Unity devs will be able to publish games in Fortnite after Epic Games announces surprise collaboration
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There was a brief surprise appearance from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney at Unite 2025 in Barcelona today. He took to the stage to reveal a new collaboration between Epic Games and Unity that allows Unity games to be brought to Fortnite. The popular battle royale game has become much more than a standalone title. Sweeney notes that “40% of playtime [in Fortnite] is going to third-party content built by independent developers”.
It’s easy to see these two companies as big rivals, as Unity and Epic’s Unreal Engine are two of the most popular game engines right now, and have been for some time. But this collaboration shows Epic’s willingness to work with its biggest competition, though we don’t expect to see Fortnite on Steam any time soon.
Unity x Epic Games announcement
Fortnite has been developed to become its own ecosystem, and the support for Unity games is an interesting new addition. Right now, new experiences or ‘islands’ created by Fortnite players are locked within Epic’s tools, as Fortnite Creative mode (now just called Create) allows for custom user content built with Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), which you can think of as a cut-down, more Fortnite-focused version of the Unreal Engine 5 development kit.
“Now it’s going to open up to all Unity games, thanks to some really amazing network technology that Unity built, that connects other engines into Unity through a networking protocol to make this work. So starting next year, Unity developers will be able to publish games directly into Fortnite to appear in Fortnite’s discovery system alongside games built with Unreal Engine and participate in the Fortnite economy as it evolves towards an open metaverse economy, connecting all users and all engines.”
Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games
Outside of Fortnite, there have been some pretty big changes to the Epic Games Store as of late. This includes the addition of game gifting earlier this week and support for pre-loading on the store last month, at long last. Early this year, Sweeney admitted that the launcher “is clunky,” but ultimately, the team wants to create something as easy to use as Steam.