Who Owns Epic Games?

It's near impossible to talk about Epic Games without mentioning "Fortnite." It is one of the biggest and most successful video games of all time. There are several ways to play it such as on the Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and even on your smartphone or tablet. It's also on PC through the Epic Games Store, as it is made by Epic Games, a U.S-based video game developer and publisher helmed by CEO Tim Sweeney.

Founded in 1991 with headquarters in North Carolina, Epic Games is the originator of the "Unreal" game franchise that included "Unreal Tournament." The company is also responsible for Unreal Engine, a game development tool that allows developers to create the worlds, characters, and effects for video games. The company is privately owned via stakeholders and has recently received extensive investments from companies such as Disney and Sony to build new games using their IP and characters. These characters, such as Aloy from Sony's "Horizon Zero Dawn" and several "Star Wars" heroes and villains, have since been featured in "Fortnite."

While Sweeney holds a majority interest in the company, Chinese megacorp Tencent owns nearly 30 percent of Epic Games, though there is pushback from the U.S. government to change that. President Trump's administration is debating whether or not to allow Tencent to continue having major stakes in American-owned companies including Epic Games and Riot Games.

The man behind the video game developer and publisher is Tim Sweeney. As CEO and founder of Epic Games, Sweeney is a billionaire with a net worth of more than $5.1 billion. He's noted as a self-made entrepreneur who got his start working in the video game industry and has been with Epic Games for the last 35 years.

Sweeney started Epic Games in 1991, where heworked on "Jill of the Jungle," an early platformer and one of the company's first games. Since then, he and the company have gone on to publish some of the gaming industry's most popular games including "Fall Guys," "Rocket League," and the aforementioned "Fortnite" — which can once again be played on mobile devices after Epic resubmitted "Fortnite" to the US App Store.

As the CEO of Epic Games, Sweeney is often found in the limelight where he needs to respond during crises and other scenarios such as layoffs, which Epic Games has undertaken multiple times in recent years. When it was announced Epic Games laid off 1,000 employees in March of 2026, his statement wasn't received well by the gaming community with him saying on X, "employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks."

Epic Games is a privately owned and operated company, but it has received investments from outside sources throughout the years. These partnerships between Epic Games and other businesses benefit both parties and are a way for them to capture the power of Epic Games' titles such as "Fortnite."

In 2022, Epic Games announced a $2 billion funding deal between it and Sony to assist with Epic's gaming vision, growth, and to support its metaverse idea. Now, the Japanese company has a small stake in Epic with a reported 5 percent total ownership. A few years later, the Mouse House came calling with a $1.5 billion investment, which gave it a 9 percent stake in Epic Games. These partnerships allow characters from Sony -owned games to appear in those produced by Epic Games. The same is true for Disney-owned characters including ones from Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar and other franchises. It's just one more entertainment brand owned and streamed by Disney. Tencent owns a larger portion of Epic Games with a 28 percent total stake in the gaming company as of 2026.

More recently, Epic Games is working on Unreal Engine 6, the newest iteration of its popular and proprietary game engine. The company revealed more during its State of Unreal event in Chicago, stating that next version of the gaming development software is expected to launch in Early Access near the end of 2027.