The Sweeney/Ball/Stephenson chat
Metaverse and so much more
As mentioned in a previous post, Matthew Ball has dropped the transcript of a recent live 90-minute conversation between me, him, and Epic Games founder/CEO Tim Sweeney. This is part of the launch for Matt’s Metaverse book which is coming out in a few days and can be pre-ordered wherever you buy books.
Much of what I had to say in that conversation I’ve recently posted here on Graphomane, or videos linked from said posts, so there’s no need for me to rehash my own part of it here. The interview is notable for a few long-form perorations from Tim, which are worth reading and unpacking. I’m just going to bullet point them here.
This word “Metaverse” has a “stock price” that goes up and down depending on what various companies have done with it lately. A much more useful way of thinking about the word’s currency than “The Metaverse is the next big thing!” or “The Metaverse is dead!”
Epic has had Metaverse aspirations from very early in the history of the company. Fortnite is a stepping stone towards a system that can support a much larger number of users and creators. The fact that Fortnite: Battle Royale only supports 100 users per shard is simply an artifact of what was technically possible on servers at the time Epic built the game.
Tim has been following blockchain technology and has a completely sane and balanced take on the current state of that industry.
From there he makes a segue, about halfway through the interview, into the topic of what I’m going to call Metaverse modularity—the idea that it should be built on engine-agnostic technical standards that would make it possible for non-Epic game engines such as Unity or Godot to participate on an equal footing.
Why he has been working on the Verse programming language and why such a language is needed in order to make an open Metaverse work.
The ethics of training AIs on data sets without permission from creators. An analogy between AI and crypto, both promising technologies that got rushed out into the world too quickly. What AI can and can’t (yet) do for game developers.
As clear a statement as you’re ever likely to see of Epic’s position vis-a-vis Apple and Google. Press coverage of these legal proceedings has tended to focus on the minutiae, characterizing it as being all about payment systems and antitrust regulation, and some have questioned why Tim has been putting so much effort into fighting this particular war. The answer’s to be found in Tim’s long, extemporaneous statement toward the very end of the interview, and it’s all about the Metaverse: “By imposing huge sets of rules on what their competitors are allowed to do on devices customers have bought, they can prevent entire categories of software from existing and they will prevent the Metaverse from existing to the extent that they can't fully tax it. And if it is allowed to exist in the future, then it will exist as a vassal to Apple's fiefdom.”
I’m hoping that the above is useful as a road map for navigating through this long and detailed interview. Matt specifically wanted us to get into the details, and gave us the time and space to do so.