Tim Sweeney retweeted
Epic Games just won its Australian antitrust case against Apple, and Fortnite is coming back to iPhones there. Here's what you need to know.
Tim Sweeney posted that the Australian Epic v Apple antitrust remedies were just issued. He called them "a huge victory for consumers and developers." He said Epic is studying the verdict and will share more soon.
Sweeney said the Court has freed Fortnite in Australia. It will return alongside the Epic Games Store, "soon." Epic's newsroom account went further and said Fortnite is coming back to the App Store in Australia tomorrow.
The Federal Court of Australia found that Apple violated competition law by restricting iOS app distribution and payments. It ordered Apple to open iOS, with no fixed expiry date on the order. Reports say Apple will appeal.
Australia was the one country left out when Fortnite returned to the App Store worldwide in May. Epic said then that Australia was blocked by what it called an illegal payment arrangement with Apple.
This follows the court's August 2025 finding that Apple and Google misused market power in breach of section 46 of the competition law.
What changes in Australia by March 2027:
- iOS must be open to third party app stores
- Alternative app stores, sideloading, third party payments and steering must be allowed
- Apple cannot hinder these options, with changes described as similar to the EU's DMA
- Fortnite returns to the App Store first, with the Epic Games Store to follow
Fans and developers are treating this as a big win for developer freedom. Critics say it could make Apple's ecosystem worse.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
Fortnite will return to Apple's app store in Australia, in another antitrust legal victory for Epic Games. gamesbeat.com/fortnite-will-…
One of my IRL friends recently got into UEFN after seeing how powerful Claude is. I'm giving his account a small push! Go check him out ya'll! @ClaudeFNC
Tim Sweeney retweeted
Big news: Fortnite is coming back to the App Store in Australia tomorrow!
Today the Australia Federal Court told Apple to open up iOS after finding they violated competition law. Here’s what’s changing in Australia in March 2027:
• iOS will be open to third party app stores
• Australian users will be able to download apps directly from developers
• Developers will be able to offer only alternative payment systems and Apple can’t require devs to offer Apple’s IAP, without charging junk fees
• Apple cannot block developers from pointing users outside apps to make purchases
• Apple is barred from charging junk fees on purchases made in third party app stores
This is great news for developers worldwide and iOS users in Australia who will benefit from an open mobile app ecosystem.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
Unreal Engine 5.8's new Iris replication system provided crucial communication between client and server for Gears of War: E-Day's multiplayer, both competitive and cooperative🌐
The Coalition were able to take advantage of Iris to help with network updates as well as bandwidth management between servers and players. Check out our piece on the game and how Iris other UE features factored into development: epic.gm/dev-interviews-gears…
The Australian Epic v Apple antitrust remedies were just issued, and are a huge victory for consumers and developers. We are studying the verdict and will share more soon.
The Court has freed Fortnite in Australia and it will return alongside the Epic Games Store…soon.
This is amazing and shows what would have taken a vast manual effort in the past can be done as a hobby project very efficiently. Truly a new age of gaming and software ahead.
I ported @TimSweeneyEpic's 1991 shareware PC classic, ZZT, to the Nintendo Entertainment System using Claude Code. One of the most underrated games of the '90s
ASCII art on a NES is more fun than it sounds. It runs on a standard MMC3 cart, real hardware, new soundtrack!
Tim Sweeney retweeted
Video 2 GLSL
I gave Claude Opus 5.5 a 20-second video clip. It rebuilt the whole thing as one GLSL fragment shader: 156 KB of code, no textures, no video frames. Just math, looping seamlessly
Tim Sweeney retweeted
One example: AI makes it extremely fast to prototype new features. Before you had to spend several days/weeks (depending on feature scope). It was awkward to throw away the feature if it wasn’t fun. People polished turd features as they already spent so much effort writing the proto. Now you don’t have such attachment anymore. AI agent spent a couple of hours writing it in a worktree and then you added dozen of prompts on top to quickly tweak it based on playtest iterations. You see quickly whether to throw away the feature or continue. You can even build features on top without risking the project schedule and throw them all away if fun and balance is not found. Similar ”what if” optimizations/refactorings can be done on engine side. For the first time, you actually have time to test all your ideas. Before you had ideas piling up and never had time to test them.
The entire comment section here is full of AI evangelists.
I systematically asked every single one of them for a SINGULAR example of what they espouse to be common fact, "How does AI amplify gamedev?".
NOT A SINGLE ONE has given an example.
The AI hype for gamedev is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
AI has enabled me to turn my ~5yr old hand-written Quake VR mod into my dream #virtualreality experience.
I would have never been able to implement all the features demonstrated below in such a short time with this level of quality and polish.
github.com/vittorioromeo/qua…
Replying to @MoralzzX
Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up. There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it - and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
Kernel Hearts success on Epic Games Store is a powerful example — bringing awesome content to players in a collaborative way that supports developers.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
What if @valvesoftware just outright banned AI art in games on it's platform?
Apart from Tim Sweeney bitching about it on twitter, what are the downsides?
Tim Sweeney retweeted
My stance in the AI discourse:
- I'm heavily pro-AI but anti-slop.
- I love human creativity & talent, and I don't think they can be replaced by AI. AI has no taste or emotions, which are the main drivers of true art.
- I use AI in almost everything I do/build, but never in a way that compromises quality or harms people. AI should be used to make things possible that weren't possible before, IMO.
- I have empathy for people who feel threatened by AI, especially those who love their craft, be it programming or art, worry that their work might lose value or be automated by AI. The threat is real, and it forces people to rethink and adapt.
- I don't have empathy for people who hate AI simply because they're miserable and want something to hate.
- AI is not what produces slop. It's people with the wrong mindset and a lack of passion for their work who do.
- I don't give a damn about tribalism and don't want any part of it.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
“Those who know cannot explain, those who don’t cannot understand.” That line from Dynamo Open Air ’96 has lived in my head for 30 years.
It’s becoming true again with AI in game development. You can’t really grasp how much the work is changing until you’ve spent real time building with the tools. Reading about it isn’t the same as feeling the shift in what you can make and how fast you can make it.
In the words of Gorilla Biscuits (band): Start Today.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
Worth mentioning that at Epic, we’ve been experimenting and monitoring the development of AI production tools for several years. It feels like we’ve now hit an inflection point where they’re genuinely adding value for developers. So time to fully commit.
Replying to @MoralzzX
Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up. There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it - and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
Rightly said, AI is just another tool. What matters is the output, and whether the audience enjoys the product.
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
Tim Sweeney retweeted
I agree with this but if you’re so soft that you can be bullied out of using AI then there’s no hope for you. This is a business for people with balls.
It’s good for Tim to talk about all this publicly. Us devs have been in the trenches being assaulted by AI haters in games. The discussion is over. Stop fighting it. No one is lesser because of it. Let’s make games and stop attaching morals to how they are made. People just want to create. Let us cook.
































