Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.
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Their wordsA lot of what they're facing isn't the challenge of learning a new art. It's friction introduced by failures of programming language design.
Their wordsThe biggest limitation that's built up over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run a single-threaded simulation. If you have a 16 core CPU, we're using one core for game simulation and running with the complicated game logic because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded programming.
Their wordsAnd by doing this, removing this from being a programming problem for the programmer to deal with, to being a language problem for us language designers to deal with. And we're moving a vast amount of pain that would be imposed on a million people, instead to a vast amount of pain imposed on a small number of people to have to actually make this work.
Their wordsWe'd constantly be improving the tools and just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games. The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you prove, you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way way way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day.
Their wordsIt is the number one trend for pervading the world of gaming today. And it says that your game is quadratically more valuable the more percentage of a user's real-world friends they can connect to.
Their wordsAnd when you look at a lot of the games that failed recently, they just didn't deliver fun or they didn't deliver fun in a manner that was nearly competitive with the other sources of fun just in people's lives. And so at a basic level, we don't need a terribly complicated theory to explain a lot of the malaise in the game industry.
Their wordsYou can't calculate every photon in the scene. You need really detailed approximations, and that's the field of computer graphics. It's about increasingly effective approximations of the laws of physics, which are just totally intractable.