Unity is entering the Epic Games universe.
Earlier today at Unity’s Unite 2025 conference in Barcelona, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney joined Unity CEO and president Matt Bromberg onstage to announce that the two companies are partnering to allow game developers using Unity to publish their games onto Fortnite, thus participating in the growing creator economy taking shape on Epic Games’ platform. At the same time, Unity announced that in early 2026 it will begin to support Unreal Engine in its cross-platform commerce platform, giving Unreal Engine developers more options to manage their web shops and payment systems.
“We’re excited to partner with Epic Games to create more opportunities for game developers around the world,” Bromberg said in a statement. “Choice and open systems create growth for everyone in the gaming ecosystem.”
By building more robust bridges with Epic Games, Unity is throwing its hat in with Epic in the Fortnite developer’s ongoing mission to be the primary builder of an expansive metaverse rooted in gaming. The companies’ press release announcing the partnerships explicitly gestured toward this goal, framing the news as a step forward for gaming’s “open, interoperable future.”
“Unity developers will be able to publish games directly into Fortnite and appear in Fortnite’s discovery system alongside games built in Unreal Engine, and participate in the Fortnite economy as it evolves towards an open metaverse economy connecting all users and all engines,” Sweeney said during his onstage talk.
Unity and Epic Games have promised to share more information about their partnership in early 2026, but the potential scale of their combined audience is considerable. Fortnite has over 500 million accounts registered worldwide, according to numbers shared by Epic Games, and Unity has shared that its mobile games garner an average of 3 billion downloads per month. Investors have reacted with enthusiasm, driving Unity’s share price up by nearly 6 percent immediately following the companies’ Unite 2025 announcement.
Unity’s announcement of a partnership with Epic Games is in line with the company’s previously stated goal of empowering its developers to publish and grow their games across all platforms — a key focus of this year’s Unite conference.
Over 1,500 developers are currently in Barcelona for Unite’s technical sessions and networking, making it a key stop on the company’s messaging tour as it looks to smooth over any doubts from developers following its attempt to implement a so-called Runtime Fee last year. Sweeney is a popular figure within the developer community, and his appearance onstage at Unite 2025 elicited raucous cheers and claps from the crowd.
“Recently, we got together with Unity and realized that we all share a common view of the need to support fair and open digital platforms, and one of the big challenges for developers now is the fragmentation of tools and publishing pathways,” Sweeney said during the talk. “Just like in the early days of the web, we believe that companies need to work together to build open and interoperable systems, and we’re doing this now.”