TWIG #180 Epic Games makes metaverse and crypto moves

[Music] so um i just want to do a quick thing on this so there's an interview with tim sweeney it's on fast company um it's great interview i think it covers some of the the the news articles because i think i i called out like tim sweeney uh had a pretty snarky response to the the genies raise of i think was 150 million for their avatar system um he he went into a little bit deep a little bit of detail on here but there was one quote here uh from him which is important so fortnite creative um if you aren't aware it's a set of tools that anybody can use to build their fortnite their own fortnite island this is coming from tim about half of fortnite play right now by users is in content created by other players half is now in epic content right so this is a very very important stat this is now reaching a tipping point where fortnite creative sounds like it's

actually reaching a meaningful scale and driving a significant amount of their play time likely retention um moving forward from tim later this year we're going to release the unreal editor for fortnite and the full capabilities that you've seen in unreal engine is now going to be opened up so that anybody can build high quality game content and code and then deploy that into fortnite creative without having to do a deal with us it's open to everybody and this as well he went into of course his anti-competitive stance on things like what's revenue share how are you going to be able to handle this on across different platform owners etc but overall this is really important news right fortnite is moving towards more of a ugc uh end game right and really epic is going to be miles ahead of anybody else going through the metaphors or chasing after them at a first stream i think we talked about this uh two podcasts ago tim sweeney is now officially james holliday let's just say

so um personally i think it's just it's great to see fortnite shifting more towards ugc since i think this is just actually like this is going to fuel its growth for the next decade and like fortnite battle royale was inevitably going to fade in engagement right you can only survive for so long um but now shifting towards ugc at this scale makes perfect sense and i also think it's just for everybody else in this industry that's going after metaverse it's going to be near impossible to replicate like to build a fortnight there's only like a super small percentage chance anybody else can build a a breakout hit at the same time right so only really roblox now is is scale to the point that they could compete with this but they don't have unreal engine right it's far easier now for epic to make unreal engine easy to build multiplayer games than it is for roblox to upgrade their engine to appeal to a broader audience so uh with this news i think that the short

term is that there's a huge opportunity for say game fam like studios or developers to kind of jump onto facebook creative mode early and build out experiences um and for for the long term i just i continue to think that epic has such a huge lead on the metaverse so super you can use that on your panel with uh ethan do you guys have any thoughts otherwise i'll move on to the diablo immortal just just quickly the fact that they're doing this much uh well consumers are consuming this much content without any real like tools and technology to build it out is awesome right and i i agree with you they're really far ahead the only thing that concerns me about this is that they are they there's no evidence that they are reaching out to developers to start using these these these these engines or small developers like you talk about game fam or something like that right like i'm trying to find the evidence that they're actually doing biz dab corp dev to go out and like recruit

people to build content you know like compelling content for with with the new tools it just doesn't seem like they're there yet so maybe this is like something that happens over the next couple of years as opposed to like something we'll see like a great product next year you know what i'm saying so yeah yeah they build up the tools um and i don't think they need professional developers they just need the the guy that goes builds the mods for dota 2 that blow up right to come over and then build a shooter gameplay mode that nobody's seen before like they need scale of developers they don't need necessarily professional at this point but it still is a great opportunity