Fortnite creator wants to celebrate an “online wake” for the metaverse

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, creator of Fortnite and the Epic graphics engine, is back in the spotlight for his recent comments calling on the community to hold an “online wake” for what is considered one of the next steps in the digital age, the metaverse.

Celebrate the end of the Metaverse

Through his Twitter account, Sweeney shared an article from Business Insider that mentions the death of the platform that was being developed by Mark Zuckerberg’s company, Meta. “The metaverse is dead!,” he commented on his tweet, while also highlighting the nearly “600,000,000 monthly active users” of other gaming and virtual reality platforms like “Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG Mobile” and more that are still standing despite the pandemic and Meta’s efforts.

Despite these comments, just this March, the head of Epic Games considered some of the proposals presented by the metaverse as feasible. However, he also believed that their development could not be carried out due to the possibility that Apple, one of its main rivals in technological matters (and with whom it recently lost in court in a case related to Fortnite), could take ownership of these developments and limit them in the process.

Sweeney is not the only one in the video game industry to express doubts about the Metaverse, as Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, mentioned that the platform is “a poorly built video game.”

The end of the metaverse

Despite its great momentum during the pandemic years, between 2021 and 2023, it has recently been lost and the platforms based on this idea have been disappearing over time. The idea of turning these Virtual and Augmented Reality environments into experiences where users could coexist, work, and even entertain themselves fell apart due to the long development time, high costs, and lack of a code that would unify all the experiences into being for mass consumption. Unfortunately, the failure of this project put many people out of work.

Source | Twitter