Tim Sweeney Says Fortnite's Biggest Challenge Is Convincing People It's 'The Everything Game' and Not Just a Battle Royale

Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney has discussed the future of Fortnite, and the developer's continued desire to grow the game from something known primarily as a battle royale into a platform that offers experiences of numerous different genres.

Several years after Fortnite's much-promoted Big Bang event that launched Lego Fortnite, Rock Band developer Harmonix's Festival and Rocket League maker Psyonix's Rocket Racing, Sweeney told IGN at Unreal Fest 2025 that Epic Games' key issue remained the fact that people still think of Fortnite simply as its leading battle royale portion.

"That's our central challenge, to have everybody recognize that Fortnite is the everything game and you can experience anything there," Sweeney said, "and that's going to take time. We're going to have to deliver on a lot of other really awesome genres."

Progress towards that goal has, so far, been steady. Festival continues to attract big name music acts to headline its seasons with new player skins and music drops. Lego Fortnite Odyssey, a survival crafting experience, has a solid player core. But Rocket Racing has largely been retired, and newer shooter-centric modes such as Reload have found more success.

During its State of Unreal show this week, Epic Games noted that a third-party experience in Fortnite had momentarily overtaken Epic's own core modes for the first time, something that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. But Epic Games' own non-shooter modes currently show no signs of replicating this success, with player numbers well below that of the developer's main Battle Royale and Zero Build playlists, let alone Reload or the game's Fortnite OG throwback offering.

When asked by IGN whether engagement for modes such as the musical Fortnite Festival and various Lego Fortnite experiences were where Epic Games wanted them to be, Epic Games executive vice president Sax Persson replied: "I don't think we're ever happy."

"I think the shooter modes have done well," Sweeney added. "I think we've not yet achieved the magic that we've been hoping to achieve with the music gameplay. It's funny, we brought in the Harmonix team, [they] joined Epic, built Rock Band and Guitar Hero in the past, they're an awesome team, and they've been riffing on approaches to that genre and Fortnite.

"They've also been bringing in all kinds of music items into Fortnite with Jam Tracks, which have not only a song, but all the beats associated with them, and ability to play them on your instruments."

"Music has done extraordinarily well in Fortnite, but ironically, not so much in music games.

Still, despite Fortnite's hugely-popular musical live events generating massive interest and player numbers in the millions, Epic has not yet found a formula that generates regular engagement of the same kind.

"Music has done extraordinarily well in Fortnite, but ironically, not so much in music games," Sweeney noted, "more just in Battle Royale and elsewhere. Our next step is to figure out music at a large scale.

"I think as Rock Band and Guitar Hero themselves achieved in their day, which was a decade or two decades ago, there's an opportunity for a music game with tens of millions of monthly active users that people just absolutely love and come to every evening or weekend for the coolest concert and competitive gameplay of all sorts."

How about Lego, then, the brand that's perhaps now the most deeply entrenched within the Fortnite ecosystem, and the offering that's most popular of all Epic's non-shooter modes.

"I think Lego is interesting, Persson said. "We are super proud of [the] journey and it has a really dedicated fan base. But is it as big as we would want it to be? No, we would love to have it bigger and figure out a way to get more Lego fans to see that this exists."

Again, it sounds like Epic is still facing the issue that Fortnite currently remains a brand associated with being a battle royale more than anything else.

"What's our primary challenge? Our primary challenge is Fortnite is Fortnite, and historically Fortnite was a shooter game," Persson continued. "It is not a shooter game anymore. It is the everything game, and we need to tell that story better than what we've done."

One solution to this will be the forthcoming rollout of improved capabilities for third-party teams working within Fortnite's Unreal Engine-powered editor, UEFN, Sweeney said. Epic currently has a better toolset than other creators, but this will change over time — to the point that Epic's own battle royale seasons will eventually (now in 2026) be made with the same tools as any creator could have access to.

"When we develop our modes, we're working with C++ and the entire Unreal Engine, [while] creators working with the toolset that we built, it's Verse and some APIs," Sweeney noted.

"Our big task now is to get the two of those development frameworks to converge so that we, Epic, and creators are working in the exact same tools with the exact same capabilities and creators will have way more power at their disposal there, and that's been the thing that we've been working so hard on for the last two years."

"I would say we're only successful with Fortnite as an ecosystem"

But why not just settle with being a brilliantly successful battle royale? For Epic Games, the future of Fortnite as a continued experience — and source of enormous income for the company — rests on its continued evolution and ongoing cultural relevance, amid the ever-changing landscape of popular video game tastes and genres.

"I would say we're only successful with Fortnite as an ecosystem," Sweeney concluded. "If somebody else actually beats us at our game, and builds something that's bigger and cooler and better than battle royale... I think there's a high probability of that happening.

"If you look at the shooter genre, it evolved with new game types coming out over time based on what was possible with the current technology," he added, noting the evolution of shooters from simple games of Deathmatch to modes with larger player counts and vehicles. "Battle Royale just happens to be the best shooter genre yet invented — and thanks to both the Japanese movie makers and [PUBG creator] Brendan Green for discovering the magic there. But it's definitely not the last. There'll be more and it'll get even better and new technologies are going to make things that are currently impossible, possible, and I think that's going to unleash unexpected surprises and creativity."

It's been a busy week for Epic Games, which has been talking about the future of AI in its Unreal Engine and in Fortnite following the recent release of a very chatty AI-powered Darth Vader. We've also heard from Epic and The Witcher 4 developer CD Projekt Red on that eye-catching Witcher 4 demo — and whether the final game will actually look anything like it.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social