As the company behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, Epic Games is playing a key role in the metaverse sector – especially with its most recent ‘Creator Economy 2.0’ announcements, which we thought could be big news for the music industry.
Now its CEO Tim Sweeney has been talking to VentureBeat about his vision for the metaverse.
“If you look back over the last six years, you can see the metaverse audience grow from a negligible number to about 600 million. It’s easy to overlook that,” said Sweeney.
“A lot of people say Roblox is just a kids’ game or Fortnite is just a shooter. But there’s an emerging market here that will reach billions of users. We should appreciate that and separate it from the unfounded hype that was given to it, the claims around it, NFTs and things.”
It’s fair to say he really isn’t keen on the NFT thing.
“There’s been so much hype around particular agendas, like selling NFTs or pitching new products that haven’t found an audience yet,” said Sweeney, who also banged the drum for different metaverses to work together.
“I just wanted to highlight how real this current trend is. There are hundreds of millions of people doing this already. There’s a path to doing it in an open way. It’ll be another one of the big failures of our generation if we let another new ecosystem develop into a set of walled gardens….”
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