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Could Fortnite Use Blockchain? ‘Maybe Someday,’ Says Epic CEO
Titan of battle royale games Fortnite could use Blockchain in the future, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said this week—but cryptocurrency will not be present in the game.
“Maybe Someday,” Sweeney tweeted in response to Game Fund Partners co-founder Jonah Blake, who asked the Epic boss whether blockchain will soon be used in Fortnite.
But this would not be in the way that many people would think, “as we have clearly said many times we are not adopting cryptocurrency or NFT trading or similar”, Sweeney added.
Instead, he is more interested in the “core idea” of blockchain, calling it “fantastic.” In particular, Sweeney emphasizes blockchain’s use as a “decentralized solution for distributed transactional evolution of computed simulation state among participants in an open ecosystem.”
In simple terms, this seems to mean using blockchain as an alternative to a database. An example of this concept was seen with the cryptographic role-playing game Pirate Nationwhich plans to distribute transactions across multiple blockchains in the same way a traditional game might use multiple databases to process user information.
“For me, money is kind of the least interesting application of blockchains,” Sweeney said in a recent interview with the author. Matthew Ballexplaining how blockchain could be used in the future. “Zero-knowledge proofs, the idea of cryptographic consensus protocols, and so on, should be a key component of many systems,” Sweeney explained.
Sweeney has been an outspoken advocate of the “open metaverse,” an idea that champions the idea of decentralization and interoperability in digital experiences often referred to as metaverse worlds. In 2021, he stated that “no company can own“the metaverse, starting from the back of Facebook’s Rebranding to Meta.
Still, he called for a curbing of the fantasy that an “open metaverse” would mean that assets from one game could be freely downloaded into another.
“There’s a dream of interoperability, which is the idea that you can basically drag and drop assets from one game to another,” he said in the Ball interview. “Which is reasonably seen as threatening and even a little offensive to the people who spend their lives making beautiful AAA games. And it’s also technically ridiculous.”
Instead, it wants to focus on how developers can concretely create an open metaverse that works by enabling interoperability between games in a more realistic sense.
“I think the future of the metaverse It has to be built on open protocols, open standards, and interoperability of all forms,” Sweeney said in the interview with Ball.
This is done through groups like the Metaverse Standards Forum, an organization that Epic has committed to—which is attempting to spread technical standards across the industry to enable interoperability.
With such a focus on the technology, Sweeney explained that the popularity (or notoriety) of blockchain gained through cryptocurrencies may have damaged the technology’s long-term reputation.
“It seems very unfortunate to me that it didn’t have a couple more decades to be nurtured in the purely nerdy community before it was adopted as a financial instrument,” Sweeney said. “The currency has been significantly undermined by speculation, scams, regulatory uncertainty, and so on.”
Despite this, he continues to believe that technology will prevail.
“I think the world is going to end up on the right side of blockchain,” Sweeney concluded. “In the meantime, it’s still a bit of a ‘Wild West,’ so buyer beware.”