Why Epic Games Isn’t The Metaverse Hero We Deserve

It’s worth reading this lengthy article from Matthew Ball about Epic Game’s long-term strategy over the years and where it’s leading.

I wrote last year (republished recently on LinkedIn) about how Sweeney’s vision has been akin to a Blue Ocean Strategy all along, that the prize for the metaverse was the ultimate goal for the use of Unreal Engine.

“At Epic we succeed when developers succeed.”

It’s true that Epic’s strategy has been to remove as many barriers for developers to gain access to their tools as possible at the expense of revenue — the majority of games will never hit over $1m in revenue so Epic will get no license fee revenue themselves.

But with the metaverse being the goal there’s absolutely no way that, if web3 achieves the promise of democratization for content creators, we should believe people using Unreal to build their virtual worlds and content won’t be making these numbers.

It’s a $5 trillion industry after all if the numbers are to be believed.

“This Metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else. If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government and be a god on Earth.”

Tim has been very vocal about centralized platforms and walled gardens like Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft taking control, rightly so. But what about centralized ecosystems?

Just look at the diagram here — there is nothing decentralized about Epic in the slightest.

Matthew’s article goes into a lot of detail about Epic’s financial strategy, and seemingly altruistic approaches toward the developer community.

It’s certainly helped the cause by taking on Apple’s app store policies, and also Unity being a complete clusterfuck of a company itself (I’ve had so many conversations with devs who are ditching for Unreal after their latest merger).

“Whatever form this medium ultimately takes, our biggest hope is that we can play a role in it, whether we’re the creators of the big thing or technology supplier to it, or even better, if it’s a decentralized distributed system that combines everybody’s efforts and connects them in a much more open way.”

Tim never talks about making money because that’s not his interest or motive. Some people want to make billions, some just want to watch the world burn.

Tim is motivated by power — the power to be the one that owns the development infrastructure to build the metaverse. If Tim says Epic will support NFTs the market breathes a sigh of relief because if Epic said ‘no’ where are you going to go? Unity? LMAO

I firmly believe Epic will crack interoperability before everyone else, or certainly provide a mechanism for it that will tie it back to Unreal and offer it for free. Eventually, he will make the money, not now but in 10–15 years when everyone using Unreal starts raking in — $1m in metaverse terms is tiny.

If they were really supportive of the development community they’d tell them about all the open source alternatives that exist across the industry. In fact, if VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz were serious about the ideology behind web3, democratization and decentralization they’d be pumping money into the open source community. But they aren’t.

Unreal is seen as the welcome antidote in the industry but it’s actually the drug. And you’ll all be hooked.

That’s Blue Ocean.

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