Epic Games
Funding History
| Private Equity Round 1 · 10/2018 | $555.73 |
|---|---|
| Late Stage Venture · 08/2020 | $575.00 |
| Series E · 04/2021 | $885.00 |
| Series F · 04/2022 | $930.00 |
| Corporate Round · 02/2024 | $600.00 |
About
Epic Games is an American interactive entertainment company and maker of 3D engine technology, founded by Tim Sweeney in 1991 and headquartered in Cary, North Carolina. It operates Fortnite alongside first-party titles including Rocket League and Fall Guys, runs the Epic Games Store, and develops Unreal Engine, which is used in games, film and television, broadcast, architecture, automotive and simulation.
- CEO
- Tim Sweeney
- Headquarters
- Cary, North Carolina
- Founded
- 1991
- Website
- epicgames.com
- Employees
- 4,000+ (2026)
Overview
Epic Games, Inc. is a privately held American game developer, publisher and software company based in Cary, North Carolina. Tim Sweeney founded it in 1991 in Potomac, Maryland as Potomac Computer Systems, renamed it Epic MegaGames the following year, and has run it ever since. He remains the controlling shareholder, and Epic has stayed private through every financing round since 2012.
The business rests on two assets. Unreal Engine is the real-time 3D toolset Epic licenses to other studios and, increasingly, to film and television, broadcast, architecture, automotive and simulation customers; since March 2015 it has been free to download, with Epic taking a royalty on commercial revenue instead of a licence fee, and since May 2020 that royalty has been waived on a title's first $1 million of revenue. Fortnite, launched in 2017 and turned into a free-to-play battle royale, is the other; Epic now runs it as a platform on which outside developers publish their own experiences through Unreal Editor for Fortnite. Around them sit the Epic Games Store, which launched in December 2018 charging a 12% revenue share against a 30% industry standard, plus Rocket League and Fall Guys.
Epic is also the games industry's most persistent litigant against mobile platform fees. Routing Fortnite payments around Apple and Google in August 2020 produced two landmark antitrust cases. A settlement with Google, first filed in November 2025 and revised in March 2026, caps Play Store commissions and creates a registration route for competing Android stores, and Fortnite returned to Google Play worldwide in March 2026. Fortnite came back to Apple's App Store worldwide on 19 May 2026, everywhere except Australia.
The company has been through a sharp contraction. After cutting some 830 jobs in September 2023, Epic laid off more than 1,000 further staff on 24 March 2026 - roughly 20% of the workforce - leaving about 4,000 employees. Chief executive Tim Sweeney told the company that market conditions were the most extreme he had seen since Epic's early days. In August 2026 it transferred ArtStation and Sketchfab to KitBash, saying it was concentrating on Unreal Engine 6, Fortnite, the developer ecosystem and the Epic Games Store.
Ownership is concentrated and strategic. Tencent paid $330 million in 2012 for roughly 48.4% of the then issued share capital and the right to nominate directors; Sony, the Lego family's KIRKBI and The Walt Disney Company have since taken stakes alongside KKR, ICONIQ Capital, Lightspeed, Baillie Gifford, BlackRock, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board. Disney's $1.5 billion investment in February 2024 is the most recent disclosed financing.
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