[APPLAUSE]
TIM SWEENEY: Thanks.
We think this is going to be a really powerful combination putting
together a Fortnite 70 million monthly active users with the power
of the Unreal Editor and a new creator economy
to share the revenue with creators who create engaging experiences.
And it's another milestone on the path
to a new kind of entertainment medium, which science fiction
literature calls the metaverse.
Because there's a crazy amount of hype around this whole topic,
I'd like to step back and take a long-term look at what we see here.
And the core of it is some very real growth
starting with Fortnite's 70 million monthly active users, Roblox's
250 million monthly active users, Minecraft's 100 million,
and PUBG Mobile and APEX Legends, and numerous other metaverse-inspired
games is leading to an identifiable audience
today of over 600 million active users in these virtual worlds.
And it's on a growth trajectory that will put it at billions of users
by the end of this decade.
And so we can set aside the crazy hype cycle around NFTs and VR
goggles.
Yeah, these technologies may play a role in the future,
but they are not required.
This revolution is happening right now.
And the core of it is something that every gamer already understands.
It's you and your friends getting together online and going around
as a group on voice chat having a fun time and social entertainment
experiences.
And some of these experiences are serious games, like Battle Royale.
Some of them are going to a concert and dancing or chatting with friends
and just having a good time.
We see this as the next big change in gaming
and in Epic's evolution as a company.
Now, we started out back in 1991 making 2D games.
We recognize the opportunity with 3D, so we
built the first Unreal Engine and the first Unreal Tournament Game.
We evolved to make console games, like Gears of War.
Then we evolved to make online games, like Paragon and Fortnite.
But when Fortnite shipped first in 2017, it was just our game.
But over time, we recognize the audien-- the opportunity
to bring it to a much wider audience.
So we built Fortnite Creative mode, and then the Unreal Editor
for Fortnite coming out now.
But we didn't see the future of this medium, primarily
not about Epic's work, but about the work of independent creators.
And we're building towards this open metaverse
from two different directions.
First of all, we're taking the Fortnite audience we have
and enhancing the development capabilities
with the new tools and this creator economy to support everybody's work.
But we're also helping developers boning standalone product
to evolve towards voting metaverse experiences themselves.
The Unreal Engine is a tool for this.
The Epic Game Store is a distribution vehicle for it.
Epic Online Services has taken Fortnite, an Epic's 700 million
player accounts and 5 billion social connections
and opened them up for free to all developers
so they can plug into voice chat and participate
in these social experiences in a very easy-to-use way.
And all of these are on ramps to the future of metaverse.
And we really think that over this decade,
today's separate apps and ecosystems are going to join together
to form tomorrow's open metaverse.
And yeah, because the last couple of decades
have been about wall gardens, wall gardens, wall gardens, let's back up
and talk about how open systems have successfully come about in the past.
Yeah, this has to happen really big time back
in the early 1980s and 1990s when the open internet was built.
Yeah, back in those days, there were a bunch of closed
networks at different companies and universities.
They couldn't talk to each other.
And so the industry got together and defined open standards,
connect these closed networks into one big open network.
They connected email systems by putting
the at sign in email addresses so people on one service
could communicate with people on other services.
And then they began to define open standards, like JavaScript and HTML
for the open internet so that any user could participate.
And the rule at that point was that any company
could connect as an equal into the system
just by following the open standards.
Now, let's talk about what this means for the open metaverse
of the future.
Now, we have the opportunity to take all
of these different online ecosystems for gaming and consoles
and publishers and connect them together into a single place
where anybody can talk to anybody else.
We have the opportunity to turn today's game engines into tomorrow's
metaverse browser engines.
And if you take a look at Unreal Engine and Unity and Godot,
yeah, you have some very powerful 3D engines
that have an increasingly common set of features
and are increasingly adopting industry standards as ways
of communicating with each other and with other tools.
There's the GLTF content standards.
There's Pixar's universal scene description format.
And then there are a lot of new standards bodies
that have formed to help to standardize the metaverse.
There's Khronos Group.
There's the Metaverse Standards Forum.
There's the Academy of Software Foundation and the Open 3D Set
Foundation.
And we have the opportunity for all developers
to work together to define the future of this thing.
And there's also the opportunity to connect the economies
of these different ecosystems.
What a user would really like is to be
able to buy a cool-looking outfit in one place and take it everywhere
they go.
And as we were designing this new Fortnite creator economy,
one of the things we were constantly thinking about
is how this could in the future be connected into an open metaverse
economy.
And there's no reason that the core model there
in which revenue from item shops are shared with creators of experience
based on engagement couldn't be turned
into an economic model for the open metaverse
at large with economic peering overseen by governance groups
to make this work in a safe way for all players.
And this gets us to a really key question here.
And that is who is going to build the metaverse in the future?
And we believe the answer has to be all of us together.
It has to be a combination of indie game developers,
together with AA and AAA game developers and Fortnite creators
and Minecraft creators and Roblox creators, each
bringing their best specialized knowledge to the new world.
And brands, like Disney and Ferrari and Ralph Lauren,
have already experienced the metaverse from the two crossovers
with Fortnite.
We think this is just the very beginning
of a very long-term opportunity for all of these companies
to have a much larger presence in the digital world in which it
becomes a major and first-class business line for all of them.
Future open metaverse will be about musicians and music
labels and film and television studios who
are using virtual production today to build
world-class photorealistic content being able to bring it and launch it
playably in the metaverse timed together with their film
and television experiences in an endless stream
of awesome entertainment content that's open to everybody
to participate in.
Now, Epic has a long history of supporting developers this way.
And we've built a lot of different services
that are available to everybody to use.
There's the Unreal Engine.
There's Epic Online Services, which are
open to all platforms and all stores.
There's the Epic Games Store, which is
open to software built on all engines using all different online services.
And we believe the metaverse has to be open.
It can't be another monopoly's wall garden.
And Epic is all in on this.
We went from the--
we went from the pandemic to the tech downturn, the crypto implosion.
And now, banks are failing.
And it's a really crazy time again.
But we're investing very heavily in the future with the belief
that companies who invest now through these hard times
are going to come out the strongest company in the future, become
strongest companies in the future.
Some of these investments, we're making in Fortnite initially
and then bringing the work to Unreal Engine.
Some things we're building in Unreal Engine taking to Fortnite.
But the aim is to support everything that AAA game
developers are doing today and more.
And this project to build this all out into an open system,
it's going to take most of the decade.
And that is the journey from Unreal Engine 5 to Unreal Engine 6
that will happen over this time period.
It is the same journey to the open metaverse.
But there's no need to wait because we're doing it live.
We're building all these systems and deploying them
as we build them right into Unreal Engine 5 openly with partners.
So we hope you download this stuff, download
on your old editor for Fortnite, download the Unreal Engine
and get started and come see some of our tech talks
where you talk about this in way more technical detail.
So thank you very much for your time.
[APPLAUSE]