Fortnite is getting Unity games

Epic Games is teaming up with arguably its biggest game development rival, Unity, to bring games made using Unity’s engine into Fortnite. The change will mean that Unity games could sit alongside Epic’s own suite of experiences as well as those created by third-party developers using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite — and it opens the door for significantly more games to be available to play within Fortnite.

“Just like the early days of the web, we believe that companies need to work together in order to build the open metaverse in a way that’s interoperable and fair,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says in a statement. “Working alongside Unity we’re helping developers build fun games, reach bigger audiences, and find success.”

Fortnite will be opened up to “all Unity games thanks to some really amazing network technology that Unity built that connects other engines into Unity through a networking protocol to make this work,” Sweeney said onstage at Unity’s Unite conference today. “So starting next year, Unity developers will be able to publish games directly into Fortnite to appear in Fortnite’s discovery system alongside games built with Unreal Engine and to participate in the Fortnite economy as it evolves towards an open metaverse economy connecting all users and all engines.“

The change represents an important step in Epic’s long-running vision of turning Fortnite into an open metaverse that’s a big 3D social space with a huge number of experiences to participate in with your friends. Epic has been marching down this path for years with Fortnite itself by putting an increased focus on creator-made experiences and making browsing through those experiences in the Fortnite lobby feel like scrolling YouTube. (You can even check out experiences on the web — and buy new Fortnite outfits in your browser, too.) 40 percent of Fortnite playtime now happens in third-party content, Sweeney said onstage.

Right now, Fortnite, which Sweeney said had 100 million monthly active users last holiday, is a closed ecosystem, meaning that creators can only make games for the platform using Epic’s tools, can’t (yet) easily drop those games into Unreal Engine to bring them to other platforms, or bring experiences built on other engines into Fortnite. But even in 2023, Tim Sweeney was telling The Verge how much he believed in the future of interoperable game engines being key to his vision.

Epic has had some success expanding Fortnite from being a battle royale into a broad, Roblox-like ecosystem with games from outside creators. By the end of last year, it had 70,000 total creators that published nearly 200,000 “islands,” or Fortnite’s term for experiences. But the Unity Editor, which is designed to help developers build their games once and run them across multiple platforms, has more than 1.2 million monthly active users. Even a fraction of those developers also bringing their games to Fortnite could add a lot to the platform.

The partnership potentially gives developers another potential avenue to find an audience and monetize their games, which could be a lifeline for smaller developers amid continued industry struggles and layoffs. It could also consolidate even more power into Fortnite, which is already a behemoth. But Sweeney actually envisions a world for Fortnite that’s much more decentralized — more like the open web.

“Fortnite’s still this big thing operated by Epic completely,” Sweeney says in an interview with The Verge. “But there will be a day when you can, from the program that’s currently called Fortnite, go to other sites that are completely controlled by other companies. We have nothing to do with them. We make no revenue from them. We don’t have commercial agreements with them. They’re just like websites on the web.” Today’s news with Unity is the first opportunity for “the rubber to meet the road” of engines that are operating together.

For now, whether a creator makes a Fortnite experience using Fortnite’s tools or with Unity, Sweeney says there will be a review process to ensure that it’s “ratings-compliant and works adequately.” But in the future, “as this evolves into a completely open system, we’d only have reviews for stuff that we host, and anybody would be able to put anything anywhere, and people would be able to browse to it like you do in a web browser today.”

Allowing Unity games will “greatly expand the developer base,” Sweeney says. “The challenge of building content in Fortnite today is you start from scratch.” You can’t currently take an Unreal Engine game and deploy it into Fortnite — that’s something that Epic is aiming for with Unreal Engine 6, which is likely years away. Ironically, Sweeney says, “publishing Unity games into Fortnite will happen before publishing standalone Unreal Engine games into Fortnite.”

There’s a second component to today’s news, too: Unity will bring support for Unreal Engine to the commerce management platform it announced last month, which lets developers manage their digital storefronts across many platforms from all inside Unity Engine. That was pitched at the time as a way to make it much easier to deal with the complexities of different storefronts and payment processors.

Bringing support for Unreal Engine to the platform gives developers “more choice around how they build stores and how they manage those stores,” says Matt Bromberg, President and CEO of Unity. “Ultimately, I think the thing that Tim and I couldn’t agree any more strongly on is that having more choice and more places where developers can build things and giving them more control over their destinies is the most important thing we can do to help the gaming ecosystem.”

Update, November 19th: Added details and a video from the Unite conference.