Over at this year’s GDC, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney held a presentation in which he shared the company’s “unified” vision of the metaverse, stating that it “has to be open” instead of being “another walled garden.”

Throughout the State of Unreal 2023 keynote, the company shared what’s included in Unreal Engine 5.2 via a video demo, while also revealing the new Unreal Editor for Fortnite and that the Unreal Marketplace, Sketchfab, ArtStation Marketplace and Quixel Bridge will be combined into one new unified 3D marketplace called Fab, among other announcements.

Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, Sweeney claimed that the metaverse “is happening for real” and that the gaming industry represents the “perfect place” for an open ecosystem because according to the Fortnite creator, “there’s not one predominant company that can dictate terms.”

“There's three pretty strong console companies and there's about a dozen publishers who each have their own ecosystem that are pretty strong themselves. And so pretty quickly you get to the realisation that each one of them will be better off connecting their services to an open system [and] being in an open economy rather than just limiting themselves to their own user base.”

He added that the metaverse “is way more attractive” to players if most of their real-life friends are also a part of it, saying that the metaverse is about “real-world experiences with real world friends” and not like the “old days where you’re playing with random strangers on the Internet.” According to the article, Epic’s vision of the metaverse is not one that includes NFTs and blockchain, as they are not interested in such technologies, saying that “we had NFT pitches, true ownership and metaverse... You don't need that for the metaverse. It works. Robux, V-Bucks. They're fine [as is]."

“If we just build this thing in an open environment then companies can live on their merits. We very much like that because we have a history of winning on the merits when given the chance and we're terribly frustrated at markets like iOS where you just can't make an Epic Games Store for iOS because Apple says 'You can't compete with us'!"

The CEO however worries that, while just about any challenge can be eventually solved, he thinks that Apple could be the biggest threat to their vision of the metaverse, believing that “They’ll either try to crush the metaverse, or extract all the profit from it.” He emphasizes that the 2nd largest mobile phone manufacturer will be “utterly dominating” the metaverse “if they're allowed to use their market power and hardware to do so. So we're fighting that.”

Earlier this month, Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison revealed that almost 20 more Web3 games are set to release on the Fortnite developer’s store.