“Fortnite” has been around for a year, with the ” BattleRoyale ” version launched last September, where 100 players connected via the Internet end up on a post-apocalyptic island, with the last survivor winning the round. The highlight is that this version is free, and more than 125 million people worldwide have downloaded it in the meantime. Epic has nevertheless taken in more than $1.2 billion so far because people buy clothes and dances that don’t bring any benefits, but are funny and have already become part of pop culture: Footballer Antoine Griezmann, for example, celebrated his goal in the World Cup final with the “Fortnite” dance “Take the L”.

Epic could take in more than $2 billion this year from “Fortnite” alone, with total revenue expected to grow to $8.5 billion. The value of the unlisted company, in which Chinese media group Tencent has taken a 40 percent stake, is now estimated by financial experts at around eight billion dollars, and by the end of the year it could be 14 billion dollars, given the projected “Fortnite” revenues. This means that founder Tim Sweeney has given himself a present for the birthday of “Fortnite”; he is now a multiple billionaire.

Hourly wage of a tenth of a cent

Sweeney, 47, hails from the town of Potomac in the U.S. state of Maryland; he taught himself to program and started the company in the basement of his parents’ home in part because he was annoyed that he was earning as much as his colleagues as an employee, even though he could do more and worked harder. He developed and shipped computer games; he later said of his first earnings in the business, “For my first $19 in the software business, I had to program 18,000 hours.” That was an hourly wage of a dime.

He kept going, looking for like-minded people around the world who programmed in a decentralized way and met only to finish a product in the small town of Cary, North Carolina. That’s where the company is headquartered today. Tim Sweeny explains why this is so: “People can buy a nice little house here on their salary; in Los Angeles, they’d have to live in a one-room apartment.” He doesn’t like expensive things; he prefers to drink a Coke-water mixture and get his food at a burger joint. He bought a sports car only to “get to work faster,” and he invests his money in forests in North Carolina with the goal of protecting nature from humans.

Epic was successful before “Fortnite” with products such as “Unreal”, “Gears of War” and “Infinity Blade”. The “Unreal Engine” platform, on which numerous legendary games were developed, is listed in the “Guinness Book of Records” as the most successful in history. Sweeney himself is not a gamer. He prefers to develop games that are so successful that he can easily afford to hand out a few gifts to customers on their anniversary.