Tim Sweeney believes the metaverse is "happening for real"

gamesindustry.biz:

Epic Games showcased its vision for a metaverse at today’s State of Unreal, during which it unveiled more details about the economy around its Unreal Editor for Fortnite, a new unified marketplace, Fab, which offers assets across several game engines, new Metahumans animation tools, and more.

Talking to GamesIndustry.biz at GDC 2023, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney further clarified his vision for an open ecosystem across the games industry.

During the presentation, Sweeney had described the company's various announcements as a milestone for Epic's "unified" vision of the metaverse, adding that "the metaverse has to be open, it can't be another walled garden."

"Open is a natural state of things, it's only in the past 15 years that we've seen walled gardens take over the world with iOS and Facebook and other companies," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "But that's not how it has to be though, the games industry is the perfect place for an open system to be involved because there's not one predominant company that can dictate terms.

"There's three pretty strong console companies and there's about a dozen publishers who each have their own ecosystem that are pretty strong themselves. And so pretty quickly you get to the realisation that each one of them will be better off connecting their services to an open system [and] being in an open economy rather than just limiting themselves to their own user base.

"The metaverse is way more attractive to you as a player if the majority of your real-world friends are there. This isn't the old days where you're playing with random strangers on the internet. This is about real-world experiences with real world friends. And interconnection is the way to do it."

He adds that Epic is focused on