Epic CEO on 250 million Fortnite players, digital humans, and $100 million dev fund

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
March 20, 2019
Updated June 19, 2025
16 min

Epic Games dumped a bunch of news about the state of the Unreal Engine at its keynote talk at the Game Developers Conference today. We got a preview of the news and were able to interview Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, and Kim Libreri, chief technology officer.

Sweeney said Fortnite has reached 250 million players, and that the popular battle royale game hasn’t seen a drop off because of rival EA’s popular Apex Legends. He said the largesse from Fortnite will enable Epic Games to set up a new $100 million fund for Unreal Mega Grants for game developers.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.