Unity and Epic Games Announce Fascinating Partnership at Unite 2025
In an exceptionally big and rather unanticipated move, Unity and Epic Games have now formed a new partnership. This was revealed during a keynote in Barcelona for Unite 2025, when Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney joined Matthew Bromberg from Unity on stage.
According to Sweeney, the genesis of the partnership is a shared desire to foster open digital platforms. The partnership will have two main stages.
Unity's In-App Purchase SDK Comes to Unreal Engine
The first of what this new collaboration will bring is Unity's new in-app purchase (IAP) software development kit (SDK) to be made available to Unreal Engine developers very soon. This gives developers an additional API choice for cross-platform purchases, something that Sweeney emphasized has become ever more important as the mobile ecosystems on Android and iOS become more open.
Fortnite Opens Its Ecosystem to Unity Developers
The most notable part is the integration of Unity games into Fortnite. With 500 million registered accounts and having hit 100 million monthly active users last holiday season, Fortnite has transformed into a platform for a huge portion of its playtime to be dedicated to third-party content.
As Tim Sweeney said, this integration is made possible by a networking protocol created by Unity to enable other engines to connect to its system. These changes will allow the Unity developers to:
- Publish their games directly into Fortnite starting next year.
- Show up in Fortnite's discovery system next to games made with Unreal Engine.
- Participate in the Fortnite economy.
This move seeks to evolve the Fortnite platform towards an open metaverse economy that links users across all game engines.
