1/ Metaverse Musings #1

Last night, 12.3 million concurrent players gathered in Fortnite to watch Travis Scott debut his new album. For context, that is almost four times bigger than Rod Stewart's Copacabana Beach—the largest concert ever on NYE 1994.

2/ In order to facilitate such an operation, all other game modes were disabled in the hour run up to the show beginning. Users were encouraged to join lobbies 30 minutes before the scheduled start time in order to guarantee a spot.

3/ The digital equivalent of queueing outside the venue proved to be rather more enjoyable, as players chased each other around a beach and constructed massive structures looming over the stage. Suprisingly, there were no contraband checks either—security was a breeze.

4/ As the squad and I waited eagerly on stage, a planet-shaped space ship came hovering towards us across the ocean as spectators could hardly contain themselves. (Yes, I am the shark).

5/ All of a sudden, a giant Travis Scott appeared and stomped his foot sending all 12.3 million players hurtling into the air (there were between 60-100 players in each lobby) as his music kicked in with deafening force.

6/ The next 15 minutes represented one of the most intense digital experiences I've ever had (I don't say this lightly), and was arguably the closest one can come to taking acid without actually taking acid.

7/ Whilst undoubtedly cool, this event represents something bigger. It is yet another major stepping stone in digital culture's advance into the mainstream with Fortnite having featured Deadpool, Thanos, Batman, John Wick, Marshmello, Star Wars, Nike, and now Travis Scott.

8/ What started out as highly experimental is getting constantly validated as increasingly audacious stunts are performed at massive scale, with huge concurrency, and flawless technical orchestration. Epic Games' latest funding talks are putting it at over a $15bn valuation.

9/ For the Metaverse to begin to flourish, there needs to emerge: 1) concurrency infrastructure 2) enticing content, both user-generated and pop culture related 3) standards and protocols.

10/ Fortnite is playing an invaluable role in capturing player imaginations whilst driving forwards both 1) and 2). It already exists as a form of quasi-Metaverse as their Creative Mode allows players to enter 1000s of user-created worlds of mad variety through space-time rifts.

11/ It has been so succesful as a bastion of modern culture, that major brands are surrendering partial control of their IP to Fortnite for additional exposure. The game might be the only place in which Star-Lord can meet Batman who can meet a Stormtrooper who can meet John Wick.

12/ Not only are they laying the foundations for an unprecedented cauldron of IP, they also have taken multiplayer to the next level. Fortnite shattered the belief held by major game platforms that these types of experiences would undermine their hard-earned network effects.

13/ In fact, Fortnite manated to force Sony out of over a decade of digital isolationism. The game (and others as a result) can now be played across PC, Mac, PS4, Xbox, Switch, Android, and iOS. Epic's social graph has become amazingly rich with over 1.6 bn player connections.

14/ On top of all this, they're intent on growing the space as a whole. Their game store is committed to 12% fees vs the 30% industry standard, and Epic Online Services go live for free in Q2 allowing other developers to benefit from Epic's infrastructure. https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1210291961904730114

15/ Clearly, Epic Games is driving the space forwards on a number of fronts and appears to be a responsible shepherd for our continued advance into the entertainment economy. But what about the 3rd Metaverse component—standards and protocols—that I mentioned earlier?

16/ With the virtual goods market reaching $50bn, perhaps it is time to move away from letting items sit in heterogeneous centralized servers that are owned by a single company, provide no way to generate cash flows, and offer no real ownership or control prospects for the user.

17/ For the Metaverse to truly take root virtual economies will need to evolve from their current form. Most trading of virtual assets happens in grey secondary markets that carry varying degrees of risk for both buyers and sellers, and usually operate against the game's ToS.

18/ How can we expect a growing number of users to dedicate serious time and capital to the virtual if they have no way to manipulate those investments? If I quit Fortnite, the only method of "cashing out" would be to sell my account altogether and risk being scammed or banned.

19/ To move beyond these current limitations, there has to emerge shared standards and protcols for the creation and movement of virtual goods in the same way there exist protocols for the sharing data packets (TCP/IP) or file types (.PNG/.ZIP) across the internet.

20/ Through the use of cryptographic tokens called NFTs (non-fungible tokens), there now exists the ability to represent digital uniqueness. Whilst it is still early, the bet is that a shared standard (e.g. ERC-721) will entrench itself as the web continues to evolve.

21/ If you had the ability to not only liquidate your blockchain-secured Fortnite skins on an open market should you grow tired of them, but actually deploy rare ones as collateral to secure loans and produce cash flows (perhaps to buy the latest battlepass), would you?

22/ The infrastructure required to support the volume of something like Fortnite items is a long way off, but so is the concurrency infrastructure that will host tens of thousands of players without having to shard game instances and cap lobby sizes. Things move fast.

23/ Whilst it seems alien, perhaps Epic Games could integrate an opt-in NFT component directly into their Unreal Engine. Not only would this drive an explosion of economic activity in Fortnite, but also across every game that builds using that game engine.

24/ It might at first look as though it could eat some of their revenue streams, but why not program royalties into the tokens allowing them to collect a fee from all transactions made across any game using Unreal Engine?

Perhaps we will all be transacting in V-Bucks after all.

25/ Many are loosely aware of the Metaverse on the horizon, but it seems probable that we will see something that looks very much like it by the close of this decade.

Could Epic be the ones to revolutionize the hatrick of concurrency, content, and standardization?