In an interview with the Gaming Business Review, an online site ran by M2 Publishing, Tim Sweeney detailed recent developments in Epic Games, as well as his visions of the future.

The interview obviously took place during Game Developer’s Conference 2015, which is traditionally held in San Francisco, CA. We highly recommend that you head there and read the whole interview, but we could not miss out on a question that is shaping the industry right now:

GBR: How big do you see virtual reality becoming over the next five to ten years as a business?

TS: Virtual reality and Augmented Reality will literally change the world. They will be the next computing platform.  There’s a market for billions of these devices because everybody who has a smartphone today will — perhaps in as much as decade from now — much prefer entertainment in a completely immersive experience that takes advantage of your entire field of view and has full body input through miniaturized cameras and other technologies.  But we’re in the early days of it now.  Let’s be clear, everything is in the development kit stage.  It is for early adopters and what we’re seeing now is really just the Palm Pilot to the platform that will evolve into something iPhone-like in its quality.

There’s no point in denying it, after seeing billions of dollars earned by 3D movies which rely on ‘cheap tricks’ to achieve depth (try finding animated feature movies without 3D being the ‘default’ option), next step will bring us technologies such as Microsoft Hololens, production versions of Facebook-owned Oculus VR (John Carmack keynote) and second-generation Google Glass, which is developed in near-secrecy by the search giant and a practical monopoly in glasses, Italian giant Luxottica.

After operating for almost 20 years as an independent studio, Epic Games made waves across the gaming and development community when they accepted an investment from Tencent Holdings (HKG:0700) last June (2014). The Chinese powerhouse paid up $330 million for 48.4% of the company, setting the valuation just a bit below $680 million.

Tim Sweeney continued to be the CEO, while his lifelong business partner Mark Rein still continues as in his role of Vice President.  Not selling themselves outright like idSoftware did with ZeniMax Media, Epic Games continues to be independent studio, consisting out of product (games) and technology development units. Their recent announcement about making Unreal Engine ‘free’ opens a path for even more ‘premium freemium’ titles which base their revenue model on microtransactions.

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As a huge fan of Unreal Tournament, I have been waiting for this day for a very long time. In fact, since Unreal Tournament 3 came out in 2007 a lot of people have been waiting for a new Unreal Tournament game, it has been nearly 7 years since the last Unreal Title and now Epic Games has finally announced they will start to develop a new Unreal Tournament game with help from the community. The new game will be based on Unreal Engine 4, which is Epic’s latest and greatest game engine and as a result, it will look and perform absolutely fantastically. Not just that, but it’ll be very portable across Windows, OSX and Linux and the game will be completely and totally free. Here’s the announcement from Epic’s online live stream where they explained exactly what the new game will be like, even though the game has basically started development today.

We even asked our good friend Tim Sweeney, Co-Founder of Epic, about whether or not they would be making a new Unreal Tournament game in 2012, but he would not confirm nor deny any such project. And he once again denied any such existence of an Unreal Tournament game at GDC earlier this year with some other press. Even so, I’m not entirely sure he was wrong in either statement since Epic Games hasn’t technically started development of the new Unreal title until today. Today is day zero and starting from today they are beginning the development of the new Unreal Tournament game. What’s interesting is that Epic has decided to bring a lot of the people that currently work at Epic, but were somehow involved with Unreal Tournament as modders and such into the project. Additionally, they are being very adamant that they want to have heavy involvement from the community and that they want to include gamers to help make the game better even at the Alpha stage.

I think that this game is going to present a new way of developing, creating and ultimately releasing a game. However, I don’t really know what’s in it for Epic Games, maybe a way to showcase their latest engine? I don’t quite know, they’ve been a pretty bottomline focused company and for them to do something like this and make a game absolutely and completely free (not even Free to Play) is almost out of their character. They claim that they will be making their money off this game through the marketplace created by modders, they want to give developers, modders, artists and gamers a way to buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from that marketplace will be split between the modder/content developer and Epic and that’s how they expect to pay for the game. It isn’t quite microtransactions, but it kind of is. It sounds almost like something we’re seeing from Valve with Counter Strike: Global Offensive, where people are paying to unlock skinned guns made by the community (In fact, I think we’ll see exactly some form of that, and many others). But you won’t see me complaining, I’ve been starving for a new Unreal Tournament game and now we’ve got it. Now it’ll just be interesting to see how the game will look and how gamers will receive it on three different platforms.

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