Unity and Epic Games, two companies that usually spend their time competing for developers, are suddenly teaming up. The plan is simple. Games built on Unity’s engine will soon be publishable inside Fortnite, and Unity’s stock jumped on the news.
Epic has spent the past few years turning Fortnite into a full-blown platform filled with user-built worlds, a bit like Roblox but with better graphics and a global fanbase. CEO Tim Sweeney said the Unity deal will “greatly expand the developer base,” which makes sense when you consider Unity has more than 1.2 million monthly active users.
Under the new partnership, Unity developers will be able to drop their games directly into Fortnite and take part in the game’s creator economy. It is essentially a new distribution channel that plugs millions of Unity developers into a platform with massive reach.
Epic already had 70,000 creators who built nearly 200,000 islands last year. Adding Unity’s user base could send those numbers into a completely different orbit and makes Fortnite feel even more like a gaming operating system than a single game.
If this is the direction the metaverse is actually going, cooperation may end up scaling faster than competition ever did.