Why Epic Games Called an Open Platform Truce With Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes: A couple of years ago, Microsoft and Epic Games executives were mad at each other. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney called out Microsoft because he saw it making moves to close off the Windows 10 store and hurt the openness of the PC. Sweeney spoke up because he foresaw the arrival of new computing platforms like augmented reality and virtual reality, and he wanted those platforms to remain open. And now Sweeney has changed his tune, throwing Epic Games' support behind Microsoft's HoloLens 2 Development Edition, which will begin selling for $3,500 later this year.

He did that because Microsoft did a turnabout and approached HoloLens 2 as an open platform. And Epic Games will launch Unreal Engine 4 support for the hardware by the end of May. In an interview this week with GamesBeat, Sweeney said the companies had largely solved their differences with it comes to making choices in support of openness. "Epic loves Microsoft," he said. "Epic hearts Microsoft."

Divisions of Reality

[Anonymous Coward]

So in the future HoloLens will be the gatekeeper between the Real and the Unreal, tournaments will be won with emoticons and the stream of royalties stay ever uninterrupted.

The answer is obvious.

[Gravis Zero]

It's money, it's always money. I didn't even have to read past the title and I knew this was about money. It's not "for the good of the community" or any other bullshit they may claim, it's plain and simple, they expect to make more money this way.

If anyone tells you it's not because of money then they just lied to you.

Re:The answer is obvious, but a dead-end

[default luser]

Yes, the reason for this move is obvious. Tim sees Steam vR platform(with recent Index announcement) and Occulus Store already with plenty of momentum behind them, and they want a piece of that action for as cheap an investment as they can get.

Unfortunately, there is no real value in this investment, because Microsoft charges thousands of dollars for the things. There's no indication that HoloLens the platform is about to get a major price cut, so there's no consumer marketplace for game developers to target.

HoloLens has always been targeted at business application developers. Tim Sweny proves once again how clueless he is in estimating the future of anything - the broken nature of the Epic Game Store tells you how little of it was planned, and how well any of those plans worked-out.

Re:

[locopuyo]

He created his own company and has made 10s of billions of dollars but yeah he's totally the idiot and you're the business genius. Unreal engine couldn't possibly be used for business purposes with a device that displays 3D graphics in real time.

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[blahplusplus]

He created his own company and has made 10s of billions of dollars but yeah he's totally the idiot and you're the business genius. Unreal engine couldn't possibly be used for business purposes with a device that displays 3D graphics in real time.

Haha Tim sweeney did at one point work hard in the early 90's with other creating unreal and unreal tournament. That is no longer, the internet enabled game companies to steal game software and not give it to customers because they can now just keep it at their office like the mafia and extract tribute (microtransactions) form the indebted slave classes who are trapped 100's of miles away. The internet gave EPIC, Valve and all other software companies access to people with impulse control problems and who

Re:

[ooshna]

As much as I hate Epic, just because they take advantage of people's impulse control, they also were smart enough not to make micro transactions mandatory in Fortnite. By making purchases completely optional by only having cosmetics, they avoided the ire of people who hate the pay2win model. Also it's not a market for lemons. People get the game free and no the money they put in is to only get digital clothes for their digital dolls. Its not Battlefront 2 with their lootbox system.

Re:

[default luser]

Yeah, you keep on pretending that just because he got lucky-as hell with Fortnight that he suddenly can put on the Big Kid Shoes.

There are no major CAD engines that use Unreal Engine.

Epic recently announced Unreal Studio, which is just a poor copy of Enscape 3D real-time render plugins [enscape3d.com] that have existed for all major the major CAD makers for years, so it's not exactly an under-served market.

And theey're really too late to hope to have any impact, as most iof the major render systems have read the trends an

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Can'tNot]

Yes, you certainly didn't read past the title. Did you even read the title? The claim was not "the good of the community," the claim was that Microsoft was creating a closed platform and Epic changed their position "because Microsoft did a turnabout and approached HoloLens 2 as an open platform."

And yes, of course it's about money. Epic sells their stuff primarily on Windows, and they need to maintain an open channel to their customers. This is the same reason why Valve started supporting Linux and did t

"Open"

[thegarbz]

Interesting criteria coming from someone who just bought Rocket League developer and intends to pull it from every platform except Epic's own.
Fuck Tim Sweeney.

Hey publishers take note, this guy is singlehandedly making piracy relevant again.