Tim Sweeney founded Potomac Computer Systems out of his parents' house in 1991 and wrote his first game engine alone. By 2024, that engine — Unreal — powered over 50% of the top 1,000 grossing mobile games and served as the primary rendering pipeline for major Hollywood virtual production stages. The company it runs on is valued at $31.5 billion and remains entirely private, majority-controlled by the founder who still writes code. The Fortnite number is the one that anchors everything: an estimated $6.8 billion in total revenue for FY2024, majority driven by a game that launched in 2017 as a relatively conventional battle royale and gradually became something harder to categorize — a live platform where third-party creators build their own experiences through the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, earn revenue shares based on engagement metrics, and collectively generate economic activity that Epic taxes as a platform operator. The antitrust confrontation with Apple in 2020 was not an impulsive decision. Epic deliberately triggered the conflict by implementing an alternative payment system in Fortnite, knowing Apple would remove the app and initiate litigation. The calculated bet paid out when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found Apple's anti-steering provisions violated federal antitrust law — a ruling that altered global app store regulations in ways that extended well beyond Epic's own commercial interests. Unreal Engine's royalty structure — 5% of gross revenue above $1 million in lifetime sales — creates a revenue stream that scales with the success of every developer who builds on the platform. Hollywood studios paying for virtual production stage usage. Mobile developers shipping games with Kirin chipsets and UE rendering. The engine is infrastructure that gets taxed every time the broader digital content creation industry grows.