Fortnite boss introduces new tech, hails nearly 1 billion players at the same time

In an interview, Tim Sweeney, president and founder of Fortnite and Epic Games, talked about the future of Unreal Engine 6, which focuses on servers and network architecture.

What is this new technology? In an interview with Double shocks Epic Games and Fortnite boss Tim Sweeney has talked about the future of Unreal Engine 6. Fortnite is powered by the engine, along with other popular games like Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong.

The engine is currently in its fifth version. Now the president talked about the new update and what needs to be improved.

You can watch the Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 3 trailer here.

Fortnite with 1,000,000,000 players at once

What is the focus of the update? Version 6 of the engine is primarily aimed at improving the server and network architecture. In the future, it should be possible to support millions, if not a billion players at the same time.

One of the big efforts we're doing for Unreal Engine 6 is improving the network model, where we have servers that support multiple players and the ability to seamlessly move players between servers and all the servers in a single data center or in multiple data centers to talk to each other and coordinate simulations on the scale of millions, or maybe even billions in the future, of concurrent players.

Tim Sweeney

The CEO also hints that Fortnite could have 200-player lobbies in the not-too-distant future. In the past, this has been technically impossible. “We can [damals] “We can't have 200 players on one server,” he says, citing the engine's limitations as an example.

What is the impact of borders today? The president explains that the current limits are the reason why Fortnite is “split into a variety of different islands.” Map creators currently can’t put their content together in one big world.

It's not currently possible for Epic Games servers to communicate with each other, so Fortnite could have 10 million players, but everyone would be playing on their own “separate version of the world.”

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