Epic Games is a video game and software Development Company that is based in Cary, North Carolina, the United States of America. The company was initially known as Potomac Computer Systems, founded by Tim Sweeney in 1991. Upon being founded, the company was located in the house of Tim’s parents in Potomac, Maryland. The first commercial game that the company released was called ZZT, in 1991 and thereafter, the name of the company changed to Epic MegaGames, Inc. in 1992.
Mark Rein joined the company in 1992, and currently, he serves as the company’s vice president. In 1999, Epic MegaGames headquarters were moved to Cary, and the name of the company was simplified to Epic Games. The company develops the Unreal Engine, which is a commercially available game engine that powers the video games that have been developed internally. Unreal Engine emerged the most successful videogame engine by the Guinness World Records in 2014.
Tim Sweeney is the majority shareholder, while Tencent, who is a Chinese developer, has 48.4%, which he acquired in 2012. The company operates sub-studios in Seoul, Yokohama, Berlin, Seattle, and England. It also owns video game developers Cloudgine, Chair Entertainment, and Psyonix.
Inception
The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991 when he was a student at the University of Maryland. Initially, the company was a computer consulting business, but he later scrapped the idea after realizing it would have taken a lot of work to keep the business stable.
He finished a game he was working on called ZZT in 1991, and he thought of re-using Potomac Computer Systems name to release the game. The game became a bigger success than Tim had anticipated, and it made him consider changing his company to a video game company.
In 1992, Tim was the company’s only employee, and he thought of hunting for a business partner. His search came to an end when he caught Mark Rein, who had previously quit his job at id Software.
Mark, who remotely worked from Toronto, was the one handling sales, publishing, and marketing deals. By 1993, the company had more than 30 employees, and at the time, it was operating under the name Epic MegaGames. Some of their first releases were Fire Fight, and Unreal, with the latter, later being expanded to a series called Unreal games.
Evolution
In 1999, Epic MegaGames announced the change of location as they moved to the new headquarters in Cary, North Carolina. They also announced a change of their name from Epic MegaGames to Epic Games. The company’s vice president said that they moved to Cary to enable all the developers to be under one roof for more efficiency.
As a way of promoting their games, the company came up with a competition called Make Something Unreal, in 2004. The aim was to reward video game developers who created mods using the Unreal game engine. In the first contest, a developer by the name of Tripwire won $80,000 in cash and other computer hardware gadgets.
In 2006, Epic released one of their successful gams at that time called Gears of War. The company grossed about $100 million out of the $12 million initial budget. The following year they released Unreal Tournament 3. The third game in the Gears of War 3 series was released in 2011, and by then, the games were made accessible through different platforms like Apple iOS and Android.
Epic Games announced its new game Fortnite in 2011, and by July 2017, it was in a state for public play. After hitting the market, there arose PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was released, and upon seeing this Epic Games developed Fortnite Battle Royale, which was developed in under two months. The Fortnite Battle Royale gained a large audience very quickly, and as of May 2018, it had more than 125 million players. To date, Fortnite is one of the games that have greatly increased the popularity as well as revenue in Epic Games.
Epic acquired the developer of Rocket League, Psyonix, in May 2019. The same year they acquired the Twinmotion visualization tool from Abvent. The tool is used in architectural design, and they plan to expand their Unreal Engine offerings. In November 2019, Epic went ahead and acquired the world’s largest photogrammetry asset library, Quixel. The company plans to open Quixel’s existing library to users of Unreal Engine.
Awards & Achievements
Epic Games is one of the most successful video game companies of all time. In 2019, the company won the BAFTA Award. Apart from that, their video games can be accessed through different platforms from all over the world, and that is a very big achievement.
Net Worth of Epic Games in 2024
As of November 2024, The net worth of Epic Games is estimated to be over $18 billion. In 2018, the company made a profit of $3 billion, and this has greatly increased the value of the company. The fortune at Epic has greatly been boosted by the video game Fortnite Battle Royale, which had 250 million players as of March 2019.
These days, video games have become very popular among people of all ages, and one of the companies developing such games is Epic Games. The company was founded in 1991 by Tim Sweeney, and over the year, it has grown to be among the top game developers in the world. Some of the games it has developed is the famous Fortnite Battle Royale, which was developed in 2017, and as of March 2019, it had more than 250 million players.