Fortnite might leverage blockchain in the future, but it will not incorporate cryptocurrencies or offer NFT trading, according to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney.
This week, Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic Games, mentioned that the battle royale gaming giant Fortnite could potentially utilize blockchain technology in the future. However, he clarified that cryptocurrency would not be included in the game.
"Perhaps someday," Sweeney tweeted in response to Game Fund Partners co-founder Jonah Blake, who inquired whether blockchain would be implemented in Fortnite soon.
Sweeney emphasized that this adoption would differ from common expectations. "As we've plainly said many times, we aren’t adopting cryptocurrency or NFT trading or similar," he added.
Instead, Sweeney is more intrigued by the "underlying idea" of blockchain, which he finds "awesome." He highlighted the potential use of blockchain as a "decentralized solution to distributed transactional evolution of simulation state computed among participants in an open ecosystem."
In simpler terms, this suggests using blockchain as an alternative to traditional databases. A practical example of this concept is seen in the crypto role-playing game Pirate Nation, which plans to distribute transactions across multiple blockchains, similar to how traditional games utilize multiple databases for processing user information.
"For me, money is kind of the least interesting of applications on blockchains," Sweeney said in a recent interview with author Matthew Ball, elaborating on potential future uses of blockchain technology. "Zero-knowledge proofs, the idea of cryptographic consensus protocols, and so on should be a key component of a lot of systems," he explained.
Sweeney has been a strong advocate for the "open metaverse," a concept promoting decentralization and interoperability in digital experiences often referred to as metaverse worlds. In 2021, he stated that "no company can own" the metaverse, following Facebook's rebranding to Meta.
Despite his support, he urged caution against the fantasy that an "open metaverse" means assets from one game could seamlessly transfer to another.
"There's a dream of interoperability, which is the idea that you could essentially drag and drop assets from one game into another," he said in the Ball interview. "This is quite reasonably seen as threatening and even kind of insulting to people who spend their lives crafting beautiful AAA games. And it's also technically ridiculous."
Sweeney explained that the association of blockchain technology with cryptocurrency has potentially harmed its long-term reputation.
"It strikes me as very unfortunate that it didn't have another couple of decades to be nurtured in the purely nerd community before it was adopted as a financial instrument," Sweeney said. "The currency has been greatly undermined by speculation, scams, regulatory uncertainty, and so on."
Despite these challenges, he remains optimistic about the technology's future.
"I think the world will end up on the right side of blockchain technology," Sweeney concluded. "In the meantime, it's still a rather ‘Wild West,’ so buyer beware."
