Tim Sweeney is the CEO of Epic Games the company which made the ever smashing and successful game Fortnite. Sweeney basking in the success of his game was invited out as a guest speaker for the annual Dice Summit. This is where he openly talked about the Video Gaming industry and spilled all the tea on its working and methodologies.

This is the talk where he had quoted that “Video companies should divorce from politics”. His statement caused him a lot of heat and backlash from his listeners and social media. He had to then go onto Twitter to clear his stance. He explained that he didn’t mean to say that video games should avoid politics at all but rather wanted to say that games that tackle politics should do so from a creative perspective rather than a marketing one. Further elaborating he said that the game platforms themselves should be “operating as neutral venues for entertainment and employees customers —and everybody else could hold their own views and not be judged by the company for that”.

Here’s one of the key views I shared at DICE. If a game tackles politics as To Kill a Mockingbird did as a novel it should come from the heart of creatives and not from marketing departments seeking to capitalize on division. https://t.co/x4eARz7Yyz

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) February 12 2020

He further elaborated that we live in a world where our political affiliation determines what chicken restaurant we go to. There’s no reason to drag divisive topics like that into gaming. Not only this on other hand he says that we need to create a very clear separation between church and state employees customers and everyone else should be able to express themselves. Video companies as companies need to divorce themselves from politics and that the platforms should be neutral.”

Apart from this hot gossip his speech touched many other hot topics like the marketing tie-ins which says that if a company has an awesome new product it starts releasing free stuff in games and people get engaged with it. Loot boxes at which he raised the question of do we want to be like Las Vegas with slot machines … or do we want to be widely respected as creators of products that customers can trust? Thereafter he discussed the cross-platform games where he explained that the companies really need to accept equal access to all customers and give up their attempts to create their own private wall guard or private monopoly. In the end he talked about privacy blaming Google and Facebook for offering free services that customers pay for with a “loss of privacy and loss of freedom”.

Sweeney’s viewpoints seem to be pretty scattered and also very unclear. He wants creatives to be allowed to make political games but that game companies that publish and distribute those games be politically neutral. The level of neutrality he talks about does fit in line with Epic’s past history when it comes to political issues.

Epic Games as a company says that it supports players and content creators in speaking out but won’t go as far as to actually stand up for any particular issue after all that might alienate people of a particular political or social view and offend a person’s personal opinion.

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