Epic detail plans for Unreal Engine 6 and share vision of a metaverse spanning "Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite"

"Let the best ecosystem win"

Epic Games laid off over 800 people a year ago, following what CEO Tim Sweeney confessed was an "unrealistic" period of investment designed to "grow Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators". Now, it's time to start talking about brighter, metaversal tomorrows and hopefully, not do the whole thing all over again. Epic have detailed early plans for Unreal Engine 6, which Sweeney says will combine Unreal Engine with Fortnite's easy-to-use Unreal Editor to create a gigantic, "interoperable" metaverse platform that lets developers sell stuff that can seamlessly be transferred to other games, whether they run on Unreal Engine or not. Stealth blockchain post? Genuinely, I can neither confirm nor deny.

All this comes from a new Verge interview with Sweeney and Epic executive vice-president Saxs Persson, which follows this year's Unreal Fest conference in Seattle. Regarding the layoffs, Sweeney told the site that Epic are now financially stable.

"Last year, before Unreal Fest, we were spending about a billion dollars a year more than we were making," he said. "Now, we're spending a bit more than we're making."

Epic "have a very robust amount of funding relative to pretty much any company in the industry and are making forward investments really judiciously that we could throttle up or down as our fortunes change," Sweeney went on. "We feel we're in a perfect position to execute for the rest of this decade and achieve all of our plans at our size."

Foremost among those grand plans is the blueprint for Unreal Engine 6, which will take several years to arrive, and is built around the philosophy of "interoperable content" that can be transferred between any game running on the engine. Epic's principal testcase for this idea is the Manhattan-Project-ish "games and entertainment universe" they're making for Disney, which will smoosh together the Disney and Fortnite communities to produce a hellish, hybrid race of monsters I call "Disnites", who raid our dwellings by the light of the full moon aboard flying, bus-shaped princesses. I mean, it will supposedly let devs and players move and ferry their digital belongings easily between Fortnite and Unreal Engine worlds based on Disney properties. A battle royale map based on Disneyland seems like an easy win, tbh.

In the meantime, Epic are about to open the Fab digital assets marketplace, which will apparently host assets that can work even in non-Unreal-Engine games like Minecraft and Roblox, and is the first step on the road towards a scenario in which Fab creators sell exactly "one logical asset that has different file formats that work in different contexts", meaning you won't have to buy it separately for any other game that supports "interoperability". Sweeney's example in the Verge piece is "a forest mesh set that has different content optimized for Unreal Engine, Unity, Roblox, and Minecraft".

Sweeney's view is that "having seamless movement of content from place to place is going to be one of the critical things that makes the metaverse work without duplication."

I have a couple of fairly predictable comments in response to all this. Firstly: what exactly is "the metaverse" these days? Is it still a loose buzzword for a bunch of ostensibly transformative technologies like VR, and if so, does it still include dodgy prospects like the blockchain and NFTs, which promise a similar "interoperability" of materials between games?

Secondly: why would Microsoft want Epic selling stuff that people can bring into Minecraft, rather than just selling those things themselves, as they currently do? Sweeney conceded to the Verge that Epic haven't had any "discussions" about interoperability with other publishers beyond Disney yet, "but we will, over time". He basically thinks companies should set up a revenue sharing scheme, so that all can prosper from 'the same' asset being sold for use in several games.

Persson, meanwhile, noted that "people are not dogmatic about where they play," and as such, "there's no reason why we couldn't have a federated way to flow between Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite." He added: "From our perspective, that would be amazing, because it keeps people together and lets the best ecosystem win."

"Let the best ecosystem win" is possibly a poor choice of words here, inasmuch as it suggests that, goodness gracious, some partners might actually lose out on "interoperability" with Epic's platform. As The Verge notes, Sweeney's vision of "interoperability" between worlds, whether Unreal or no, makes perfect sense for Epic - it means they can pump a little indirect revenue from the increasingly besieged group of games that refuse to use Unreal Engine. But other companies might wish to avoid a scenario in which all their artists are, strictly speaking, making stuff for the Unreal Engine marketplace, rather than the games they're supposed to be working on.

I don't know. I'm an idiot non-businessy know-nothing: feel free to give me an education in the comments. Epic are being pretty militant about increasing their returns from third-party platforms at present. In other news, they're still picking legal fights with the likes of Google over how easily players can access Fortnite on their phones.