Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said during his address at today's Unreal Fest in Seattle that while there's still uncertainty about what exactly the metaverse is, the continuing growth of Fortnite—and the failure of a number of high-profile big-budget games to meet expectations—is proof that it represents the future of gaming.
Fortnite hit "new records in concurrency," Sweeney said during his opening comments, achieving an all-time peak of 110 million active users over the previous holiday season—an accomplishment he said comes amidst a "generational change" in the games industry.
"One of the manifestations [of that change] we're seeing right now is that a lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling nearly as well as expected," Sweeney said. "Whereas other games are going incredibly strong. What we're seeing is a real trend where players are gravitating toward the really big games where they can play with more of their friends."
The perceived value of a game, he continued, "grows in proportion to the number of your friends that you can connect to," for everything from playing games together to chatting by voice, watching virtual concerts, or "doing other kinds of cool, virtual things online."
"Some people will call it the metaverse," Sweeney said, "And we're not all in agreement on what this means. Some people, when they hear the word 'metaverse,' they think of what Facebook is doing with VR and now AR. Some people use the metaverse to describe everything they don't like about the current Fortnite season."
Regardless of what you think of the moment-to-moment state of Fortnite, though, "it's new, and it's exciting, and it's something that's never happened at this scale in the history of entertainment," Sweeney said. The evolving story and ongoing live content updates are obviously a huge part of that, but he attributed much of Fortnite's success to "all the world's brands participating and dropping in: Musicians reaching users, Disney and Star Wars and others all coming together to create a world class entertainment experience that's ever-evolving and live. That's really what we think the future of gaming is about."
I'm among those who raise an eyebrow whenever the topic of the metaverse comes up, but I won't argue Sweeney's point. Seven years after Fortnite first launched it remains an absolute juggernaut, and the biggest brands in entertainment are still lining up to get in. On the other side of the coin, Sweeney's mention of a slump among some big-budget standalone releases seems on point: Suicide Squad, Final Fantasy 16, Starfield, and most pointedly Star Wars Outlaws have all been letdowns to some extent, even though they all carry the branding Sweeney is so enthusiastic about.
