Battle royale gaming giant Fortnite may utilize blockchain in the future, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said this week, even though the game will not feature cryptocurrencies.
“Maybe one day,” Sweeney tweeted in response to GameFund Partners co-founder Jonah Blake, who asked Epic’s leadership if blockchain would be used in Fortnite anytime soon.
But this is not what many think: “As we have made clear many times before, we are not embracing cryptocurrencies, NFT trading or the like,” Sweeney added.
Rather, he is interested in the “underlying ideas” of blockchain, which he calls “awesome.” Specifically, Sweeney points to using blockchain as a “decentralized solution to distributed transactional evolution of simulated states computed among participants in an open ecosystem.”
In simple terms, this seems to mean using blockchain as a replacement for databases. An example of this concept can be seen in the crypto role-playing game “Pirate Nation,” which plans to distribute transactions across multiple blockchains in the same way that traditional games use multiple databases to handle user information.
“To me, money is the least interesting application of blockchain,” Sweeney said in a recent interview with author Matthew Ball, explaining how blockchain may be used in the future. “I think the ideas of zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic consensus protocols, and so on, are going to be important building blocks for a lot of systems,” Sweeney explained.
Sweeney has been a vocal proponent of the “open metaverse,” which advocates for the idea of decentralization and interoperability in digital experiences, often referred to as the metaverse world. In 2021, he said in response to Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, “No company can own the metaverse.”
Nonetheless, he called for putting the brakes on the illusion that an “open metaverse” means assets from one game can be freely dropped into another.
“There’s this dream of interoperability, the idea of being able to drag and drop assets from one game into another,” he told Ball in an interview. “This is of course threatening, even insulting, to people who dedicate their lives to making beautiful AAA games. It’s also technically absurd.”
Instead, he wants to focus on the reality of how developers can create an open metaverse that works by enabling interoperability between games in a more practical sense.
“I think the future of the metaverse needs to be built on open protocols, open standards and all forms of interoperability,” Sweeney told Ball in an interview.
This is done through groups such as the Metaverse Standards Forum, an organization Epic is involved in, which seeks to introduce technical standards across the industry to achieve interoperability.
Sweeney explained that with so much attention being focused on the technology, blockchain’s rise to popularity (or notoriety) thanks to cryptocurrencies may have damaged the technology’s long-term reputation.
“It’s a shame that Bitcoin didn’t spend a few more decades fostering itself in the nerd community before being adopted as a financial instrument,” Sweeney said. “The currency has been heavily marred by speculation, fraud, and regulatory uncertainty.”
Despite this, he still believes technology will win.
“I think the world will eventually be on the right side of blockchain technology,” Sweeney concluded. “Until then, it’s still pretty much a ‘lawless world,’ so buyer beware.”
Editor: Andrew Hayward
