Epic Games just showed us what a metaverse can look like (2024)

Last week Epic Games went above and beyond with Fortnite, expanding it with multiple major standalone game modes.

Apart from a classic battle royale, there’s now also LEGO Fortnite, a survival game similar to Minecraft in its core mechanics. Then there’s Rocket Racing, a racing game created by Rocket League developers, Psyonix. And Fortnite Festival, a musical rhythm game that features licensed songs by artists like The Weekend and Lady Gaga. All that in one place.

How does that tie in with the metaverse? Metaverse is considered a part of the Web3 vision and while there are many definitions, here’s a more generalized one:

“The Metaverse is the all-encompassing space in which all digital experience sits; the observable digital universe made up of millions of digital galaxies”

— Eric Redmond (Global Director, Technology Innovation, Nike)

So it’s a digital space that features multiple experiences which is what Fortnite is slowly becoming, especially after introducing these independent game modes.

The last few years proved how bad relations are between Web3 and gaming, and for a good reason. Current Web3 gaming is focused on areas gamers don’t care about including crypto and NFTs. Video game publishers who tried to push NFTs (looking at you, Ubisoft) were met with a huge backlash from gamers.

Epic Games is the one company that welcomed and stuck with the concept of Web3 and the metaverse ever since it announced the collaboration with LEGO to “shape the future of the metaverse.” But Epic will do it in its own way, and last week we saw what that future might look like.

I already wrote about how Epic Games made moves in the Web3 world and the investments they received for metaverse pursuits. However, Epic’s metaverse doesn't have all the Web3 buzzwords we’re so tired of hearing — decentralization, blockchain, crypto, NFTs, pay-to-earn, and so on. Fortnite has none of those things, it’s a game first and foremost.

Paul Tassi shared a key view regarding the Web3 metaverses when discussing Fortnite:

“These blockchain imitators almost killed the concept before they died themselves.”

And as much as some may hate to hear that, it’s true. Metaverse is a gamified experience, and people play games to have fun. Once you try to sell me NFTs, I quickly realize that you don’t care about gaming that much because you are not making games for the sake of games.

Many Web3 projects will claim blockchain and NFTs are the future. However, it was concluded by the World Economic Forum panel that the metaverse could exist without blockchain despite the possible advancements this technology could bring.

In reality, who knows, maybe Epic will eventually bring blockchain to their infrastructure (maybe they already have). Regardless, what it builds is a metaverse, and what matters to me more is that Epic builds games and entertainment, not NFT projects.

The new modes added to Fortnite also shed a bit of light on interoperability — the ability to access digital items and content across different experiences in the metaverse. Interoperability is one of the features metaverse enthusiasts believe is lacking in Web2 and wish to see in Web3 and the metaverse.

Imagine taking a skin from one game and transferring it over to another. In Fortnite’s Rocket Racing mode, you can access cars you own in Rocket League and vice versa. However, Epic Games owns both games hence why it was made possible.

According to Matthew Ball, there’s a disagreement on how much interoperability is required for the metaverse. However, the important point raised in that article is that our current online content is not made for interoperability. For it to exist right now, the metaverse will have to be controlled by one entity.

You can’t force Valve and Riot Games to create shared assets for a shared platform, why would they want to do that? Epic, on the other hand, can do things by itself thanks to Unreal Engine 5 which is an engine used in many games, as well as multiple collaborations it has done for Fortnite.

Donald Mustard spoke on Twitter on Dec. 9 about how they at Epic had an idea of evolving Fortnite into a place where you could “have all sorts of different agency driven game and entertainment experiences with your friends.” He shared a sketch of a “Fortnite Hub” that included PvP, PvE, Survival, Music, and more. This sure sounds like a metaverse to me.

If this wasn’t convincing enough, this concept has been in the works for years now and was even teased by Donald back in 2019 at The Game Awards show. Already then, he highlighted the goal is “to create a metaverse, a place where all IP can live together, where all kinds of experiences can happen.”

It’s a little surreal to see how far Fortnite has gone since then. So many collaborations, events, and now an expansion with quite literally brand-new games. So yeah, if anyone can create a metaverse in this day and age, it’s Epic Games. And I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us next.