Maybe not I'm using the M-word a lot these days, but the race to build an interconnected virtual world powered by avatars hasn't taken a break over the past year.
The metaverse, a tech buzzword sandwiched between the hype eras of NFTs and ai, is still being built, regardless of what we call it. And in light of this week's news, one company is increasingly positioned to dominate the near future.
Epic Games and Disney revealed Wednesday that they are together designing an “entertainment universe” full of Disney-flavored games to play and things to buy. The multi-year project will deploy Epic's in-house technology and Fortnite's social gaming ecosystem to bring characters from Disney's vast intellectual property vault to life. Disney invested $1.5 billion for a portion of Epic in the deal.
In an image promoting the project, Disney and Epic portray their work together as a series of colorful futuristic islands floating in space with highways between them and a Magic Castle glowing in the center, a beacon of cash-printing possibility. Those highways, whether literally or symbolically, will connect to Epic's Fortnite, a hit game that has now become a huge online social ecosystem.
The evolution of Fortnite
Fortnite is best known as a third-person shooter where 100 players swarm an increasingly smaller virtual island and fight to be the last man standing. The game is famous for its ridiculous maximalism and encourages players to dress up in custom “skins,” which can be obtained by playing the game or purchasing through Epic's lucrative virtual gift shop. In Fortnite, you can, like Darth Vader, roll over your enemy in a giant hamster wheel, slingshot through the attic of a square suburban house. Your enemy could be dressed like Goku from Dragon Ball Z, Ariana Grande, or Meowscles, a shirtless muscular cat (an Epic original).
In its early days, Fortnite was as ubiquitous and popular as a game can be. Game streaming routinely attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers on Twitch, where a cottage industry of professional Fortnite players emerged, all focused on Epic's polished battle royale. By 2020, the game already had more registered players than the population of the United States. In 2023, the game saw a resurgence and 100 million people logged in last November.
Anyone who still thinks of Fortnite solely as that silly battle royale will be surprised to learn the extent of Epic's true ambitions.
In recent years, Epic has been steadily expanding its flagship title until it becomes something much more like a platform or marketplace than a simple independent game. Over the years, Fortnite's seasonal psychedelic events, concerts by kaiju Travis Scott, and user generated sandbox worlds Everyone was hinting at these big plans. In December, Epic tripled down by simultaneously launching three new in-game games: Lego Fortnite, a Minecraft/Animal Crossing hybrid, Fortnite Festival, a rhythm game from the studio behind Rock Band, and Rocket Racing, a racing title. Fast-paced game from the creators of Rocket League.
That list of new games was already ambitious, but this week's surprise news that Disney is coming to Fortnite (or the other way around) is on another level entirely. The two companies already have a relationship; Disney first invested in Epic through its accelerator program in 2017 and has licensed many of its Marvel and Star Wars characters for Fortnite as skins, but the new $1.5 billion investment signals a much deeper long-term play. .
Disney needs Fortnite
With Fortnite, Disney finds itself in an interesting position of needing something it probably couldn't do better on its own.
Epic Games is light years ahead of many of its peers in smooth online multiplayer gaming. Running fluid, fast, and simultaneous instances of detailed virtual worlds for many millions of people is technically complex and expensive. Any Fortnite player could be forgiven for not realizing that because the core Epic experience works perfectly the vast majority of the time, allowing people on all devices to play and chat together instantly. Fortnite looks and moves so well thanks to Epic's Unreal Engine 5, which Disney partner Square Enix will also use for Kingdom Hearts IV, the latest game in the hit franchise featuring Disney characters.
In it advertisement, Disney CEO Bob Iger called the partnership with Epic “Disney's biggest entry into gaming.” Because anything the two companies come up with will be interoperable with Fortnite, Disney can also instantly gain Fortnite's 100 million monthly players without needing to build a player base from scratch.
The benefits will also extend in the other direction, and Fortnite could surpass Roblox's own numbers, which are currently at least double his own. Disney, like Lego, will also broaden Fortnite's appeal beyond the audience that plays Battle Royale and other Fortnite shooters. Fortnite's offerings in other genres could appeal to players both young and old and broaden the game's appeal to more women, who are currently enjoying the boom in cozy gaming, and to parents looking for family-friendly titles.
Fortnite's business model is also key to the potential success of the collaboration with Disney. Games in the Fortnite ecosystem are free to play, and the company makes money through brand licensing partnerships and in-game purchases, such as skins, dances, and emotes, which rotate through its virtual store daily.
If the popularity of Fortnite character skins from Disney-owned franchises like Star Wars and Wonderful As an indication, players will be eager to collect their favorites and display them on Fortnite's slick animated avatars. From Elsa and Mickey to Princess Leia and Iron Man, Disney's vast vault of characters is a nearly infinite resource with unlimited revenue potential for both companies.
Metaverse Status
Meta may have gone to the trouble of renaming the metaverse, but in figuring out the future, the company formerly known as Facebook flipped the equation. By focusing on virtual reality hardware, a market the company had largely cornered after purchasing Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion, Meta ended up with a solution that needed a problem: a as without a what. Apple's new Vision Pro, while technically very impressive, may hit a similar adoption wall.
While Meta was obsessed with turning its Oculus acquisition into a mass-market product, companies like Epic, Roblox, Minecraft-maker Mojang, and others were developing avatar-powered virtual worlds where people loved to spend time. Importantly, those worlds are widely available and hardware agnostic, meaning a PlayStation 5 player could take on someone on a PC or even an iPhone (despite Epic's complex showdown with Apple).
Horizon Worlds was Meta's answer to those experiences (creepy legless avatars and all), but by then many millions of people had already invested in a virtual world that adapted to them, without the need for headsets. These social game worlds are extremely catchy and people love to hang out in them, express themselves through virtual shopping, and generally do everything without VR.
In light of their success, Epic, Roblox, and Mojang smartly positioned things we once considered games instead of platforms. Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft all host user-generated content, sometimes called UGC, a not-very-useful acronym that means players can also upload their own game modes and virtual goods there for other players to try out or purchase. This content is very, very popular: according to Epic, 70% of Fortnite players play user-created content in addition to the main experience. It's what people think of when they talk about Roblox. For these companies, user-generated content costs nothing, keeps players coming back, and can generate revenue with little effort.
Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and other avatar-based virtual worlds can coexist, but Fortnite has some unique advantages. While its peers lean on its nostalgia-laden looks, Fortnite's high-fidelity graphics and sophisticated animations (so sophisticated that they've sparked more than one lawsuit for dance moves) are more future-proof and user-friendly. the brand. Minecraft and Roblox are technology-67105983″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>powers in its own right, but the former is more of a game than an ecosystem and the latter will have to prove it can retain its young core users as they grow. Meanwhile, Epic has a deep understanding of the ways people want to express themselves online and the technical prowess, and now partnerships, to make it possible.
Online multiplayer games are not social networks in the traditional sense, but the two categories are converging: games are more like social networks, and social networks are increasingly full of games. As Fortnite's cinematic universe expands to include Lego, Rock Band, and now Disney, Epic is set to introduce a host of new players to a virtual world that's as much about who you're with as it is what you're doing. And wasn't that the promise of the metaverse all along?
