Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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One of the really critical things we aim to do in designing that is ensure it's a creator economy that could scale to other companies, other ecosystems.
and say, right now we have many industry standards bodies, one standardized game ratings, age ratings of games, another standardized file formats for the web, another style standardizing file formats for 3D, like chronoscopes in the metaverse standards form. If we had a standards body standardize what are portable outfits in games, game outfits that you could buy in one game that work in another,
What are their dimensions and what are their capabilities and what can you do and what can't you do and so on. Then you could have an item economy where every game agrees to respect each other's item purchases of that sort. And revenue is shared between ecosystems as well. That would be incredible.
I think this can be done. Um, yeah, we did a lot of analysis of the fortnight economy and found that, um, Some Fortnite experiences correlate with higher spending than others. And Battle Royale is relatively strong in that area because you see your character from behind and see all of your other characters from the front.
And you have lots of opportunities to really see who you are and to interact with other players. And a lot of games have that characteristic. One funny anomaly stood out. There was this game that was one of the big breakthroughs in Fortnite, only up. It's a game where you're just climbing up and up by following paths of stacks of objects and things. It was just stupid fun. Everybody loved it.
We found people weren't spending a lot of money on outfits when they were playing only up. It's kind of intuitive, actually. You're not seeing other players. If you see anything, you're seeing their butt as you're trying to catch up to them, jumping from object to object, and they're above you. And so it wasn't a mode that showed off outfits very much.
But you can determine the economic correlation between a game mode and spending.
Yeah, I think so. You don't need an alternate currency system. Unfortunately, a bunch of ideas have been conflated because people are trying to hype up different things, but this idea of large-scale multiplayer social gaming, that notion of the metaverse, there's 600 to 800 million people playing that kind of game every month.
So you know that's real and that's happening, and it's very much underway. VR has a much smaller audience. I don't think you need VR to have anything like this. VR is hardware that may or may not enhance the experience for some usage cases. For some, it will probably be better, and for some, it will probably be worse. But certainly, there's not any set of Battle Royale players flocking to VR
talking to VR. And the other thing is an FT is it's like, you know, trying to equate digital or cryptocurrency to, to the metaverse. It's like, well, you know, It's just a way of denoting money or value exchange. You can do that with money or you can do it with NFTs or whatever. But there's nothing about this future digital economy that fundamentally requires cryptocurrency or whatever.
What you need is interoperability. Interoperability can happen through a blockchain. It can happen through a database. It can happen through standards bodies, defining standards and protocols. And we've been doing it for hundreds of years since the railroads were standardized. And It's not something that totally requires a novel technological solution.
We need a lot of different things. The one area where the standards bodies have been very successful in creating working standards implemented by all the major engines today is in low-level file formats for data interchange. The web has PNG files for 2D images. and MP3 files for audio.
And 3D has the Pixar USD file format, the Universal Scene Description, which is a description of the scene graph, the entire set of objects in the scene and all of their parameters so that any engine that supports those features could import that and then render the same scene as the engine they came from.
You know, large parts of this work across Unreal Engine and Unity and Blender and all of these 3D packages of different sorts. Then there's the glTF texture format, which stores textures and geometry and other low-level data for 3D objects.
When you see a Fortnite character, that file format together with the image file formats can store their static appearance, the shape of their body, even their animations and their different poses, and the appearance of them. The different standard file formats could store all the sounds they make in their emotes, but we're still missing a bunch of pieces.
The biggest missing piece is the programming language that's at the center of standardizing the Matterverse. Now, if you look at the web, the web is a combination of a bunch of different technologies. The two biggest ones are HTML, which describes... the 2D scene graph, or the 2D layout of controls and objects on the web page. But that's just static data.
It's just a non-moving, non-animating web page. And then you have the JavaScript programming language, which is used to manipulate that, to display things to the user, and to implement anything you could implement in code. So it's a little programming language that runs in your web browser. And the metaverse needs something that performs that similar role.
But the metaverse and 3D gaming in general needs something that's rather more powerful, more safe, more scalable, and more capable than JavaScript. Because the metaverse is actually a more difficult technical problem than a web page. A web page, like an app, is just a single bundle of... code and content that somebody, a company, has prepared.
And they release it, and it stays exactly what it is until they release a new version, and it's upgraded from version to version as it goes. But the metaverse needs to be a composite of code and content built by millions of different people that could potentially form a seamless world together.
Yeah, the highest detail of Fortnite updates amount to about 60 gigabytes of data. And, you know, that's just a small part of what exists in the Fortnite creative economy. And if you look at what this might be in a decade as standards emerge, you might have exabytes of data out there. Fortnite Battle Royale is, I don't think, the ultimate manifestation of gameplay that will ever be invented.
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