Geralt will be joining Fortnite shortly. | Image: Epic Games
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney laid out what he called his โgrand visionโ for the company in a livestream on Thursday, and it might not be surprising that the company that builds Fortnite wants to help usher in the best version of the metaverse.
While the metaverse doesnโt exactly have a firm definition, Fortnite is perhaps currently the easiest metaverse idea to grasp in that it allows players to easily hang out in 3D virtual worlds and take on avatars ranging from Epic-designed human characters to Goku from Dragon Ball. But Epic doesnโt just develop Fortnite; it also makes the Unreal Engine development tools used by both gaming studios and film productions, operates a Steam competitor in the Epic Games Store, runs Rocket League and Fall Guys after buying the studios that made them, and recently acquired the music platform Bandcamp.
According to Sweeney, Epic wants to use those pieces to help people create good metaverses. โOver the next few years, what weโre going to be doing at Epic is bringing these pieces together into something that comes closer and closer to the metaverse from science fiction,โ Sweeney said near the end of Epicโs โYear in Review 2022โ livestream for Unreal Engine. โNot the dystopian version of the metaverse from science fiction. But the really positive versions where you and your friends get together into a real-time 3D social experience and can explore the whole world.โ Epic has already signaled one way it plans to do that with the kids-focused metaverse itโs building with Lego.
Sweeney, a vocal critic of Apple and Googleโs restrictive app store policies, also envisions that the world people explore will be open. โThe world isnโt just the creation of Epic or some other corporation, but itโs the creation of all of humanityโs best content creators from all walks of life and all countries putting together their best stuff.โ The company believes that itโs possible for a million developers to be building content and a billion players to be playing that content, he said.
We might have been able to see a preview of Epicโs next-generation metaverse creation tools on Thursday… had they been working. Fortnite already offers a robust Creative mode that lets players build worlds within the game (and they can be very lucrative). But Epic has been hinting at a much more extensive set of tools itโs calling the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), which will even have its own scripting language called Verse. Epic intended to show off UEFN during Thursdayโs livestream but ultimately wasnโt able to; โit was working yesterday, but itโs not working today,โ Sweeney said.
You never know whatโs going to happen in game dev! Weโre sorry that it didnโt work out today but we canโt wait to share more on UEFN and Verse in the New Year.
โ Fortnite Creative (@FNCreate) December 15, 2022
In November, Sweeney said UEFN had been delayed to โlate January 2023,โ but now it sounds like it could miss that timeline, too. Sweeney joked Thursday that it will ship โsometime between January 31st and like January 90th.โ
Itโs likely going to be a long road between Epicโs vision and actually seeing it play out in practice. But as more developers use Unreal Engine across disciplines and as more people play Epicโs crossover-filled games, itโs easy to see the path Epic is traveling down. Whether we actually want to spend our time in the metaverse is another story, but at least for now, Fortnite is as fun as itโs ever been, and it looks good, too.
During the livestream, Epic also gave a small update on the popularity of the Epic Games Store. It now has โa global audience north of 60 million monthly active users,โ according to Epicโs Tina Wisdom, which is a slight decrease from the 62 million Epic reported in December 2021. Itโs not clear what counts as a monthly active user, and Iโm guessing some of those are people like me who only log in to claim the free game giveaways and donโt actually play them.