It's Not Meta vs Fornite - It's Sweeney vs Zuckerberg

I saw an article earlier comparing Meta to Fortnite. After a quick search on Google, there are now multiple articles all saying the same bland thing. And they're all talking nonsense.

This is not a correct like-for-like comparison for a start (in fact they all stem from a single piece 2 days ago now and regurgitate the same thing). These articles just bash Meta for clickbait without doing any real analysis.

Fortnite

Fortnite is an open-world built on a technology backed by years of innovation in a game creation engine from Epic Games.

Meta is a social media company desperately trying to use a VR hardware product they bought to force a virtual world to happen.

Want to know what the biggest difference is worth talking about that not one of these articles bothered to pick up?

Epic owns Unreal Engine. It owns the creation and development ecosystem that companies are building their#metaverseworlds on.

Meta is building Horizon Worlds on Unity. There were reports it acquired Crayta, a small development tool but even this is based on Unreal Engine 4. They even tried to acquire Unity in 2020.

The Real Comparison

Meta doesn't have its own engine, they're using someone else's. If Zuckerberg and the execs in Metaactually had a strategy they'd have been quietly building their own from the ground up with the billions in their war chest instead of being constrained by the limitations of another's technology.

THAT'S THE COMPARISON. Not the silly cartoon avatars or Zuckerberg fumbling around with Oculus, it's the strategy that led Epic to this point in time vs Facebook lurching from trend to trend without building a coherent legacy of their own. Well, a legacy worth leaving to the world anyway.

Epic has been doing a lot more with Unreal Engine than just games, their collaboration with other companies in other industries points to this. Take the Ferrari collaboration in 2021 that put a 296 GTB into Fortnite. On the surface, it was a neat way to bring a prestige supercar into a game played by millions. But that's half the story.

“The car featured in the game is built on the same source data and using the same Unreal Engine features as the 296 GTB in Ferrari’s own car configurator, and it’s this level of power and versatility which has led the automotive industry to put its trust in Unreal Engine,”

Unreal Engine has become a go-to platform for digital twins because it delivers the precision, quality, and fidelity needed when establishing a single source of truth for digital assets. And digital replicas - whether virtual doubles of cars, buildings, or entire cities - are essential building blocks of the Metaverse.

Meta can't claim this because it's not built anything to rival Epic this way. Their vision for the metaverse is based on social networks and hasty acquisitions that are forced to work together.

The real comparison isn't Fornite vs Meta - it's Sweeney vs Zuckerberg.