Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in an interview in Edge magazine issue 428 that AI data centers are buying up memory and storage chips at a pace that is driving gaming hardware deeper into crisis, with related contract prices rising 4x over three years.
In the same interview, Sweeney said the NFT industry’s push for cross-platform digital assets had "completely failed" and that "everybody got scammed in the process." Still, the alternative he laid out aims at much the same destination: letting players use purchased cosmetic items across games, but with trust anchored in Epic’s Unreal Engine 6 rather than blockchain infrastructure.
AI demand is crowding out gaming hardware buyers
Sweeney said big technology companies and venture-backed startups are spending at unprecedented scale on AI systems and data centers. Demand for high-bandwidth memory, DRAM modules, and fast SSD storage chips has become so intense that gaming hardware makers and PC component suppliers are now at the back of the queue.
He said contract prices for memory and flash storage components have already risen fourfold and that the uptrend has not stopped. Because foundry capacity takes years and enormous capital to expand, he expects home consoles, handheld devices, gaming PCs, and related peripherals to remain stuck in a cycle of shortages and price increases for the next three years.
Epic says it is feeling the pressure too
The reported strain has already hit Epic itself. According to the report, the company expanded during Fortnite’s pandemic-era surge, then moved into restructuring this year as console sales cooled, cutting as many as 1,000 core developers.
Sweeney described the current moment as "crash 2.0," comparing it with the 1983 Atari shock that caused the North American video game market to collapse. He said the industry will need to move past its closed ecosystems if it wants to get through this period.
Team Open centers on cross-game portability and revenue sharing
Sweeney is placing that bet on a project he calls Team Open. The plan is for games built with Unreal Engine 6 to move content, code, and even economic systems between one another. Fortnite is positioned as the first demonstration, with cosmetics bought there eventually becoming usable in other games built on the same engine.
The model depends on revenue sharing rather than goodwill. If a player brings an item bought in Game A into Game B and uses it over time, the developer of Game B would share revenue based on that usage. In theory, that would also reduce the risk that an item simply loses all value when a game shuts down.
Roblox is part of the competitive backdrop
Sweeney also pointed to Roblox as a rival expanding at a speed traditional game companies cannot ignore. If publishers stick with older approaches, he said, they risk losing the market.
Epic has recently widened Fortnite’s role as a platform by bringing in classic IPs including Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Street Fighter, and Kingdom Hearts, in an effort to make it a larger gateway-style experience.
A familiar NFT story, rebuilt without blockchain
At a structural level, Team Open carries forward a promise the NFT market tried to sell several years ago: assets that can move across games. The difference is the trust layer. Instead of on-chain ownership and decentralized ledgers, Sweeney’s version relies on Epic’s engine stack, licensing terms, and commercial contracts.
The report noted that the NFT sector once promoted the same vision, with game items recorded on-chain and usable wherever players went. In practice, very few game studios wanted to plug outside assets into their own economies. As demand faded, many of those items were reduced to speculative listings on secondary markets and then to unwanted image files.
Epic’s version may get around part of that problem because Epic is the largest participant in the system it is proposing. It can start with Fortnite, which the report described as having hundreds of millions of players, then bring other Unreal Engine 6 studios into the framework.
But that swap also introduces a different set of risks. The rules of the economy, the revenue split, and audit authority would sit with Epic. Other developers would not be joining a neutral public system. They would be entering a new walled structure under a different name.
Key questions are still unanswered
The report said the hardest part may not be technical implementation but settlement and liability. If a player wears an item bought in Game A while playing Game B, there is still no public answer on how usage time would be counted, whose servers would record it, or how often payouts would be settled.
There is also no clear framework yet for disputes. If cross-publisher revenue allocation is wrong, or if players ask for refunds, it remains unclear whether Epic as the engine provider would arbitrate or whether the publishers involved would have to negotiate directly.
Art direction and licensing raise another layer of risk. If a costume designed for Game A appears inside the world of Game B and creates visual inconsistency or triggers an intellectual property dispute, responsibility is not clearly assigned in the report. Those accounting, audit, and liability questions may decide whether Team Open can work in practice.
AI’s externalities are reaching consumers through hardware prices
The report framed the situation as a case study in the external costs of the AI investment boom. Discussion around AI data centers often focuses on power, water, and land. Here, the pressure is showing up in memory and storage chip prices, with the cost ultimately moving through consoles, handhelds, and graphics hardware to consumers.
In Sweeney’s view, gaming is simply one of the first industries to feel the impact. Whether his call for broader cooperation leads to a workable cross-game asset model will depend on how many participants are willing to operate under a single engine framework and a single revenue-sharing system.