Game Theory: Fortnite's SECRET Plan to Control Disney! By The Game Theorists

People wait: eight hours for Disneyland tickets sold out for months Disney plus winning in the streaming wars solidly number two in the streaming wars passes a hundred million subscribers Disney stock surges. You thought a little virus could slow me down it just made them all hungry. For more of me, I own everything, haha everything you don't own me mickey, but I definitely have a hold on you. Dance mouse dance. I don't understand you will mouse, you will hello internet, welcome to game theory, the show at 10 years old, isn't old enough to drive, but is probably still older than most of the kids playing Fortnite. Speaking of being old, a quick plug here for our sponsor rocket mortgage and our appearance over on their rocket learn YouTube channel recently Steph and I were interviewed over there on their new series, big change about what it means to be mature adults having to organize our living space to maintain sanity while also working at home and after 2020.

I think we've all had our fair share of tips and horror stories. So if you're interested in learning from our 10 years of ups and downs check out that episode link is in the top line of the description or at the end of the video. So it's been a while, since we last checked in with epic games creators of the global flossing phenomenon for tonight now, if you'll remember last august, when everyone was talking about how Fortnite was pulling a move to try and avoid a 30 payment fee for Buck purchases, we did a video over here on the channel covering how everyone was missing. The real story that epic's biggest plan was to create their own competing app store to compete directly against the Apple app store and the Google Play Store. This shouldn't have been some obscure piece of hidden information either.

It was right there in the legal documents that anyone could read but apparently did not read our main point. That episode, though, was that, if you hear the word, epic and all you think of is Fortnite while you're actually missing the biggest picture of them all. Remember Fortnite battle: royale came out a mere four years ago, which come to think of it feels like a lot longer man. The last two years have just vanished from my mind anyway. Epic is a company with a history dating all the way back to 1991 and this whole missing the epic forest for the Fortnite trees seems to be a much bigger trend as it relates to the company.

People keep underestimating them and missing how powerful they really are, because epic doesn't just have the splashiest headline grabbing game to come out in recent history. Oh no, they have a much bigger, much more powerful secret weapon that everyone just overlooks, one that allows them to control, not just games but entire other industries, a weapon with an unreal amount of power that we're all aware of, but don't really give a second thought to epic's unreal secret weapon is well the unreal game engine. Maybe the reason that people don't really talk about this thing is that they don't exactly understand it. I mean I can tell you that the Unreal Engine is what powers a huge percentage of games as diverse and wide-ranging. As hello, neighbor and PUBG to mass effect, Dragon Ball fighter, z, Tetris effect and even the Nintendo Switch's Joshi's crafted world even Nintendo, who is notorious for sticking to their own proprietary tools, has built games using unreal's engine.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of other titles all built using the Unreal Engine by companies other than epic. So what does it all really mean? What exactly is a game engine, and how is it allowing epic games to infiltrate industries other than gaming? Well, that's a question. That's best answered by looking at the history of epic games itself. I think we're all familiar with doom which basically spawned the first-person shooter genre back in 1993. It wasn't the first fps Wallenstein 3d came out a year earlier in 1992, but doom basically ignited the genre to the point that for years, any other shooting game that involved walking down in a first-person perspective was called a doom clone one such clone that began development during the 90s was a game called unreal created by none other than epic games, though, at the time they had the totally tubular company name, epic mega games.

Epic's founder Tim Sweeney saw the success of 1993's doom and 94's doom 2 and realized that it would be hard to compete. Unreal's development didn't start until 1995. He would be stuck playing catch-up forever, so instead he had an idea. You see the development of doom 2 looked a lot like the development of doom 1. Large portions of the sequel were being built from scratch, even though they were creating a sequel to an existing game.

In a lot of ways. The development process looked like they were reinventing the wheel, but what if it was possible to create not just a standalone game but rather a framework that could be used to create a series of games? True, it would take longer for the first game in the series to come out, but creating a tool set and a framework that could be used to create multiple games meant that they could spit out sequels faster, and that would be their advantage. So true to his plan, epic created the first-person shooter game unreal, which came out in 1998, and yes, this is an actual PC game screenshot, as we've been told on the cover of next generation magazine, I joke about it now, but in all seriousness, unreal was pretty mind-blowing graphically at the time, so confident in its graphics that it came with a box complete with a window to show off a screenshot of the game. PC master race looked a lot different back then, anyway, in the process, epic mega games also created the Unreal Engine, a tool set that makes it easier to create video games. It wasn't the first game engine by any means, but when it was capable of making games that looked like this, it quickly became one of the most popular with other game companies asking to borrow it, or you know, pay to use it.19 games in total were built using that first generation Unreal Engine, but it was enough to prove the existence of a brand new business model. Sure epic was still making their own games during that time, most notably the Gears of War series.

But why make the games yourself, when you can make the tools that everyone else uses to make the games? They were making more profit from the game engine than the games that they were making, which is probably why they were willing to sell the Gears of War IP to Microsoft in 2014. So what I hear you asking epic earns bank licensing, a tool that makes creating video games easier. What's the big deal? Well, you see that's the thinking that everyone falls into, which is why epic is so vastly underestimated. Yeah, they're known for making games but Unreal Engine is so, so much more than that. Remember the Mandalorian aka the reason you started a Disney plus subscription a year ago, and you still haven't gotten around to canceling.

Yet almost none of that show was shot using practical effects. Almost the entire show was shot on a sound stage in Manhattan beach with the vivid and memorable settings all being computer generated now. That alone is no big surprise. After all, green screen is nothing new star. War has been shooting on a green screen ever since the phantom menace back in the 90s, but what's different is that the world of the Mandalorian was created using the Unreal Engine director john Favre had access to the virtual set in real time.

He could look at the virtual set to plan shots rather than having to shoot everything against a green screen and not have a clear idea of how it's going to turn out after the computer animators get to it. Unreal renderings can be projected onto backgrounds in real time, so say. For instance, a superhero's battling against a CGI monster in the olden days, actors would pretend to fight whatever is eventually edited onto the green screen. The Unreal Engine, however, allows studios to project a near movie-ready monster on screen for the actors to see and interact with that. In turn is going to cut down on production funds, editing time costs heck, you can shoot the whole movie in one big green room and with more and more movies, being less and less real and more and more like video games, the power of epic's Unreal Engine in the movie business becomes dominant and that's not all the application of game engines goes beyond media and entertainment.

There are virtual realty yeahs. I said that right, virtual realty, as in realtors people who sell houses who make use of virtual reality headsets to give people the experience of what it's like to stand in a home without actually having to go and stand in that home, but this virtual reality. Simulations of houses have to be built somehow, and they're built using the same types of game engines that virtual reality games are built in zip view, for instance, is a real estate company that allows you to tour virtual versions of houses powered by you guessed it the Unreal Engine. I mean think about it. If you're trying to create a virtual house tour, you need to have something that can provide realistic, rendering in real time as you walk around immersed in a virtual space, even taking into account things like how the light will shine through a window or what a room will look like during different times of day.

These are all things that are novel in the world of VR house tours, but they're all things that video games have been offering for well over a decade which makes a game developer tool like the Unreal Engine, the ideal place to build a virtual house tour did that example seem too small and specific for you. Okay, how about this? The US military uses simulation tools that were built using the Unreal Engine again simulations of a bunch of virtual soldiers running around on a battlefield shooting at each other is kind of the thing that a lot of game engines are built for and used for. The US military simulations just happen to be more realistic than your typical cod match. Oh my god, now an obvious question to this might be: if creating a game engine is such good business. Why hasn't someone else stepped in to create the competitor? I mean? Surely epic's Unreal Engine can't be the only game in town uh game engine in town? I guess! Well, as it turns out.

There is one big competitor to unreal, which is unity, and I really do mean one big competitor. Nothing else even comes close. Unity is widely used for mobile games, including some pretty heavy hitters like Pok?mon, go and hearthstone, as well as a wide variety of indie games like bendy and the ink machine hollow knight, the outer wilds, just to name a few that you might be familiar with, but when it comes to games that are really pushing the graphical limits of PC and console hardware, unity's presence is a lot smaller. That being said, unity like unreal is making a big splash in the movie-making world. Remember that live-action Lion King reboot, which is totally not live action at all and just computer generated.

Well, its computer generated using tools from unity, yeah Disney raked in 1.3 billion dollars at the box office, with a movie made using some of the same tools as bendy and the ink machine. So unreal isn't the only game engine out there making waves outside the game industry, but it doesn't have much competition apart from unity. In fact, unreal and unity kinda have what you call a duopoly in the game market, a situation where two companies, as in a duo of companies, hold all the market share, sort of like android and iPhone as opposed to a monopoly where one company holds all the market share. But if creating a game engine is such big business, then why don't more companies? Do it? One word money: its expensive part of the reason. Other companies started licensing the Unreal Engine as early as 1996 and continue to use modern versions of the Unreal Engine.

To this day is, so they don't have to invest in building that technology themselves. Epic's own Tim Sweeney says quote: the cost of building an engine now is hundreds of millions of dollars representing the work of hundreds of people. For many years. You can't build an engine, that's just good for one type of game anymore: the economics don't work, and he's not wrong. Ea tried to use their own proprietary engine, the frostbite engine that powers games like battlefield and FIFA to make mass effect, Andromeda and uh.

Well, we see how well that worked out for him. This face: what are you what is happening there? She must be constipated. Even the biggest game companies in the world are often reliant on licensed game engines. Consider riot creator of League of Legends, a game, that's generated over 20 billion dollars in revenue. Surely they would have the resources to create their own game engine in-house if they wanted, but when it came time to create their new game Valorant, they relied on epic's Unreal Engine.

The economics just made more sense, and what are those economics he asked? What could they possibly be charging for this incredibly valuable service, zero dollars for real? That is the amount of money that you paid, epic up front until the point that your game hits a million dollars in sales. After that you pay epic, a five percent royalty. Unless, of course, you distribute your game on the epic game store, in which case that gets waived and if you're, a small indie developer, who never hits a million dollars in sales, you pay nothing. I bring all of this up to make a point. Epic has the world's premier game engine and rather than choosing to prioritize short-term profit by charging everyone to use it they're trying to get it into the hands of as many developers as possible.

It's the same thing that google did with Gmail and google search and Google Chrome free services that are reliable and work well getting into the hands of as many people as possible, so that you become the industry standard and once you're ubiquitous and largely free, you earn money by leveraging your massive user base, marketing other products, advertising and more and because you're, free and first to market it's hard for new competitors to cut in and turn a profit in a reasonable amount of time. So there you have it friends, epic's unreal advantage. It may be talked about as just a game engine, but it's a tool that is single-handedly taking over our increasingly digital world. It's weird to think that, just a decade or two ago, gaming was dismissed as a niche hobby for kids, but now gaming technology is literally powering the world, be it our movies, our military or even allowing us to virtually tour our future homes, and, let me tell you, those virtual tours- are important in the aftermath of Ovid working from home has become the new normal for many of us working from home, not just for YouTubers anymore, but taken from Steph, and I is not all business on top sweatpants or less down below maintaining sanity, while working from home can be hard, especially if your physical space isn't set up to help your mental space and that's true whether you're talking about an apartment, a condo or a home, we've been through it all. So, if you're interested in how you can set up your home for long-term success and sanity, we shared our best strategies with Gabe bolt over on his new show, big change on our sponsor for this episode's channel.

The rocket learn YouTube channel link is on screen right now or down in the description below if you've ever wanted to set your work from home situation. Up for greater success have a listen. I've learned the hard way that there are some very easy traps that you can fall into that I'd love to share, but you have to click the link head on over to their channel and leave a comment that says kitty says thanks anyway: click on that link below to get those tips and always remember it's all, just a theory, a game theory thanks for watching.

Source : The Game Theorists