Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed the hit battle royale shooter Fortnite has “no plans currently” to come to Quest, although he hasn’t ruled it out entirely.
Here’s what Sweeney said in response to X user ‘TheoryDecrypt’:
No plans currently. For it to be successful we’d need a lot of players across all platforms spending a lot of their time on islands whose locomotion mechanics wouldn’t have VR players barfing. We’ve gone from 0 to 1 such popular mechanics but it’s not a critical mass yet.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) June 30, 2024
It’s pretty clear by now Sweeney doesn’t think VR would work well with Fortnite, as he’s basically echoing a statement he made in 2022 in an interview with The Verge.
“Epic has no plans to build a VR version of Fortnite. Not out of any grand business strategy, but just because the thing that we do in Fortnite every day as gamers is run through an environment rapidly, and it’s the kind of experience that involves intense motion and doesn’t work as well in VR,” Sweeney told The Verge. “And so if we were to ever do anything in VR, it would have to be something that’s really custom tailored for the experience. And it’s not that we have any negative view of that. We just have 101 things to do.”
The whole ‘barfing’ part of his latest statement though feels a little outdated in 2024, making it seem like Sweeney really hasn’t checked back into VR recently. In contrast to the early days of VR, modern games tend to include a number of comfort options as standard, such as variable snap-turn, FOV vignettes, ‘comfort’ cages, and the full gamut of locomotion options. Notably, any of these can be used to render “intense motion” into something stomachable for all.
Still, Sweeney may be right about VR not being a right fit for Fortnite, and it may be less about nerfing the game’s “intense” locomotion to level the playing field, and more about how VR gameplay is so different from flatscreen in the advantages and disadvantages it brings to the table.
For a VR player, it may be more difficult to rapidly build yourself out of a sticky situation like on flatscreen, but easier to do a host of other actions, like ducking and shooting around corners, going prone behind cover, and doing complex actions flatscreen users simply can’t, like physically catching an extra magazine your teammate throws you.
Whatever the case, we’re hoping Sweeney changes his tune on VR comfort, maybe by reading our handy VR comfort checklist which we use for game reviews.
