Epic Games is over single-player campaigns

All free-to-play online games from here on out

Epic Games is transitioning away from developing single-player games, the studio tells Polygon.

The company plans to develop smaller, free-to-play online games like Paragon, Fortnite, and the new Unreal Tournament, rather than more expensive, campaign-driven experiences like Gears of War.

“The economics of those games forces developers to work with major publishers to succeed, and that seems to be irreversible,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told Polygon in a recent interview.

“We realized that the business really needed to change its approach quite significantly,” Sweeney also said. “We were seeing some of the best games in the industry being built and operated as live games over time rather than big retail releases … so we began the transition of being a fairly narrow console developer focused on Xbox to being a multi-platform game developer and self publisher, and indie on a larger scale.”

According to multiple sources at the studio, the plan is for many of these games to be “dynamic” — meaning they will essentially be released unfinished and continue to evolve post-launch.

Epic Games might never make another single-player game [Polygon]