the most concerned tool in the game development industry. With the subsequent iteration of the illusory engine, Epic Games decided to develop a new 3D third person shooting game to demonstrate the powerful technical capabilities of the new generation of illusory engine 3.
This game is in Microsoft windows And Xbox The 360 platform was exclusive, and because it was so popular, Microsoft simply bought the gears of war of the whole IP series. It became the fastest game to achieve 3 million sales on the Xbox 360 platform, and attracted the attention of more third-party developers.
As of today, a number of well-known developers, including Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard and R star, are developing with the unreal engine. As long as the game adopts the illusory engine, Epic Games can draw a small licensing fee from the sales performance - as a result, the existence of the illusory engine has brought huge and stable revenue to Epic Games.
However, the legend of this game company has not reached the climax.
|Tencent, fortress night, and the era of "game as a service"
After the release of the unreal engine, especially in the years of iteration from version 3 to version 4 of the unreal engine, Epic Games in the eyes of the outside world lost its direction and lost its "momentum": Although many external developers are still using the unreal engine, which has brought a lot of revenue to the company, some of its independently developed games, including fortrite, which was announced in 2011, have fallen into a state of stagnation.
Internally, however, Tim Sweeney has a clear judgment on the future direction of the company and the industry. Specifically, Sweeney believes that the future prospect of Epic Games as a game publisher may not be optimistic, because the business model of the whole game industry, like the whole technology industry, is facing the transformation of "service-oriented".
In the game industry, the concept of "game as a service" triggered a revolution at that time. Game developers had to seek revenue means other than game sales, including point card / monthly card, in-game purchase, etc.
Tencent is considered to be one of the earliest advocates of the concept of "game as a service", and many online games developed and operated by Tencent have achieved great success. Sweeney recognized this very much, so she directly found Tencent in 2012, hoping to get help in the transformation of "game as a service" and accepted the 48.4% equity of Tencent's strategic investment in exchange.
However, the veteran of Epic Games is very difficult to accept Tencent's investment. These developers themselves are also core players and loyal to the traditional game development model. At that time, they stubbornly believed that:
Game developers should spend money, time and energy to make games with "grand plot, exquisite story and far-reaching influence", and then sell money with dignity.
At that time, in their view, the current popular content development rhythm of "selling auction houses" such as DLC and season tickets, as well as the practice of not putting high-quality equipment directly in the basic game, but becoming paid props purchased in the game - such models of free value-added or even paid additional value-added, turned game developers into bad vendors, which was disgraced.
Therefore, during the period of Tencent's investment, more than a dozen core veterans of Epic Games left successively. It is precisely because of these major personnel changes that some game development projects within Epic Games were suspended to varying degrees during that time.
Sweeney can see clearly. He knew in his heart that the future game should be "living game": a game series can not redevelop and release new works every one or two years, but can rely on online mode to add new game content, props, modes and other ways to achieve sustainability.
In order to successfully realize the transformation of "game as a service", he is willing to accept temporary setbacks. Epic Games remained dormant until fortress night was born.
The "Fortress night" project was officially announced in 2011, and then there was almost no news for six years. It was not until 2017 that Epic Games finally launched the game's large multiplayer online escape mode (also known as "chicken eating" mode) - fortress night: airborne operation.
The mode of pure free play + purchase of skin props has attracted a large number of young players into the pit. In less than a year, the chicken eating mode of Fortress night reached 125 million players, exceeding the number of players of my world at that time. A large number of players, associated E-sports competitions, as well as youtube and short video content produced by loyal fans, make the chicken eating mode of Fortress night a social phenomenon far beyond the game.
Poster of chicken eating mode in Fortress night source: Epic Games
At the commercial level, as the most commercially successful game project in Epic Games history, the whole development process of Fortress night basically runs through the transformation process of the company from a traditional developer and publisher to a service provider.
However, even after having implemented the concept of "game as a service" for many years, Epic Games was obsessed with how the chicken eating mode of Fortress night should work. Specifically, whether to put the chicken eating mode in the paid main game or release it directly as an independent game.
Finally, two weeks before its official release in 2017, Epic Games made up its mind to choose the latter. More interestingly, in the game environment, Epic Games and its partners have successfully held many non game activities, including Star Wars film press conference, fan meeting, live electronic concert and so on. This new form of in-game events makes the chicken eating mode of Fortress night a prototype similar to the concept of "meta universe".
The popularity and lasting success of this game in the European and American markets have also proved the correctness and foresight of the concept of "game as a service" advocated by Epic Games and Tencent.
|Challenge Apple alone
Friends who pay attention to silicon stars may remember that in 2020, we reported that Epic Games suddenly launched an antitrust lawsuit against apple.
At that time, the chicken eating mode of Fortress night suddenly added a direct payment channel to IOS and Android clients, skipping the pumping mode of Apple's app store and Google play app mall, resulting in Apple's sudden pain and killer to take the game off the shelf from the app store.
As a result, within an hour of being off the shelf, Epic Games's complaint had been submitted to the California court, and the company also released a video of spoofing Apple's original advertising film 1984, turning the "big brother" in the original film into Apple itself.
Screenshot source: Epic Games
Epic Games is an old friend of apple and has been on the stage of Apple's press conference for many times. However, in the face of the application mall, commonly known as the "Apple tax", and various harsh shelf review systems, Epic Games has become the first big company in the game industry to dare to tear its face with apple.
In the view of the outside world, Epic Games also has "independent" selfishness towards Apple's backwater, that is, it wants the game / application store developed by the company to log on to the IOS platform and be on an equal footing with the app store:
Screenshot source: court documents
However, from Sweeney's point of view, he still insists that this is for the good of players, giving them cheaper services and giving them the right to choose that they have been deprived of for too long.
In this regard, believe it or not, at least give free games to players in the game mall all day, which indirectly leads to the loss of money in the mall business - Epic Games can do such a thing.
There are other things for Sweeney to do. For example, Sony's latest generation of game console ps5 was put on the original solid-state drive at Sweeney's insistence.
Before that, because the mechanical hard disk of the original factory had poor performance, high noise and high heat, many players would replace the solid-state hard disk for the PS4 host by themselves. Sony system architect mark Cerny once revealed in an interview that Sweeney has been asking Sony for SSDs all day since the PS4 era. "He said that hard disks are dragging down the whole game industry. He didn't even say hard disks, but called them 'rusty spinning media'."
This is why we see that the official release of unreal engine 5 is displayed on ps5 - the key components on this host, including SSD, are partly to show the full strength of unreal engine 5 and succumb to Sweeney's "power".
Nanite technology demo image source: Epic Games
The two most famous corporate financing in the history of Epic Games should be the two strategic investments of Tencent in 2012 and Sony in 2020. However, in the past two years after the outbreak, the company has completed PE financing for many times, and the investors are well-known institutions in the industry: Lightspeed venture capital, T. Rowe price, fidelity, BlackRock, GIC (Singapore sovereign fund), etc.
However, even after receiving so many external investments, Tim Sweeney himself is still the largest shareholder of Epic Games, with a shareholding ratio of more than 50%.
As a game tycoon, Sweeney also lost himself in his early years. More than 20 years ago, the release of unreal and the first generation of unreal engine made him a multimillionaire. He also bought a Ferrari and a Lamborghini and put them in the parking lot at the door of his apartment, which led his neighbors to think he was a drug dealer.
Later, as the company became more and more successful, Sweeney became more and more low-key. He invested more of his money in environmental protection public welfare undertakings. He bought a large area of land in North Carolina where the company is located for ecological restoration, and then gave it to non-profit organizations for further ecological protection and scientific research operation free of charge.
Instead of buying a new sports car, he gave the opportunity to "drive a sports car" to all players: last year, Ferrari and Epic Games had an unprecedented cooperation, designed the body through the illusory engine, and released the 296 GTB sports car in the game fortress night.
Source: Epic Games
At some tea parties and player meeting activities often held by Epic Games, you can still see Tim Sweeney as a guest to chat with colleagues, players and fans about favorite game topics.
Tim Sweeney (middle) attends a technical tea party photo source: Epic Games
Moreover, he is still working on the front line, contributing code to the company's products and some core projects, and deeply participated in the actual development of the "meta universe" strategy launched by the company in the past two years (in fact, he was studying the technical problems of virtual human as early as 2009).
On his social network account, you can also see him using the classic IBM model M keyboard and writing code in languages such as C + +. Even, he is still learning Chinese and recently sent a screenshot of himself using the Chinese version of the Unreal Engine editor.
In the current game industry, although the business model and competitors of Epic Games are gradually converging, the operation state of the company is still incompatible with the whole industry, which makes it popular with more game players and insiders.
Tim Sweeney is the same as before. He is a hardworking, kind and low-key game developer who writes legends in his own way in the world of video games.