Could Fortnite Use Blockchain? ‘Perhaps Someday,’ Says Epic CEO

Battle royale gaming titan Fortnite could utilize blockchain in the future, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said this week—but cryptocurrency will not feature in the game.

“Perhaps someday,” Sweeney tweeted in response to Game Fund Partners co-founder Jonah Blake, who asked the Epic head if blockchain will be used in Fortnite soon. 

But this would not be in the way that many people would think, “as we’ve plainly said many times we aren’t adopting cryptocurrency or NFT trading or similar,” Sweeney added. 

Instead, he is more interested in the “underlying idea” of blockchain, calling it “awesome.” Specifically, Sweeney points to using the blockchain as a “decentralized solution to distributed transactional evolution of simulation state computed among participants in an open ecosystem.”

Put simply, this appears to mean using the blockchain as a database alternative. An example of this concept has been seen with crypto role-playing game Pirate Nation, which plans to spread transactions across multiple blockchains in the same way that a traditional game may use multiple databases to process 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, explaining in which ways the blockchain may be used in the future. “Zero-knowledge proofs, the idea of cryptographic consensus protocols, and so on should be a key component of a lot of systems,” Sweeney explained.

Sweeney has been a vocal supporter of the “open metaverse,” an idea that upholds the idea of decentralization and interoperability in digital experiences often referred to as metaverse worlds. In 2021, he said that “no company can own” the metaverse, off the back of Facebook’s rebranding to Meta.

Despite this, he called to pump the breaks on the fantasy that an “open metaverse” means that assets from one game could just freely be dumped into another one.

“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. “Which 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.”

Instead, he wants to focus on the reality of how developers can create an open metaverse that works by enabling interoperability across games in a more realistic sense.

“I think the future of the metaverse has to be built on open protocols, open standards, and interoperability of all forms,” Sweeney said in the Ball interview.

This is being done through groups like the Metaverse Standards Forum—an organization that Epic has engaged with—which is attempting to bring technical standards across the industry to enable interoperability.

With such a focus on the tech, Sweeney explained that blockchain gaining popularity (or notoriety) because of cryptocurrency may have damaged the technology’s long-term reputation.

“It strikes me as very unfortunate that it didn't have another couple 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.”

In spite of this, he still believes the technology will prevail.

“I think the world will end up on the right side of blockchain technology,” Sweeney finished. “In the meantime, it's still a rather ‘Wild West,’ so buyer beware.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward