Epic Games Launches 'Epic Parties,' a Cross-Game Voice Chat That Follows You Between Titles
Epic Games has announced Epic Parties, a cross-platform voice chat service that lets friends keep talking even when they are playing different games. The feature is currently rolling out to Fortnite and will arrive in Rocket League the following year, according to GameSpot.
The pitch is straightforward. You and your friends join a party through the Epic Games Store launcher on PC, iOS, or Android, or through the Epic Games app on mobile. Once connected, you can voice chat regardless of who is in Fortnite, browsing the store, or simply hanging out in the launcher. If everyone in the party opens Fortnite at the same time, the game automatically drops them into the same lobby.
That last detail matters. Until now, players on Xbox and PlayStation have had to leave their native console party chats — the system-level voice channels built into each platform — before Fortnite's own voice chat would work, even if nobody else was in that console party, according to Epic's help documentation. Epic Parties sidesteps that friction by running through Epic's own ecosystem rather than the platform holder's.
The service works across Fortnite on all supported platforms, the Epic Games Store launcher on PC, iOS and Android, and the Epic Games app on iOS and Android. It brings social friend lists, persistent voice channels, and digital avatars together in one place — a direct challenge to Discord, which has spent years establishing itself as the default voice and text chat tool for gamers across every platform.
Epic is also building the technology deeper into its foundations. The company said Epic Parties' voice and avatar systems will be integrated directly into Unreal Engine 6 — Epic's next-generation game engine, currently in development — with the tools offered to other developers who build on that engine. In June, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney framed the cross-game social link as a solution to a problem he sees across the industry: new multiplayer games are struggling because players do not want to leave their established friend groups to try something new, according to Automaton Media. If a developer can plug into the same party system players already use, the logic goes, the social cost of switching games drops.
The audience Epic is addressing is substantial. The Epic Games Store reached an all-time record of 78 million monthly active users on PC in 2025, with over US$1 billion spent on the store that year, according to GameSpot. Those numbers give Epic a large existing base to push toward a single social layer that spans PC, mobile, and console — provided players are willing to adopt it.
For players, the immediate change is practical. Friends who used to coordinate on Discord before launching a game, or who lost voice contact when one person switched to a different title, can now stay connected inside Epic's ecosystem. Whether that convenience is enough to pull people away from a tool as entrenched as Discord is a question the rollout will answer in the coming months.
