In April Fast Company published a short interview with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in which he speaks about both the metaverse generally and their specific plans in this space.

If you're interested in gaming and / or the metaverse it's worth a read.

For those not quite that interested, we've plucked out two particularly salient points.

Later this year, we’re going to release the Unreal Editor for Fortnite–the full capabilities that you’ve seen [in Unreal Engine] opened up so that anybody can build very high-quality game content and code . . . and deploy it into Fortnite without having to do a deal with us–it’s open to everybody.

While we haven't played Fortnite we recognise the significance.

It relates to the second point we plucked out.

But, unfortunately right now it’s bundled up with a lot of speculation and a lot of outright scams, and a lot of efforts are scammy by construction in that the thing they’re pursuing doesn’t achieve a plausible version of the stated goals. You know, like the blockchain avatar economies for example, there are a bunch of companies aspiring to make avatars that you universally own, but none of them I’ve found, not a single one, has actually made any effort to foster actual adoption of these avatars by any actual games or ecosystems. They just want to build this thing and sell people avatars, but they’re completely useless in practice.

I firmly believe there’s going to be a multi-trillion dollar economy around digital goods in the future. But I think so much of the crypto currency effort, especially touching the gaming space, doesn’t address that problem of utility. They’re showing you digital goods you can’t do anything with except to say that you own it. You can cryptographically prove that you own it, but who cares?

A cornerstone of the emerging NFT market is purchasable player avatars.

Some games allow players to create and modify character appearance to their precise liking.

Others, like Fortnite, sell predefined avatars.

Fortnite's existing players are already comfortable with this practice - which is not universally appreciated - so bringing full Unreal Editor capabilities into Fortnite means that its players will be able use Fortnite sold avatars in what will effectively be different games.

These avatars don't need to be NFTs, i.e. have blockchain authentication, because it's still technically all happening within the Fortnite game client but this looks like the stage being set for the NFT avatar market.

[ Main Image: Fortnite. Credit: Epic Games via IMDb.com. ]

References

Sullivan, Mark (April 25, 2022). Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney talks the metaverse, crypto, and antitrust. Fast Company.