Tim Sweeney has shared his thoughts on the Metaverse and concept of a single storefront for all platforms. He was recently in South Korea to praise its new law requiring Google and Apple to accept third-party payments. While there, he expressed the following in regard to the growing fragmentation of the gaming industry.
What the world really needs now is a single store that works with all platforms, to buy software in one place, knowing that they’d have it on all devices and all platforms.
Such unification is unlikely to ever exist, but he also discussed the economic impact the Metaverse will have on the gaming industry and world economy while giving a jab at Apple and Google. He stated the following at last week’s Global Conference for Mobile Application Ecosystem Fairness.
The metaverse is a 3D social entertainment platform . Some early examples of games that aspire to be the metaverse are Roblox, PUBG, and Fortnite. Over the coming decades, the metaverse has the potential to become a multi-trillion dollar part of the world economy, open to all companies around the world as equals…Apple and Google policies ban other companies from creating the metaverse so they can dominate it themselves and tax it. We must not allow these two companies to control our digital lives.
“The next three years are going to be critical for all of the metaverse-aspiring companies like Epic, Roblox, Microsoft, Facebook,” Sweeney said, stating that the first to reach a billion users will be the one who’ll define the standards. Even if Epic doesn’t attain this goal, he believes it can offer tools like Unreal Engine to assist others in the process. Epic is also developing digital assets for film, TV, and games that can be incorporated into the Metaverse.
Sources: Bloomberg (1, 2), The Global Conference for Mobile Application Ecosystem Fairness (via Tweaktown)