Unity surprised everyone this morning during the Unite 2025 keynote in Barcelona, Spain, when Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was suddenly called on stage to announce a partnership between the two companies behind the most used third-party game engines in the industry.
Sweeney said he spoke with Matthew Bromberg, president and CEO of Unity (who replaced John Riccitiello after the former CEO's resignation following the runtime fee controversy), about the companies' shared objective of supporting open digital platforms.
The first result of this collaboration will be that Unity's brand-new in-app purchase software development kit (SDK) will soon be available to Unreal Engine developers, allowing them to choose this API to handle cross-platform purchases. Sweeney noted that this will become even more important now that Google and Apple are being forced (after Epic's lawsuits) to open up the Android and iOS ecosystems a little.
Arguably, though, the bigger news is that the Fortnite ecosystem, which boasts 500 million registered accounts, is embracing games made in Unity. Sweeney said:
Fortnite is a huge game that hit 100 million monthly active users last Holiday. And though it began as a little Battle Royale game that we built, over time, it's evolved into an ecosystem where 40% of playtime is going to third-party content built by independent developers. They're earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year from participating in Fortnite, and 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 to participate in the Fortnite economy as it evolves towards an open metaverse economy connecting all users and all engines.
In somewhat related news, Fortnite recently allowed Island Creators to sell items within their Islands, including random rewards that appear to be functionally similar to lootboxes.
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