![]() You could buy a house here on a game developer's salary, rather than be stuck in a one-bedroom apartment in California, Sweeney told the website Gamasutra in 2009. The team had looked around the country for a landing spot, before eventually settling on the Triangle because of its cost of living. First they moved to Raleigh, then to Cary in 2005, where they built their office off Crossroads Boulevard. It wasn't until 1999 that Epic made it to the Triangle, as a small group of game developers who had just finished working on a project in the suburbs of Toronto. He then started creating Unreal Engine, the software that is the backbone of his empire today. He was eventually awarded his degree the university said he didn't receive it in 1993 because of a "technical issue."īy then, he had already created one game, called "ZZT," and was selling copies at a steady clip. Then, at just the age of 20, having recently left the University of Maryland before graduating, his youthful passion for video games was turning into an actual business. "I love going off the trail and finding things that I think nobody's ever seen before," he said.įounded in 1991, the story of Epic began in the basement of Sweeney's parents' home in the affluent D.C. In the infrequent times he is not working, he said, you'll more than likely find him walking in the woods somewhere. ![]() His office uniform is described as a T-shirt and cargo pants and he says his favorite food is Bojangles' fried chicken. In the same interview, he is described as a "youthful" man who maintains an informal presence at work. So I lead a fairly simple life," he told The Wall Street Journal in a rare interview earlier this year. He has put that personal fortune to work buying up tens of thousands of acres of forest land in North Carolina, all of which he plans to preserve. 244 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world's richest people. His personal fortune, valued at $7.2 billion, ranks him at No. Over the past decade, he has become one of North Carolina's most prolific conservationists and largest private landowners. Outside of Epic, where he works long hours, Sweeney's interest seems to revolve around conservation. The most common place you'll find his thinking is in his preferred medium of Twitter, where he calls out tech giants like Google for monopolistic tendencies and vows to protect free expression on "Fortnite," even though a Chinese company owns a 40% stake in Epic. Sweeney, through his spokesperson at Epic, declined to be interviewed for this article. And, if you were to make it to the front desk, a stack of non-disclosure agreements would await your signature. You could drive by the growing Epic Games corporate campus in the eastern part of Cary, not far from Crossroads Shopping Center, and not even realize it was there. ![]() Yet, for most people, he remains an enigma.īoth Sweeney and his company remain private most of the time. That growth makes the company's founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, 49, one of the most influential business leaders in the country these days-and perhaps the world. More than 250 million people have now registered to play "Fortnite," and the game has brought in billions of dollars in revenue to the company, which now sports a valuation of $15 billion. Tencent bought 40% of the company in 2012 and it remains a shareholder.Since releasing "Fortnite," one of the most popular video games on earth, the Cary-based game maker has upturned the video game industry, revolutionized the way a generation of kids play-and parents pay for-video games and supercharged its growth to become one of the most valuable private companies in the U.S. The company has raised $1.6 billion to date, including $1.25 billion raised in 2018. Epic used a lot of that money to invest in its Epic Games Store, expanding its staff for Fortnite and Unreal Engine, and some acquisitions. In 2018, Epic Games did better than it did in 2019. ![]() Fortnite also garnered a huge amount of attention for staging a virtual Travis Scott concert that drew more than 27 million people. Epic has said that in April, players spent 3.2 billion hours in the battle royale shooter. In April alone, thanks to the pandemic, Fortnite revenue was $400 million, sources told me. Revenue for 2020 is forecast to be $5 billion, with EBITDA of $1 billion. In 2019, Epic Games reported $4.2 billion in revenue and $730 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA, a key measure of profitability). ![]()
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