Fortnite Metaverse
It is abundantly clear at this point that the last few years have taken the term “metaverse” from an aspirational (though also dystopian) sci-fi concept to a buzzword destroyed by tech companies and grifters trying to build some weird, demented, overmonetized version of it.
We saw this in big and small ways, a bunch of web3 blockchain “metaverses” where companies would buy land and Paris Hilton would hang out with an ugly avatar. These were dismal, empty, gross places that served no purpose except for attempting to make their founders rich by selling air.
Then we saw this at a huge scale with Facebook, I mean Meta, where they changed their name to Meta to better personify Mark Zuckerberg’s VR-driven vision of the metaverse. And while yes, in fiction, the metaverse is an immersive VR experience that transports the user “in person” to the virtual space, the tech we have now is not remotely close to that. Zuckerberg spent a fortune on his version of Ready Player One’s OASIS, Horizon Worlds, that featured a bunch of horrifying legless avatars running around (so to speak), getting up to a few hundred thousand players and then…promptly losing a few hundred thousand players. While the Meta VR arm still exists, VR itself remains a niche and not anywhere close to the metaverse that was promised. Meta, of course, is now pivoting mainly to AI like everyone else.
But, slow and steady may win the race, and I believe that’s what we’re seeing with Fortnite now. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has been a bit obnoxious with his side of the metaverse fight, where he believes its fundamental existence relies on getting Apple, Google, Steam, and everyone else to get rid of their 30% revenue cut or else that will “strange the metaverse” before it can actually exist.
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But the rest of Epic? They have been…building the actual metaverse, or at least the closest we’re going to get to it. And unlike Facebook trying to capture the magic of OASIS with VR, Fortnite is doing it with normal gameplay, but creating the virtual spaces and cast of characters that made that universe so appealing in the first place. Something no one else trying to do this ever really understood.
We saw glimpses of this for years, with large-scale mass-watched events like meteor strikes or rocket launches on the Fortnite map, then Travis Scott or Ariana Grande concerts. Those were the first inklings of “metaverse moments” that made it feel like Fortnite was on the right track. But for a while, it felt like that came and went and Fortnite had missed its chance, stuck in the same rut with its wider ambitions stalled.
Instead, behind the scenes, they were prepping a large-scale launch that would make Fortnite more metaverse-y than ever. After refueling Fortnite’s player count with its return to the OG map,