Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney thinks games can be political, but gaming companies should stay out of politics

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is one of the biggest names in video games these days, thanks to the seemingly unstoppable success of Fortnite. And with the spotlight on him as the keynote speaker at the annual DICE Summit, (as recapped by The Hollywood Reporter, VentureBeat, and others) Sweeney gave his thoughts on the overall video game industry — including his view that gaming companies as platforms need to “divorce ourselves from politics. ” As Sweeney elaborated later on Twitter, his argument isn’t that games should avoid politics at all, but rather to say that games that tackle politics should do so from a creative perspective, rather than a marketing one. And that game platforms themselves should be “operating as neutral venues for entertainment and employees, customers — everybody else can hold their own views and not be judged by us 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 Sweeney’s speech also touched on a wide variety of hot button issues in the gaming world right now, including marketing tie-ins (“If you have an awesome new product, you start releasing free stuff in games and people get [engaged with it]”), loot boxes (“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? ”), cross-platform games (“What we all really want and need to accept is equal access to all customers and give up our attempts to create our own private wall guard or private monopoly”), and privacy (blaming Google and Facebook for offering free services that customers pay for with a “loss of privacy and loss of freedom”). But the most contentious issues Sweeney touched on were his comments that “we should get the marketing departments out of politics,” he said. “We live in a world where your political affiliation determines what chicken restaurant you go to.

There’s no reason to drag divisive topics like that into gaming. ” It’s all a bit confusing, though, given that Sweeney would go on to say that game companies should be politically neutral. “We need to create a very clear separation between church and state… employees, customers and everyone else should be able to express themselves,” said Sweeney. “We as companies need to divorce ourselves from politics… platforms should be neutral.