Th purpose of this article is to discuss the future of the metaverse and how Fortnite will help shape that. If the Metaverse is going to happen anywhere, it will happen on a gaming community like Fortnite. Imagine if you will, a Fortnite gaming experience in its own Metaverse. It would mean Fortnite has its own economy. Businesses would flock to it in order to provide products and services to gamers. For example, your character has taken damage. They can simply stop at a real-life fast-food chain and buy a cheeseburger to increase health. Or buy a pair of name-brand shoes for increased speed and stamina. While driving around in a vehicle, songs and advertisements from a real-life radio station. All these companies could pay Epic Games advertisement dollars to increase their name brand.
Fortnite is the future of the Metaverse
That is the vision CEO Tim Sweeney conveyed in his interview with Fast Company. He discussed the evolution and future of Fortnite. Fortnite would seem to be the perfect proving ground for a metaverse. It has a loyal subscriber base with over 300 million people (roughly the size of the population of the entire United States of America) according to Dexterto.com, a website that measures Fortnite player counts. It also draws in its user base with a highly attractive game, something that other meta-type companies seem to be lacking.
Challenges with the future of the Metaverse
The challenge with the metaverse in general is that it is currently being pioneered in silos. Facebook, Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are each building their own. Microsoft with its recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard is also investing in the metaverse. How these different companies will come to terms and create a universal system of protocols and measures for allowing users to interact with each other is a different and unanswered question altogether. Right now, at least, it is not a system of protocols like the internet as we know it today that can connect everyone.
It does seem, however, that a silo approach can work for a specific game or platform like Fortnite. The idea is planted and that is the important thing. The next step in the evolution is bringing businesses into a community like Fortnite and allowing them to create business models to spur an economy within the platform itself. Another key will be allowing a user-based economy, one that will allow users to start their own businesses and sell products and services or work for other businesses in the metaverse to earn money. An easily identifiable service would be for example training services and teaching someone how to play Fortnite for example, better.
The metaverse has been a popular topic and is in the early stages of its evolution. Its future is uncertain, but trends like this inspire confidence for those invested. If nothing else, it will be certainly interesting to keep an eye on the developments of the metaverse and watch how platforms like Fortnite evolve.