A year ago, Epic Games laid off more than 800 people after CEO Tim Sweeney admitted it was an “unrealistic” period of investment to “develop Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired creator ecosystem.” It’s time to start talking about brighter, metaverse tomorrows and hopefully not having to do it all over again. Epic has detailed preliminary plans for Unreal Engine 6, which Sweeney says will combine Unreal Engine with Fortnite’s easy-to-use Unreal Editor to create a giant “interoperable” metaverse platform that will allow developers to sell things that can be seamlessly ported to other games, regardless depending on whether they run on Unreal Engine or not. Hidden post on the blockchain? Honestly, I can neither confirm nor deny it.
All this comes from modern interview for Verge with Sweeney and Epic Executive Vice President Saxs Persson after this year’s Unreal Fest conference in Seattle. Regarding layoffs, Sweeney told the site that Epic is currently financially stable.
“Last year, before Unreal Fest, we were spending about a billion dollars a year more than we were making,” he said. “Now we spend a little more than we earn.”
Epic “has a very large amount of resources compared to almost any company in the industry and is investing in the future really judiciously so that we can scale them up or down as our fortunes change,” Sweeney continued. “We believe we are in an excellent position to execute on our plans for the rest of this decade and execute all of our plans at our size.”
The most essential of these grand plans is the Unreal Engine 6 project, which will take several years to develop and is based on the philosophy of “interoperable content” that can be transferred between any game running on that engine. Epic’s main test of this idea is the Manhattan Project-style “gaming and entertainment universe” they’re creating for Disney, which will combine the Disney and Fortnite communities to create a hellish hybrid race of monsters I call “Disnites.” who invade our apartments in the airy of the full moon aboard flying princesses shaped like buses. What I mean is that it will supposedly allow creators and players to easily move and move their digital stuff between Fortnite and Unreal Engine worlds based on Disney properties. A Battle Royale map based on Disneyland seems like an simple win, TBD.
Meanwhile, Epic is set to open a marketplace for Fab digital assets, which will apparently feature assets that can even run on non-Unreal Engine games like Minecraft and Roblox, and this is the first step towards a scenario where Fab the developers are selling exactly “one logical asset that has different file formats and run in different contexts”, which means you won’t have to buy it separately for any other game that supports “interoperability”. Sweeney’s example in the Verge piece is “a set of forest meshes that has different content optimized for Unreal Engine, Unity, Roblox and Minecraft.”
Sweeney believes that “moving content seamlessly from place to place will be one of the most important things that will make the metaworld work without duplication.”
In response to all of this, I have some rather predictable comments. First, what exactly is the “metaworld” these days? Is it still a loose catchphrase for a range of supposedly transformative technologies like VR, and if so, does it still include dubious prospects like blockchain and NFTs that promise similar cross-game material “interoperability”?
Second: why would Microsoft want Epic to sell things that people can bring to Minecraft, rather than just selling those things themselves like they currently do? Sweeney admitted to The Verge that Epic hasn’t had any “discussions” about interoperability with other publishers beyond Disney yet, “but we will over time.” Basically, he believes that companies should implement a revenue sharing system so that everyone can benefit from selling the “same” resource for exploit in several games.
Meanwhile, Persson noted that “people aren’t dogmatic about where they play” and therefore “there’s no reason why we couldn’t create a federated way for information to flow between Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite.” He added: “From our point of view, it would be amazing because it keeps people together and allows the best ecosystem to win.”
“May the best ecosystem win” is probably a needy choice of words because it suggests that, for God’s sake, some partners might actually lose on “interoperability” with the Epic platform. As The Verge notes, Sweeney’s vision of “interoperability” between worlds, whether it’s Unreal or not, makes perfect sense for Epic – it means it can generate a little indirect revenue from an increasingly beleaguered group of games that don’t they exploit Unreal Engine. But other companies might want to avoid a scenario where all of their artists are, strictly speaking, creating stuff for the Unreal Engine market, rather than games they’re supposed to be working on.
I don’t know. I’m an idiot who knows nothing about business: feel free to educate me in the comments. Epic is currently quite combative about increasing profits from third-party platforms. In other news, they still are initiating legal disputes with companies such as Google on how easily players can access Fortnite on their phones.