How a legal decision and AI tools can change the game industry | Tim Sweeney interview

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
July 15, 2025
11 min

A few weeks ago seems like an eternity in the game business. But that’s when we talked to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney during the Unreal Fest in the shadow of Walt Disney World. And it was great to capture Sweeney’s state of mind at a critical time for his company’s main gaming franchise, Fortnite, which has generated tens of billions in revenue to date.

Our Q&A started out with a query to Sweeney about the significance of getting Fortnite back in the U.S. Apple App Store — after 4.5 years of litigation with the world’s biggest tech company.

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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.