Fortnite Has Nearly the Entire Epic Games Team Working On It

For a while there, Epic Games had its investment in other projects, like the multiplayer action game Paragon and a forthcoming edition of Unreal Tournament for PC. But all that changed the millisecond Fortnite started rocketing to popularity.

As a result, Paragon is shutting down next month, and Unreal…well, we're not sure what happened to it. But we do know that a lot of Epic's team are working on the game, according to Rolling Stone.

Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, said, "We have 700 people at Epic and it's the majority. But it's a fairly unusual situation. We shipped with 25 people and now we're responding to the reaction.

"Right now we have a huge part of the company working on Fortnite and we have so many cool things we want to do. But that's certainly not the long-term intent. Epic has been around for 27 years, we definitely have different games we'll be working on."

Among those projects are smaller games like Spyjinx and Battlebreakers, along with so many Fortnite updates. "We learn from great experiences," explained Sweeney. "Fortnite has pushed the engine in a very positive way," and optimizing the game's recent mobile beta has been "hugely beneficial" to the publisher.

The team is learning from working on the game, too. "One of the lessons from Fortnite Battle Royale is that we spent years building a base game that was fun and achieved a base level of success," he said. "Then we had a small team do an experiment which turned out to be a complete game changer for a whole game. Being able to experiment like that is important."

But what's surprising is how little time was spent making Battle Royale a part of the game. "About four weeks in we started conducting internal play tests and it was just magical," Sweeney said. "It was like being in a Pixar movie and an action game and then there was this whole building dynamic.

"We saw it had potential at that point." But potential grew into something much, much larger.

Sweeney was also asked if Fortnite has become the publisher's most popular game. "We worked released Gears of War games over a period of ten years," he said. "But Fortnite is quite popular. More people have played it then have played Gears of War. There's no barrier of entry (for Fortnite) anyone can get in it."

The full interview can be found here.

Fortnite is available now for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.