Metaverse Can Be A 'Multitrillion-Dollar' Business, Created By Millions Of Developers

Tim Sweeney
Founder and CEO of Epic Games, Inc.

Epic Games has lots under its belt. After it was founded in 1991, the company quickly too off and introduced various products, including the popular Unreal Engine, which is a commercially available game engine.

In 2014, Epic's Unreal Engine was named the "most successful videogame engine" by Guinness World Records.

If those aren't enough, Epic is also known for its immensely popular Fortnite game. Other popular titles the company is known for, also include Unreal, Gears of War and the Infinity Blade series.

This is why Tim Sweeney, the company's founder and CEO, is no stranger to the term "metaverse."

While the term is popularized after Mark Zuckerberg renamed his entire company from Facebook to Meta, Sweeney is among the most enthusiastic supporter of the technology.

And that is for an obvious reason: Sweeney has made his company to rapidly evolve from just a popular multiplayer game powered by a popular game engine, to become a place where people can socialize with others in a digital environment, and even host the first-ever virtual concert with millions of attendance.

Sweeney has the very reason to be bullish.

Tim Sweeney

According to Sweeney in an interview with CNN, describing the metaverse:

"It is real time 3D entertainment experiences that are social. It's you and your friends together in a 3D world, having fun in lots of different ways."

"You can be playing games like Fortnite Battle Royale, you can be going to concerts, you can be dancing, or you can just be standing around and chatting."

"It's all the sorts of social interactions we can have in real time 3D together with our group of friends."

He envisions that the metaverse will create a better online experience than ever before.

"It will succeed because it's better," he said.

On top of that, the metaverse doesn't require fancy new hardware. For those who want to experience AR or VR, can do so using existing devices.

And speaking at the Global Conference for Mobile Application Ecosystem Fairness in Seoul, South Korea, he said that:

"Over the coming decades, the metaverse has the potential to become a multitrillion-dollar part of the world economy."

In the so-called world where the things in real life can blend digitally with computers, Epic Games competes with world-building games like Microsoft’s Minecraft and Roblox.

And with others also pursuing the metaverse, Sweeney believes that everyone involved is after this promising business.

"It’s kind of a race to get to a billion users, whoever brings on a billion users first, would be the presumed leader in setting the standards," he said.

The biggest hurdles tech companies must experience before any of that can happen, is that the metaverse isn't going to be created by one company.

Instead, metaverse will be created by many companies, working together with millions of developers. Each and every one of them will build out their part of the metaverse.

Another issue, is to deal with the economy.

In order to have lots of companies and lots of developers working together to build this metaverse, "you need to have a business where they can make as much or more money from that effort, developing software to support their businesses," Sweeney went on explaning.

And one of the ways to do that, is "to win the fight against platform monopolies, because Apple and Google currently have rules in place to prevent the metaverse from existing on the Google Play Store and on iOS. They have rules that prevent web browsers from existing — you're only allowed to use their web browser."

"They don't allow commerce to be done directly with users. They don't allow code to be run on your local device if it hasn't been reviewed by Apple and Google. The metaverse needs to support all of these things, so we really need to win this battle to open up platforms before the metaverse can truly exist."

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