The Chief Executive Officer of Epic Games sees the “metaverse” as a potentially “multitrillion-dollar part of the world economy.”
Tim Sweeney’s Epic Games is, of course, the company behind the global phenomenon that is Fortnite and the Unreal toolset responsible for making it. Sweeney and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are among two of the most prominent technology industry executives using the term “metaverse” to describe a broader shift toward sharing experiences with others in real-time over the Internet. While we’ve heard plenty from Zuckerberg recently, Sweeney’s recent comments, which were made at a conference in Seoul as well as an interview afterward with Bloomberg, offer us an updated view into his assessment of the opportunity.
“The next three years are going to be critical for all of the metaverse-aspiring companies like Epic, Roblox, Microsoft, Facebook,” Sweeney is quoted as saying. “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.”
Bloomberg reports Sweeney is aiming to expand Fortnite from 60 million monthly active users “to an experience that could reach a billion in the future.”
“I do believe in this future of the world in which billions of people are wearing AR hardware, AR glasses are their everyday life and I believe that’s the entertainment platform of the future,” Sweeney told us in 2019. “And we’re gonna be there.”
