At the Unity Unite 2025 conference held recently in Barcelona, ​​Spain, an unexpected cooperation was announced.Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was invited to the stage to jointly announce with Unity President and CEO Matthew Bromberg that the two industry-leading engine companies have officially established a partnership.This move marks the beginning of the integration of the two major engine ecosystems and is regarded by the industry as an important step towards an open digital platform.

The first concrete result of this cooperation is technology sharing.Unity’s new in-app purchase software development kit will soon be available to Unreal Engine developers.This move will give the Unreal Engine project an efficient and reliable option when dealing with cross-platform purchases.Sweeney specifically pointed out that this kind of cross-engine tool support is particularly important at a time when Apple and Google are forced to gradually open up their mobile ecosystems due to antitrust lawsuits.

The most eye-catching part of this cooperation is the full opening of the "Fortnite" ecosystem to Unity games.Sweeney revealed on stage that "Fortnite" has more than 500 million registered accounts and achieved the milestone of 100 million monthly active users during last year's holiday season.

"It has evolved from a small tactical competitive game we built ourselves into an ecosystem - 40% of game time is now spent on third-party content created by independent developers." Sweeney said, "These developers earn hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year from participating in the Fortnite ecosystem. And now, thanks to a superior network technology developed by Unity, all Unity games will be able to connect to this ecosystem."

According to official instructions, starting next year, Unity developers will be able to publish their games directly to the Fortnite platform.These games will appear in Fortnite's content discovery system, compete with games made using Unreal Engine, and participate in Fortnite's economic system.This move is seen as a key step in the evolution of "Fortnite" into an "open metaverse economy" that connects all users and all engines.

This cooperation also marks that Unity, under the leadership of its new leadership, is actively opening a new chapter and is committed to creating a more open and connected future for developers.