Epic Games has brought in Martin Keely, the former head of Blizzard’s Battle.net platform, to run the Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services. CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed the move on X on Monday, July 27, framing it around the company’s broader push toward Unreal Engine 6 and a more connected way of shipping and playing games.
Quick answer: Martin Keely, previously Senior Vice President of Technology and Services for Battle.net, is now Vice President and General Manager of the Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services. Sweeney publicly endorsed the hire, tying it to Epic’s goal of making games work “across platforms, stores, engines, and ecosystems.”
Who Martin Keely is and his new role at Epic
Keely spent seven years leading development on Battle.net, Blizzard’s online platform for account management, storefront, and multiplayer services. At Epic, he steps into a combined leadership post covering the storefront side and the developer backend that powers cross-platform play, achievements, and account systems.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| New hire | Martin Keely |
| Previous role | Senior Vice President, Technology and Services, Battle.net (Blizzard) |
| New role at Epic | Vice President / General Manager, Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services |
| Announced by | Tim Sweeney, via X, Monday, July 27 |
In his own announcement, Keely said he was “thrilled and honored” to take the position and “excited to get started with the team delivering new capabilities that elevate player, creator and developer experiences.” He also said he was “grateful for the opportunity to play a role in shaping an open and sustainable gaming ecosystem,” a phrase that lines up directly with Epic’s stated ambitions.
What Tim Sweeney said about the Unreal Engine 6 era
Sweeney’s repost of the announcement placed the hire inside Epic’s next chapter. He wrote that Epic is heading into “the era of Unreal Engine 6 and Team Open linking up to make everything work across platforms, stores, engines, and ecosystems.” That connects the storefront and services leadership directly to the engine work Epic has been detailing publicly.
The appointment reflects the kind of expertise Epic wants for that goal. Running a storefront and an online services stack at scale is exactly the background Keely built at Blizzard, and it maps onto the parts of Epic that handle payments, entitlements, cross-play, and account linking across many games.
The open ecosystem vision behind the hire
The language around this hire ties back to a long-running idea from Sweeney. At the State of Unreal in June 2026, he pointed to a speech he gave at SIGGRAPH 2016, where he described “a potential future of gaming as an open system like the web is open, in which any developer can run a server, build a game, host their own content, and a user can go anywhere they want from place to place, bringing all of their stuff with them.”
At the same 2026 event, Sweeney said Unreal Engine could “[tear] down the walls and barriers that exist between games to have a completely interoperable ecosystem.” He described Epic as “tantalizingly close now to fully realizing this idea of an open gaming ecosystem.” Whether that future arrives on schedule remains to be seen, but the storefront and services leadership is now being staffed to pursue it.
How Unreal Engine 6 fits into Epic’s plans
Unreal Engine 6 is the first brand new version of Unreal Engine in six years, and it merges Unreal Engine 5 with Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) into one unified engine. Sweeney summed it up as “UE5 plus UEFN equals UE6, plus some more cool stuff on the way.” The aim is to let developers build once and ship to console, PC, and mobile stores, as well as live into the Fortnite ecosystem or any other UE6-based ecosystem.
| Area | What Epic has said |
|---|---|
| Foundation | Combines UE5 and UEFN into a single engine |
| Programming model | Moves gameplay programming to Verse, with a new Scene Graph framework |
| Interoperability | Content, code, and economies made portable across games and engines via open standards |
| Development tools | AI-assisted pipeline features, including an MCP with integrations for models such as Claude and Gemini |
| Early Access | Targeted for the end of 2027 |
Epic first teased Unreal Engine 6 during the Rocket League Championship Series Paris Major in May 2026, confirming Rocket League as one of the first major titles to move onto the new engine. The company then laid out its direction at the State of Unreal keynote in June 2026. No firm launch date beyond the end-of-2027 Early Access target has been confirmed.
Put together, the pieces point one way. Epic is building the engine, the storefront, and the online services around a single idea of games that connect to each other, and Keely’s arrival gives the storefront and services side experienced leadership as that plan moves forward.
