Today, Epic games and CEO Tim Sweeney, launched two major updates in the company’s online services project. By adding Anti-Cheat and Voice Chat features, Epic Games says it is looking to encourage and promote cross-platform development. The company also runs the Epic Games Store, through which it regularly pays and offers exclusives, older games and giveaways. With the Epic Games Store, it also competes with the PC’s biggest provider of games, Steam.
The new features that Epic games has added: Voice and Anti-Cheat technology. They added, “The connections made with EOS voice establish only between authenticated users and go through only voice servers without exposing the personal information about the user.”
This new voice technology supports both, one-to-one and party chat in lobbies according to reports. The voice data is rendered from Epic’s back end server while using this technology and handles all scaling and quality service features. The Anti-Easy chat is a service designed to root out and remove players who are cheating in an online game.
These technologies are also included as part of Epic Online Services Suite. For now these technological advancements will be enabled to be used with any game engine that supports Windows, Linux, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation etc. According to the company, both voice chat and anti-cheat systems can cost millions of dollars for popular online games and this will allow developers to implement group chat or one-one-one features in their game.
Apps such as Clubhouse and Discord have made audio popular in recent times and Epic Games, which is in battle with Apple, said that it had 350 million registered users for Fortnite as of June 2020 and more than 500 million accounts across the world.
The problem Epic could have is from Sony’s side. Sony has been stringent on not allowing cross play for PS4 and PS5 platforms and it is also reported that Epic had to pay Sony royalties to make that technology work in Fortnite. Aside from simplifying cross-platform gameplay and development, Epic also has its own “Unreal Engine” which works on all kinds of consoles, PC’s, VR headsets etc.
