Epic Games Turns 30: Only a Team With Strong Will Can Create a Hit Product

Unreal Engine 5's global debut last night instantly swept the screen. Some people say that it will bring a subversive change to the industry. What kind of big boss is behind such a shocking product?

Last night and all day today, Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) was all over the news. Countless netizens held their phones and licked the screens while watching the real-time demo running on PlayStation 5.

Game and film and television practitioners: The film, television, animation and game industries are about to change, and a new era is about to come; Artists: The workload will be reduced by 60%!

Behind these amazing achievements is a team of geniuses and iron-blooded people.

Hot ticket circle: real-life experience, hard to tell the real from the fake

First, let’s take a look at how powerful UE 5 is.

The details it renders in real time are just like real pictures taken in real time, including the texture of rocks and the reflection of light, which makes it difficult to tell whether it is a real scene or a game.

Although the official release will have to wait until 2021, this 9-minute demonstration has already made everyone drop their jaws.

These effects are all thanks to two new core technologies of UE 5:Nanite and Lumen.

Nanite virtual micropolygon geometry allows engineers to create all the geometric details that the human eye can see.This means that any film-quality artwork composed of polygons can be directly imported into Unreal Engine without any loss of picture quality..

Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that responds to scene and lighting changes in real time.And no specialized ray tracing hardware is required.

The system can render indirect specular reflections and diffuse reflections with infinite bounces in large and detailed scenes. Lumen can handle everything from millimeters to kilometers.

Black technology does not rely on hardware, but on technology

From an industry perspective, the truly amazing thing about UE5 is not only the leap in image quality, but also,It greatly speeds up the production process of game graphics.

The existing process usually requires UV development (skin of three-dimensional model), baking, texture making, and rendering after the model is completed.The production cycle takes 15-20 days.

From the design of the previous generation UE 4, AI technology has already begun to show its power.

In Unreal Engine 4 (UE 4), tools such as behavior trees, environment query systems, AI perception, and AI debugging have been added to create artificial intelligence for non-player characters in your project.

From creating game characters, formulating action strategies, sensing environmental changes, diagnosing problems and other steps, AI tools can be used to help users create a better game development experience.

The amazing team behind the amazing project

The team that created these amazing special effects is Epic Games, a well-known gaming company in the gaming field.

  A game development company with nearly 30 years of history 

Epic Games was founded in 1991 and has studios in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and South Korea. The company currently has more than 1,000 employees and is one of the most prestigious game production teams in the past decade.

In 2012, Tencent invested $330 million in Epic and acquired 48.4% of its shares. Today, Epic Games' valuation has far exceeded $15 billion.

Epic Games' work includes: Unreal Series, Gears of War, Infinity Blade, Paragon, Fortnite, Agent Jinx, War Breakers, Robo Recall, and the newly released Unreal Tournament.

 CEO: The father of Unreal Engine worth $4.5 billion 

CEO of Unreal Engine Team Tim Sweeney,He has the resounding title of "Father of Unreal Engine", is a 3D engine design genius, a recognized technical expert, and a celebrity on the rich list.

He entered the world of video games when he first came into contact with Nintendo's Space Firebird at the age of 9, but he was not interested in playing video games. He was more obsessed with spending time to reproduce the logic of the games himself.

He started learning programming at the age of 11, and earned $100 a day with just one game, "ZZT", in college. At the age of 21, he founded Epic and personally participated in the development of the first generation of Unreal Engine.

This young man who truly loves game technology development has gradually created his own game business empire.

At the 2017 Game Developers Conference (GDC), Tim received "Lifetime Achievement Award in Gaming"He is a skilled businessman with a strong business sense. In April 2020, he was ranked 383rd on the Forbes Rich List with a net worth of $4.5 billion.

His main idea is to look at game development from the perspective of tools and provide game development tools, allowing anyone to use these development tools to make their own games.

 CTO: Former Lucasfilm, worked on The Matrix 

Chief Technology Officer of Epic Games Kim Libreri,He is also a well-known figure in the film and television industry. He is responsible for integrating advanced technology and visual arts at Epic.

Prior to joining Epic Games, Kim was Chief Strategy Officer at Lucasfilm, where he was responsible for the company's Star Wars technology strategy and interactive storytelling innovations, including the acclaimed 1313 prototype. 

Kim has been working in the field of digital technology and visual effects for more than 20 years. He has a reputation for designing many films.Including Super Eight, Speed Racer, Poseidon, and The Matrix Trilogy.

His contributions to these technologies have earned him numerous awards, including an Oscar nomination in 2006 and two Academy Awards in 2000 and 2015.

  Team: Perhaps the most stressful company to work for in the Western Hemisphere 

With such a big shot leading the company, it has gathered a group of talented people.

Brian Karis and Daniel Wright, the masters who worked on UE5's Lumen and Nanite technologies, are also known as geniuses.

In addition to their extraordinary abilities, the Epic Games team is also very hardworking.

In 2017, Epic Games officially released "Fortnite". It has been six years since the project was announced in 2011, and five years since Tencent acquired a stake in it in 2012.

One year after its launch, Fortnite has achieved huge success.As of the beginning of this year, the number of players exceeded 350 million, with the peak number of online players reaching 12.3 million.In comparison, the highest concurrent player record for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on Steam is only over 3 million.

The huge success has also brought unprecedented pressure. An employee in the operations department said, "In the past, we only received about 50 customer service tickets a day, but now we receive 1,500 to 2,000 customer service tickets a day."

Polygon, a well-known European and American gaming media, spent several months interviewing Epic Games about their work status.The survey found that many employees work more than 70 hours a week, and some employees work up to 100 hours a week.

"If employees are unwilling to work overtime on weekends, they are likely to be interviewed or even fired."

Epic Games is also known as the "iron-blooded client". It is rumored that if suppliers are unwilling to work overtime to complete the tasks or are unwilling to exceed the tasks, their contracts will be terminated soon.

This kind of wolf culture makes Epic Games completely unlike an American company that advocates "Work-Life Balance". In recent years, Epic Games has even been criticized for excessive overtime and not caring about the health of its employees.

All these efforts have achieved results that are difficult to surpass.

In 2019, Fortnite's global total revenue was US$1.8 billion (approximately RMB 12.5 billion), making it the world's most profitable video game for the second consecutive year.

By 2021, the 30th anniversary of Epic Games, Unreal Engine 5 will be officially released, perhaps becoming a birthday present for this legendary gaming company.

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