Interviewing Epic Games Founder/CEO Tim Sweeney and Author/Entrepreneur Neal Stephenson
On June 25th, I interviewed Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, which makes the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, and Neal Stephenson, the #1 New York Times bestselling author who also coined the term “Metaverse” in his 1992 bestseller Snow Crash, and is a Co-Founder of blockchain start-up Lamina1, and AI storytelling platform Whenere.
In the interview, we discuss their definitions of “Metaverse,” thoughts on its technological and economic growth, Neal’s reaction on the day Facebook changed its name to Meta, the future of Fortnite, Apple’s Vision Pro, blockchains, and the ethics of Generative AI, plus “Snow Crash 2," and much more.
My new book “The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet,” is now out (Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop), and is a 70% net new update to the 2022 edition, which was personally blurbed by Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Sweeney, Reed Hastings, and more, became a national bestseller in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and China, and was named a Book of the Year by The Guardian, Amazon, The Economist’s Global Business Review, and other publications. More details at www.ballmetaversebook.com/.
Ball: Let's start at the foundation. Neal, how do you define the Metaverse in 2024?
Stephenson: A massively multiplayer online universe that has a sense of space to it so that there are experiences distributed around that space in a way that is perceived by all of its users in the same way. And you can move around from one place to another and interact with other users who are not physically present. It’s not controlled by any one entity; many creators, large and small, build things there.
Ball: How about you, Tim? What comes to mind when you think of the word Metaverse?
Sweeney: Well, Neal invented the word, and so I would defer to him on that. But I will just observe that we've seen games trending in the direction of that definition for a very long time and becoming more and more close to not only Neal's definition, but kind of the spirit of what Neal wrote in Snow Crash and other novels. And this is what makes it timely and interesting to Epic.
Ball: For many people, the word Metaverse brings to mind (if not outright requires) virtual reality goggles and augmented reality glasses. From your perspective and the Epic perspective, how central, critical, or relevant overall are goggles or glasses to the vision of the Metaverse?
Sweeney: Well, I think this is happening now and you don't need new hardware to experience it. Hardware getting better over time and more powerful will enhance it for sure. I think what we're seeing emerge now is to some extent, inevitable, right? As soon as people invented microelectronics, a few years later people started making video games out of parts. And as computers and consoles took off, games grew in their capabilities and then the internet came along and gaming became multiplayer. I think what we're really seeing is the inevitable evolution of gaming to take advantage of all the new capabilities that people are learning of and discovering every year.
And when we talk about the Metaverse, it's a word that kind of has a stock price. When we release something cool, it goes up and when we release something that's not cool, it goes down, but it's very much not any one company defining this. Rather we're all building towards this ideal that we and all of the players in the world are talking about and debating and discussing, and we're figuring out what it is as we go and figuring out the nuances of what makes it work and what makes it really awesome and fun.
Ball: Neal you've spoken about your changing perspective on the criticality of head-mounted displays relating to the Metaverse. What's your perspective in 2024?
Stephenson: My overarching answer is that the actual market and actual users find ways to do things that we don't necessarily imagine in advance, just with our own limited perspective. And so cyberpunk had a whole aesthetic about it and still does, which to a large extent, revolved around having cool shit on your face. Mirror shades. Actually, one of the original anthologies of cyberpunk fiction was called Mirror Shades. And it was easy to assume back then that in order to truly experience a three-dimensional environment in an immersive way that you needed stereoscopy, you needed to have a different image slightly in each eyeball to give you a fully three-dimensional effect.
And so there's always been this linkage in people's minds between cyberspace, the Metaverse, and goggles. What we've learned is way more nuanced and interesting than that. The year after Snow Crash came out was when Doom was released, and Doom is the ancestor of all games that are set in immersive environments [Note: Tim is nodding]. And it didn't require stereoscopy. It was all in a screen - very low resolution by current standards - and yet, the magic of the illusion was that you were running around in this three-dimensional persistent environment. And then since then, that kind of experience has only gotten better. And in the meantime, we've been learning things about goggles, about headsets and what they are and are not good at. And it took a long time for them to get to the point where [input/output] lag was acceptable. And so there's kind of this long period of time during which video games on screens were getting much, much, much better, but the acceptance of headsets was [falling] behind, because if lag is bad, you're more prone to get sick.
One of the things that I became aware of when I was working at Magic Leap on AR headsets is that stereoscopy isn't enough. That your brain actually uses a lot of other cues other than stereoscopy to build a map of the three-dimensional world around you. And so people with one eye, one-eyed people can still perceive three-dimensionality, for example, because of these other mechanisms.
This is a kind of a long-winded way of saying that the reality we've ended up with, which didn't seem plausible in 1990 when I was writing [Snow Crash], is that we've got billions of people fluently navigating highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse.
Ball: So I want to use this to jump into a related question. Since Meta's name change in 2021, there have been a number of different eulogies for the Metaverse. And so I have to ask the question starting with you, Tim, what's your perspective on the suggestion that the Metaverse is dead, duly rejected by consumers, and long since buried?
Sweeney: Well, I think what's been rejected is a particular vision of the Metaverse, which is people putting on VR headsets and going to the office and working with co-workers in this Silicon Valley chic art style, that was just totally lame and was never going to succeed. But on the other hand, if you look at what people are doing with their time in video games. Fortnite and Roblox and other immersive games like PUBG Mobile are growing at an amazing rate. People are playing them, enjoying them. You can identify now about 800 million people who engage in these kinds of experiences every month. And what they're doing is very Metaverse. They're going into a real-time, 3D environment with their friends. They're engaging in a variety of different experiences.
In Fortnite alone, the time is [mostly in] Battle Royale, but there are other user created things too, and other Epic created things which are consuming more and more of a fraction of people's time, and they really are traveling through virtual worlds together socially and having fun together. And it is becoming, in many ways, a new medium that is qualitatively different than the multiplayer games of the older eras like Doom or Ultima Online. What's happening now is different. Being there in 3D emoting and voice chat is, to me, that's the version of the Metaverse that's actually working. And when a company does something lame and people say "The Metaverse.... it's failed." No, a developer, perhaps us sometimes, just did something that was lame and that particular thing failed. But the idea goes on.
And I think overall, it's inevitable that gaming becomes more and more like this, more socially connected, more interconnected with many creators participating and what you're experiencing, and a faster number of people participating so that the internet itself or the social networks, it eventually becomes ubiquitous and everybody's there. So I think in terms of actual use and actual engagement, [the Metaverse] is going stronger than ever before, definitely stronger than last year and stronger than the year before that. And it's on the growth. But when companies try lame stuff, it's rejected however strong the reputation of the company is.
Ball: So Tim's talking about lame stuff often being publicly associated with the Metaverse. Neal, I think another common association with this dystopia. That the concept of the Metaverse is inherently dystopic, or if it's not, the book that it comes from is considered dystopic. You're responsible for both. What's your perspective? Is it an inherently dystopic concept? Is that what you were trying to communicate in the book?
Stephenson: By the time I wrote Snow Crash, the dystopian elements of cyberpunk had already become so familiar and kind of shopworn that it was already a little bit of a cliche, so I didn't feel as though I could just write another one of those with a straight face. So Snow Crash is both a dystopian novel in some ways and a parody of the tropes of dystopian novels [Note: Tim is nodding]. It tries to be funny, which was a thing that alarmed and disconcerted some readers at the time; they didn't know what to make of that. We could get into a whole question of whether basically stable civilization of people living mostly in comfortable burbclaves is more or less dystopian than a post apocalyptic wasteland or something like that.
But I'll concede the point that that world [of Snow Crash] has got dystopian stuff in it. The Metaverse as shown in the book, is really neither dystopian nor utopian. It's just a communications medium that different people use in different ways. When we first see it, we're seeing kind of the schlockiest, most mass market version of it with intrusive advertisements and kind of garish lowest common denominator content. But as we get into the book, we see people using it in much more interesting ways. We see characters who've gone to a great deal of effort to build exquisite environments that they enjoy being in. We see the kind of library environment where the librarian is curating a huge storehouse of ancient information. And so I think it's possible for all of those things to be true at once, and that already we can see examples of all of those different styles of usage in the Metaverse as it's coming into existence today.
Ball: So October 28th, 2021, Facebook announces it's changing its name to Meta. What did you think Neal? What was your instant response that day and a month later?
Stephenson: Well, I was working and I have a hobby of machining, so I was working in a machine shop on something and my phone buzzed, and it was a text message from John Gaeta, who I worked with at Magic Leap [Note: Gaeta is also a visual effects designer and inventor, and partly credited with creating Bullet Time, which won him an Oscar]. And he just sent me a text message saying, "I'm sorry for your loss." And so, I had no idea what he was talking about, and I thought, oh, some friend of his must have experienced a death in the family and he's trying to send condolences to this person but he hit the wrong button and he sent it to the wrong guy. And so I better tell John that his message didn't reach the intended recipient. So I'm sort of thumbing that out, and knowing John with a little bit of a mischievous streak, maybe I better do some Googling and catch up on current events. So that was when I became aware of the name change and understood the true meaning of John's message.
And then within 48 hours, other huge companies like Microsoft, and I think Google had also come out and said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, we are Metaverse companies too," because I think they wanted to prevent a competitor from establishing a lock on that name. And then a million smaller companies came in the wake of that saying, "Oh, well, if the next big thing is the Metaverse thing, we are now Metaverse companies." A year and a half later, they'd be calling themselves AI companies. So I just tried to take it with a little bit of a sense of humor, and as time went on, I looked for ways to see if I could create anything sustainable out of that whole scene. So that's how I ended up, for example, talking to Marc Petit [then VP and GM of Unreal Engine at Epic Games] and Patrick Cozzi [CEO/Founder of Cesium], who had been working on the idea of a decentralized open Metaverse, and I continue to be in touch with them, and have co-founded Lamina1, which is a company dedicated to building infrastructure for a decentralized open Metaverse, and building a thing called Whenere, which is the place that I would want to visit in the Metaverse.
So I just think that's the best way to deal with all that is to try to make use of the notoriety while it lasted to create some things that were sustainable. I knew that a year later there would be another fad that would knock Metaverse off the stage and become the new hot thing in tech.
Ball: Neal, do you ever consider doing a sequel to Snow Crash? You've done sequels to a few of your books, some have been planned as multi-part entries. Is there a Snow Crash 2 that ever seeps into your mind?
Stephenson: Actually, over the last couple of years I've produced a bunch of material that I call the Extended Snow Crash Universe timeline, which places the events of Snow Crash into a specific date on the calendar, and then there's sequel and prequel material connected with that. And some of it's filling in backstory. There's this character named Lagos in the book who's an interesting guy, but we don't quite ever hear how he got involved in all this. So I've got his backstory all worked out in detail. And I also created another place in the Metaverse called Vertex4 which is more more geared towards interactive. The Black Sun and everything you read about in the book is very much, it's suitable for use in a work of written fiction. It's not actually that transferable to an interactive experience. So yeah, there's not a sequel in the sense of a written book, but there's sequel and prequel material that may break the surface in various formats as we go along.
Ball: Tim, in the past you've pointed to code from the very first Unreal Tournament in 1997, making the argument that you and the company have had Metaverse ambitions for quite some time. And I know that you've been speaking about the Metaverse for at least 15 years publicly, long before the hype. I'd love to understand why do you want to build the Metaverse? Is that Epic's overarching ambition or is that just one of many goals?
Sweeney: I think this is the inevitable future of real-time 3D in gaming. It became apparent in the very early days of computers for me. We used to dial into bulletin boards with modems before we had the open internet and played a multi-user dungeon game and a text mode game where you joined a Unix server that was serving a dozen people at a time and you'd type commands and go from place to place. But you realized there are other people in this world and you could go up, you can have conversations with them in the world, but you could also engage in gameplay. And that was around 1985 or so.
It became apparent at that point that this was going to be the future of gaming, and that as computers became more capable and connectivity improved and graphics capabilities grew, we'd get multiplayer games where the social element would be by far the most compelling games. And it's taken a very long time to get to that point.
From then to the first Unreal game being released was 12 years. But subsequent capabilities have taken a very long time. Ubiquitous internet connectivity of the form that can support a real-time 3D simulation at quality is a problem that took decades to solve. Being able to draw a world as realistic as the Fortnite Battle Royale world with 100 players participating in a simulation together took decades. There was an entire genre of games in Battle Royale that you couldn't have built a decade earlier. The technology just wasn't capable and the computers were just not fast enough.
And so a large part of this has been building up our part of civilization's technology tree, building up all of the real-time 3D features and building up all of the simulation features that are needed to run these sorts of universes. And seeing at the same time, people's expectations of the world are changing. We had the internet long before we had social networks. We had social networks long before people began joining these games and hanging out with their friends in real time 3D and voice chatting as we do now. And as each new tier of capabilities came online, we've been getting closer and closer. And I think we can finally see in Fortnite and Roblox and a few other experiences, all of the elements of the Metaverse in place, but in a very early and limited form. You see a creator tool set that's increasingly powerful like the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) where people can build their own content. Over the next few years it’s going to approach the levels of AAA game development capabilities.
You have very realistic 3D graphics capabilities. You have the ability to take content that's been built for movies, take blueprints and schematics of cars that have been built for production and then bring them into real time 3D and have them work as functioning objects. And so the convergence of all these different 3D content pipelines from different industries into real time 3D, into Fortnite, as we've done with so many of our crossovers, is really starting to show that there's not just a bunch of games out there. There is an entire universe in which all of the world's cool ideas and brands and creators connect together into a single space and can build anything far beyond previously envisioned limits. It is going to evolve at a far faster pace than any one company could ever build anything, because there's going to be hundreds of thousands of creators each contributing their art and their code and their ideas to it, and all the world's major brands contributing their IP and their ideas and their support to it. And it's going to take on a life of its own and really quickly transcend what it is today. It's become very clear over the past few years that we're in this steep growth curve that's being driven by that.
Though there are some structural impediments in the way, for example Apple blocking Fortnite and blocking different development practices that are going to be absolutely necessary to create the Metaverse, the legal and technical problems are being addressed.
This medium is emerging at an astonishing rate, and I think people have no idea how awesome it's going to be by the end of this decade. But when you look at all the best capabilities of the top game engines, look at all the work being created for top movies in the film industry, all the work of all the car makers and of all the other storytellers and creators of all different kinds of games, and envision what the world is like when all of that comes together into a socially connected united economy which everybody can participate in, that's going to be a whole new world. And that's what we're very excited about.
But nobody had any clear vision of this in the 1980s, but it was obvious at that point in 1985, that the world was heading in this general direction. And for the past 33 years of Epic's history, we've been marching in this direction, figuring out exactly what the direction is as we go, but we are learning every step of the way and getting closer and closer.
Stephenson: For people who never saw a MUD [Multi-User Dungeon], to roll the clock back a few decades, the thing about that that was mind-blowing at the time was that it's the simplest possible ASCII teletype interface, but when you were moving around that dungeon and you were in a particular location in the dungeon, if there was another player in the same location, then the system knew that, and there might be some form of interaction that could happen at that point. And as simple as it was, that was the thing that just completely blew everybody's mind. It's really the basis for anything that's happened since then in a metaverse-y kind of development path.
Now Available: “THE METAVERSE AND BUILDING THE SPATIAL INTERNET,” the fully revised and updated edition of my nationally bestselling (US, UK, Canada, China) and award-winning book (Best of 2022 by Amazon, The Guardian, FT China, The Economist’s Global Business Review, Barnes & Noble). Buy at Amazon, Apple, B&N, more.
Ball: So when I was writing this book, I was reading a bunch of Richard Bartle's old published works, and he had reported on a statistic that I thought was remarkable, which was as late as 1993, a full 10% of all global internet traffic was just for MUDs.
Sweeney: That was to the point where you realized that the graphics can help the experience, but they're not essential. Our brains are willing to fill in massive amounts of detail. In my memory of reading Snow Crash, I actually see images of it though it was just a book. From the early MUDs to playing Doom with 320 by 200 pixels of real estate on the screen, my memories of are in fully formed photorealistic fashion. And I think that's the big lesson that we don't need hardware that plugs into our brain and creates a sense of immersion that's indistinguishable from reality. What we can do with just the devices right in front of us is totally not the limiting factor now.
Ball: Neal, I'd love to get a little bit deeper into Lamina1. You co-founded it in 2022 with one of your colleagues from Magic Leap, Rebecca Barkin. Can you explain what Lamina1 is, how it works, what it's trying to do, and its criticality to the Metaverse as you imagine it?
Stephenson: If we're going to have a Metaverse that millions of people use, we need to have experiences there that people enjoy having, which seemed like kind of a obvious statement to make, especially in present company. But the people who know how to make those experiences are the creators who by and large are employed in the video game industry or more and more in the motion picture and TV industry. They're the people who know how to run game engines and who know how to run the tool chains that feed assets into those engines. So the question is, what's the revenue model that allows those people to get paid? And there's various answers to that question. We have conventional payment systems that work, but in our minds, there was an overlap there with some of the qualities and capabilities of blockchain systems. And so Lamina1s a new chain that's optimized to help creators build things, to help them get paid for building things and creating experiences or components of new experiences in an open Metaverse.
Ball: Crypto has become one of those more controversial elements among Metaverse aficionados. There are those who are ardent believer's in blockchain technology's criticality to the Metaverse. You have those who are entirely skeptical about the technology, not just unconvinced of its relevance. And then comparatively few people in the middle who largely say, "not sure; we'll see." What in your mind makes blockchain such a viable, helpful, if not essential technology for building an open Metaverse?
Stephenson: I think a lot of the skepticism and hostility that we've seen, particularly in the game development industry, just comes from this clash of mindsets between people who are strongly ideologically motivated coming out of a libertarian crypto kind of mentality, versus the people who build these experiences and who actually understand how game engines work. And there's a dream of interoperability, which is the idea that you could essentially drag and drop assets from one game into another, 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. If you actually understand how these things work, you can't just take an asset from one game and somehow drop it into another. So I think that it is possible to engineer new experiences from the ground up that are designed to support interoperability and that there's some overlap between what that is going to look like and the kinds of payment systems that you can construct, and the more importantly, the smart contract systems that you can construct on top of blockchains.
For me, money is kind of the least interesting of applications on blockchains. It's the one that's gotten the most attention because they were mostly started as financial instruments. But with the rise of NFTs, we saw this idea that you could essentially put pieces of art up on a chain. And what was then discovered was that the smart contracts that governed these NFTs weren't smart, and they weren't contracts. They actually weren't enforceable. And so some work has been going on in the last couple of years to bring the NFT market into the realm of legal enforceability. The late Josh Kramer at Grapevine developed some technology in this area, but unfortunately passed away last fall. Mattereum is a company in the UK that's building royalty systems based on legitimate UK law.
And our friends at Shrapnel have been developing an actual running AAA game that embodies some of the features I'm talking about, where creators can post things on a chain that establish a kind of chain of IP development, IP ownership that's traceable, and that should in theory, allow them to get rewarded economically if their stuff succeeds. So that's I guess kind of the quick overview of a really complicated topic.
Ball: Tim, I'm curious about your perspective on blockchain technologies.
Sweeney: The underlying idea of blockchains is awesome nerd technology. There's great use of cryptography, great protocols for distributed agreement on events, and a really interesting foundation for the future of distributed computing systems of all sorts, including the Metaverse. 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, because the currency has been greatly undermined by speculation and scams and regulatory uncertainty and so on. And I feel like it's a very unfortunate artifact of this decade. But in the future, the ideas from various blockchains such as zero knowledge proofs, the idea of cryptographic consensus protocols and so on, should be a key component of a lot of systems. And if we would only stop clawing the money and stop building financial scams around them, then they could be a great part of a future society.
I think that it takes a lot of discipline in the minds of technologists to separate the good from the bad of crypto. There is actually a great deal of good in the technology, separate from the bad uses of it that we've seen over the past, and I think we should be open-minded to the learnings to be made from there. Perhaps in a decade or two, we'll look back and be like comparing the cryptocurrency period we went through now to the 1990s dot-com crash. Underneath all of that, the internet was really solid technology and there were some companies built up in that timeframe, like Amazon actually did extremely well and thrived, but there are also scams layered on top of it. But the world recovered from that and is doing great now. And I think the world will end up on the right side of blockchain technology in the long-term future. And in the meantime, it's still a rather wild west so buyer beware.
I think the future of the Metaverse has to be built on open protocols, open standards and interoperability of all forms. We need both technological interoperability so that any creator, any hosting provider, any ecosystem operator, any brand and any content can interoperate freely without being forced into any one company's walled garden of any sorts. And this isn't really even an attempt to paint a utopian picture, but just that there are going to be lots of places in the Metaverse and a lot of these places will be owned by companies, but we mustn't allow any one company to dominate or control the thing overall. And this both goes for the underlying technology and standards, but also for commerce and notions of ownership and economic interoperability in the Metaverse.
When we designed the Fortnite Creator Economy 2.0, the key principle is realizing there are two things happening in the Fortnite economy. There is value being created through engagement, people building fun experiences. Third-party creators as well as their own teams are creating value engaging players. And because players are engaging and are happy, they're spending money in the Item Shop. And so the key became to share the Item Shop’s revenue, which is a source of spending, with experiences, which are the source of engagement, and build an economy that scales based on that. And from the very beginning, the idea was that we're operating a Fortnite version of this initially, but in the long run, there's no reason that this Creator Economy 2.0 couldn't be extended into a Creator Economy 3.0 where any company could participate however they choose.
And besides participating in technical standards, if another ecosystem with similar or compatible visual aesthetic and respect for games ratings and so on wanted to participate, then perhaps we could connect our economies where if you spend in the Fortnite Item Shop and then play in a third-party economy, then we revenue share to them. And if a third-party item shop sells something and then it's used in Fortnite, they revenue share to us. And just as internet hosts agree on peering arrangements to connect their fiber optic lines, that revenue sharing can enable an open Metaverse economic model. And I think this is one of the exciting things that we'll see happen within this decade. And Epic has been on a very long-term trajectory to build out all of this tech and to do it in a thoroughly open way.
We have Unreal Engine, which is a huge engine, but we expect the ultimate Metaverse technical standards will be engine agnostic and that you could participate in the open Metaverse in the game that's built using the Unity engine or the Godot permissively licensed open source engine.
And while you're doing that, you could use any number of online backends. You could use the Epic Online Services social backend for voice chat or you could use Sony's PSN or Microsoft's Xbox Live or Valve's with Steamworks. And that perhaps if these companies would actually cooperate in the right ways, then we could build an entire economy that links all the major games and all of the platforms together into an economy. I think it's actually in everybody's best interest. This isn't like the smartphone walled gardens. What's happening in the Metaverse is Metcalfe’s Law at a huge scale. Players want to be in a place where they can play with their friends. If we can connect our voice chat systems and our economies and players can move seamlessly together with their party and with their purchases where they're compatible, move from say, Fortnite to Roblox to Grand Theft Auto to PUBG Mobile, and then to a pure chat type of application as well, then the world would be a better place.
But not only that, but the companies participating would actually make more money because we'd see an engagement lift from the ability to reach more customers through this interconnected economy. And all of our competitors would gain more revenue too because of the increased opportunity they have to actually reach customers and players would play more and they would spend more, because buying an outfit in this future open Metaverse could be owning it everywhere they went and not just in the one Roblox experience or one Fortnite ecosystem that they're participating in as is currently the case. I really think that this is going to happen. And it doesn't rely on any altruism for those participants, but it's in everybody's interest and that this world of the open Metaverse will just be purely better than the separate game worlds that we have today.
Stephenson: You don't want to have to stop at the exit of every Metaverse experience and take all your clothes off and then step across the threshold into a different experience and then put on the clothes that you're allowed to wear in that experience. You want to just walk through. And that seems so obvious that people just assume that's the case. It seems like you shouldn't even have to mention that, but it takes a lot of technology to actually make that work.
Ball: The seventh anniversary of Fortnite comes up next month. Seven years from now, how do you think of Fortnite as being different? I think in the typical fan's perspective, Fortnite right now is Battle Royale, which they see primarily as a game. They see the Metaverse play primarily around UEFN. And the interaction model for UEFN feels a little bit like an app store or Netflix or YouTube. You've got thumbnails and rows and rows of them, and that's how you navigate these different 3D worlds that are lightly connected through avatars and aesthetics and user identities. What do you think the platform looks like another seven years from now? What's your dream experience?
Sweeney: It's going to evolve a lot. And when you look at what's in Fortnite today, some of it you have to recognize as artifacts of the limitations of the current technology that we're working within. Why is Fortnite: Battle Royale 100 players? Well, because at the time we launched it we couldn't make 200 players work on a server. Computers in the data center were just too slow. The reason we have Fortnite divided into a huge number of different islands, many built by third-party creators and some built by Epic, is because we don't yet have the entire technology stack needed to robustly enable every creator to put their content together into a big, seamless open world if they wanted. And so a lot of the things you see in there are not the permanent end state of what we see this medium being, but are just current crutches that we're using to hobble by as we work towards the ultimate capabilities of the thing.
And so I think we need to expect really significant changes in a number of areas. One is being able to build an interoperable economy that works with other games and other ecosystems is a key that will be really freeing for people, being all of the systems for voice chat and account interoperable, federated so that you can participate with any of the major platform company services rather than each Fortnite using ours and every other game using their own is going to be a key part of it. Another is the networking model, which is extremely limited. If you look at what's in Unreal Engine 5 today, it's remarkably similar to the networking model I built for Unreal Engine 1 in 1997. It shipped in Unreal and Unreal Tournament, and it's been incrementally improved ever since without dramatically upending it.
But the problem with this network model is it doesn't enable our servers to talk to each other. A Fortnite Battle Royale session is 100 players. There might be at peak hundreds of thousands of these servers running and there might be at peak over 10 million concurrent players online all at once, but they're each in their own separate sharded copies of the world and they can't see each other in that space. They can't go anywhere to find each other all at once.
So one of the big efforts that we're making for Unreal Engine 6 is improving the networking model, where we both have servers supporting lots of players, but also the ability to seamlessly move players between servers and to enable all the servers in a data center or in multiple data centers, to talk to each other and coordinate a simulation of the scale of millions or in the future, perhaps even a billion concurrent players. That's got to be one of the goals of the technology. Otherwise, many genres of games just can never exist because the technology isn't there to support them. And further, we've seen massively multiplayer online games that have built parts of this kind of server technology. They've done it by imposing enormous costs on every programmer who writes code for the system. As a programmer you would write your code twice, one version for doing the thing locally when the player's on your server and another for negotiating across the network when the player's on another server. Every interaction in the game devolves into this complicated networking protocol every programmer has to make work. And when they have any bugs, you see item duplication bugs and cheating and all kinds of exploits. Our aim is to build a networking model that retains the really simple Verse programming model that we have in Fortnite today using technology that was made practical in the early 2000's by Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones and others called Software Transactional Memory.
The idea is that you write normal code and it's our job as the implementors of the engine and the language runtime to make your code scale, so the game can run on a vast number of servers and to do all of the necessary coordination and to provide the guidelines. If you optimize your code in a certain way like you optimize for cache coherency today, then we want your game to be able to run in a much larger simulation than we're running now. This is one of our focuses for Unreal Engine 6, and it's going to consume an increasing portion of our engine team's efforts as we work on this. And the other is the ability to combine as much of the content together into a seamless world as players want. Some experiences will be better by themselves. If you want to build an awesome bespoke story-driven, single player or a co-op game, you might build it off in its own little corner of the world, no connections to the outside, but an awful lot of what we're doing would be a whole lot better if it were all seamlessly connected.
As Disneyland is itself, you get on all of these elaborate transport systems like the People Mover and the different cars go from place to place. You can go anywhere in this connected world and participate in any experience there. And what are creators doing instead of creating their own little isolated islands? They're taking over a portion of space in the world and they're defining the game roles there in different parts of space.
We've done little experiments here and there along the way. Back in Fortnite Chapter 2 [Note: This eight-season chapter began in October 2019 and ended December 2021], there was a period where there was a bubble appearing around certain parts of the world. It changed the gameplay in that part. Imagine that writ large in the scale of a simulation with hundreds of millions of players and hundreds of thousands of creators.
The final bit is interoperability of content and code. Battle Royale is mostly code written by Epic. Every creator's world is a mashup of their code and Epic's code. But things become really interesting when every creator's code can interoperate with every creator's code.
Everybody's out creating their own really interesting objects and creating them using protocols that are provided by the system to enable them all to work together. So you might be riding a mount or an animal built by one creator and your friend might be driving a car built by another creator. You might be carrying a weapon built by a third creator, and you might be in a world maintained by dozens of other creators, and you might be moving seamlessly from place to place with all of these interactions happening. And you really expect that to work. An awful lot of the reasons that we've built Verse and our ecosystem the way we have is to allow for these future usage cases.
If you just wanted to get Roblox style experience with a bunch of sharded islands deployed as quickly as possible, there were much faster ways we could have done that and much simpler trade-offs we could have made in the language and in the engine to achieve that. But we're building for the long term, and by the end of this decade I think an awful lot of this will have come to fruition and you'll see the ability of creators of all sorts to build things that are qualitatively different and better than they are today.
Ball: Neal, we talked a little bit about Lamina1, and you have a novel coming out later this year that I want to get to, but you're also an advisor to Inworld.AI and a co-founder at Whenere. What are those latter two companies about?
Stephenson: Yeah, so this has to do with what would I want to experience in the Metaverse. - where is the first place I would go. My co-founder at Whenere is Karen Laur, who was employee number 17 at Valve. She worked on Half-Life 1, and we ended up working together at Magic Leap building creative projects there. And towards the end of that time, we were messing around quite a bit with Sequencer, which was a component of Unreal Engine that is there to help people who want to make cinematic experiences. And through that, we got to know Kim Libreri and some of the team at the Northern California branch of Epic who were working on making Unreal Engine a tool for people who work in film and TV, not just games. And so what came out of all of that is this realization that graphics hardware and game engines have reached the point where you can now build immersive environments that most people would identify as of cinematic quality. If you're a professional movie director, you might see that it's not quite up to that level, but most people are essentially going to consider it a photorealistic environment. So that was kind of the first element of this.
And then what came on a little bit later was Inworld.AI, and they're building a system that essentially makes it easy to connect large language models on the back end to avatars in the game engine. In effect, you can use a simple interface to essentially build the brain of a character. You can specify what this character knows, what they don't know, and what their personality traits are. You can map them onto a voice from a different company. The one we are using at the moment is called ElevenLabs. And then you can wire that in to an avatar in the game engine. We're using Unreal, we're using MetaHuman, which is another kind of cinematic feature that's been added to the engine in the last few years, which basically makes it easier for people to create, again, nearly photorealistic human avatars. So what it all adds up to is that to game in Whenere, all you have to do is talk.
We have a speech-to-text subsystem in there that will transmit whatever you said to the character's brain in the backend. The brain will generate an appropriate response based on the knowledge base and the personality of that character, and send it back to the game engine as an utterance, which is it's text, it's the sound file generated by ElevenLabs, and it's a set of visemes, so the atoms of facial animation. So that the character will exhibit the right facial expressions and even the right emotional expressions that have been generated by the brain.
And we first encountered this when we were working with an internal production team at Inworld to make a character Virj, who was part of the extended Snow Crash universe timeline. And we went in sort of with modest expectations and were just astounded by how well this thing worked and how interesting the results could be. And so I think zooming out for a second, the door that this opened for us is that the way that we interact with video game worlds has tended to be pretty limited, and most games still revolve around shooting things because that is a perfect match for the UI input devices that we've got. You use a mouse to put the crosshair where you want it, you click the button to fire the weapon or whatever, and you see something happen in the world, the world responds in a way that makes sense, and that's been a very powerful UI paradigm. But here for the first time, we were able to just sit and talk like normal people to this character and have an answer back.
So based on that, we, Karen and I and Jamil Moledina co-founded Whenere last summer and we've been working since then on building a system that sits on top of Unreal Engine and on top of Inworld.AI, and its purpose is to enable users to immerse themselves in story worlds that they love. You go to Comic-Con, you go to any kind of fan environment, you see people who've traveled thousands of miles, they've spent thousands of dollars to make elaborate cosplay outfits, and it's all in the service of I love Game of Thrones or Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or whatever, so much that I just want to spend more time in it. And we think that there's a way now to give those fans the ability to enter into such worlds, and not only to interact with them, but to mod those worlds, to come up with new ideas, new fan fiction storylines, or just to change the way the furniture's arranged or the way a character looks or talks.
So we've been working away on that since about August and have been fairly quiet up to now, but we're going to be talking about it more in the coming weeks.
Whenere, an AI storytelling platform from Neal Stephenson, Karen Laur, and Tadhg Kelly, is currently crowdfunding at Wefunder.
Ball: Both of you create technology and you're also content creators. I'm interested in your perspective on AI training data and ethics.
Sweeney: I think that outside of universities doing research, companies shouldn't train AI on data where they don't have clear and explicit permission from the creator of the data to do that. That was granted in a way that made either ownership or the right to train clear. If a company buys ownership of the data from the creator of the data or gets permission to use it for training AI, it’s fair game. And they shouldn’t train AI on that data if they don’t have that permission. And I think we have to treat research institutions differently when they're actually doing research because there's much more compelling public interest in advancing that research. I think it's rather unfortunate that like cryptocurrency, AI has been taken over by the Wild West with companies doing things that are rather astonishing and put them at odds with all the world's creators and an awful lot of the users as well.
I think that's unfortunate because AI is a really important technology that is going to change the world. I think that after this first generation of rather wild practices fades away, we're going to see companies with a lot much more responsible data usage practices coming to the forefront and use of AI in a way that's much more well-thought-out and specialized to particular usage cases. I still think that the idea of creating a chatbot that's supposed to have all the world's knowledge and be an agent of good is a very long way from coming to fruition. And the folly of all the current efforts, both being lamed down to the point where they aren't as useful as they ought to be, but also doing things that are egregiously wrong, like telling you to eat rocks. It's kind of an artifact of this technology being adopted way too widely, way too quickly.
But I think all of this stuff would've been awesome if it were the work of researchers for another decade or so before it were treated as a serious mainstream technology. And if instead of being a commercial product that's being licensed to enterprise customers around the world, if ChatGPT were, like, some university's chatbot, with this massive disclaimer of this chatbot might make stuff up and say ridiculous things at times and it's just no big deal, don't treat it too seriously. But unfortunately, everybody in their race to have their first mover advantage has gone away from the standards that govern most forms of technology development, and that's leading to regulatory backlash and all sorts of other problems, and that's very unfortunate. But I think as optimists for the future of technology, we shouldn't let that early misadventure with AI dissuade us from the long-term value of the technology. And so I'd encourage the same sort of patience I encourage with blockchain and cryptographic technology in the field of AI.
Stephenson: I was just going to say that I think a lot of this has to do with the intent or the perceived intent of the people who are building these systems. They've shown kind of a remarkable propensity for shooting themselves in the foot by making statements that are very threatening to creators. And it's strange to me that they would focus on famous actresses or artists as we're going to replace you. It's a really odd series of PR gaffes.
I'll say that as Tim says, this is going to develop more texture and complexity over time for Whenere, we wanted to avoid getting into issues around ownership of IP. And so we're starting with older books that are in the public domain. We've hired a researcher. The woman who's creating the brains of our characters is an accomplished researcher who's using open source public domain material to come up with the background information, what these characters know, what they understand, how they talk, and that's all kind of kept track of and footnoted so that we know where our training material originates from.
Ball: Tim, another major gaming publisher's CEO recently said that within three years, he expects that GenAI will allow them to be 30% more efficient, expand their player network by 50% using personalization, culturalization and increased immersion, and 10 to 20% increases in ARPU. Others are more focused on creating new game genres or experiences using AI. How do you think about this tool set over the, say, longer time horizon when some of the ethics and legality and permissions are clarified, but where do you think the big opportunity is for game makers?
Sweeney: I think generative AI will lead to dramatic productivity gains because of the ease of creation of objects that will meet your specific needs. If you want a bunch of cool trees, you can go into the Quixel library and get a tree off the shelf from us for free for Unreal Engine use. But if you want a specific tree that meets a specific need for a specific scene in your game, you can have a modeler build it right now, and that takes an enormous amount of time and expense. In the future you're going to be able to create a mashup by giving some high-level instructions as to exactly what kind of tree you create. And based on training data that was properly owned or licensed, it will make the tree you want. I see dramatic productivity gains coming to a lot of areas of game development.
Also, I think that this will increase opportunities for all creators and increase employment opportunities in the industry as a whole, as have all other technological improvements that have come. We're going to take all the people we have and perhaps some more and build even bigger, better games using the technology. And so the technology is going to enable us to improve the scope and quality of our products and build bigger and better games. And so that will certainly come and it will come at different rates. You have to remember, the reason that we had a massive revolution in generative AI and text AI beginning last year was because of the 30 years of research that had gone into the foundations of how to train and manage those sorts of AIs.
And particularly if you read some of the papers on this technology-powered stable diffusion image generation AI, they're solving a long complicated series of differential equations at the absolute leading edge of applied mathematics because they've spent the past 20 to 30 years figuring out how to do that. This AI isn't going to come to all fields with equal speed. 3D object generation AI isn't going to be revolutionized next year. It's probably going to take many years because a lot of the things that were done for 2D have not yet been done for 3D, nor does anybody know how to do them. And so there's a huge amount of research and development effort needed to unblock AI contributing to specific fields in specific new ways and creating game content at the level of quality that you expect.
But I think this will be empowering and economically expanding and opportunity expanding for everybody in the industry. And it's very hard to predict the impact on game industry revenue or other metrics like that. But this is definitely going to bring us the capability of building better, bigger, and more compelling games faster. And because this technology will be ubiquitously available to everybody, we should expect the state of gaming to improve dramatically as a result of it. I think we should expect the entirety of the gaming economy to improve as well. Better games means players will be spending more. Better games means that companies get more returns by investing more in building games. And so you'll probably see increases in employment and you'll probably see a lifting of all ships and also an upending of a lot of things.
In the early days, Epic artists drew pixels. Nowadays, Epic artists mostly model 3D objects. And the things that people do with their mouse clicks in the future will be different things than the things they do with their mouse clicks today. But I think the value of creators will not be undermined by AI in the long run because all of these companies are competing with each other. We need a lot of humans to make a lot of awesome creative decisions about how these games are to work.
Now Available: “THE METAVERSE AND BUILDING THE SPATIAL INTERNET,” the fully revised and updated edition of my nationally bestselling (US, UK, Canada, China) and award-winning book (Best of 2022 by Amazon, The Guardian, FT China, The Economist’s Global Business Review, Barnes & Noble). Buy at Amazon, Apple, B&N, more.
Ball: Neal, have you tried the Vision Pro?
Stephenson: No. No, I haven't.
Ball: Have you tried it, Tim?
Sweeney: I have not.
Ball: Why not?
Stephenson: I simply haven't had the opportunity. I literally don't know how I would go about getting access to one, other than buying one and having it shipped to me, which I wouldn't be interested in doing. My drawer is full. The drawer where I put expensive goggles that I never use.
Sweeney: We're doing a lot here and I have to prioritize. That's just me personally; the Unreal Engine team is supporting Vision Pro wholeheartedly.
Ball: Tim, why were your Apple and Google lawsuits so critical to constructing the Metaverse?
Sweeney: The Metaverse needs to evolve into a system that's way cooler and more powerful than the web. You're going to need the best capabilities of 3D engines, the best capabilities of economies, commerce and interoperability. You're going to need the best creation tools and the best creator deployment tools. And ultimately, what creators will be doing in building the Metaverse is not building a bunch of separate apps to go through Apple's approval process, but they're going to be contributing to a huge world that will evolve under extraordinarily complex rules. And it is vitally important that we not allow the gatekeepers, Apple and Google, to block progress on the Metaverse as they block progress on the web and block progress in computing in general. And the ways they do that are numerous, and they're also rather insidious. We take a lot of their past decisions for granted and don't realize how much they're undermining the quality and capabilities of the devices that we own and the capabilities that the devices we own could have if they weren't being so horrid.
For example, Apple blocks web browser choice. By blocking competing web browser engines, they block web browsers from introducing new 3D standards from optimizing performance and from creating capabilities for web apps to have the power and performance and capabilities of native apps. You're not allowed to do any of these things on the web because Apple doesn’t want web apps to compete with native apps, since they collect 30% taxes on native apps and 0% on web apps.
We should also expect the Metaverse to be an economically complex and expensive business to operate in which many creators are fully investing most of their profits or most of their revenue back into creating awesome content, with ecosystem companies, payment processors, and everybody competing with each other to offer the best value. And operating the Fortnite creator economy, we know that this is a very expensive thing to operate. It's not just like a game store like the Epic Games Store which sells other companies’ games. There's a massive amount of back-end services that have to be run including cloud service and hosting, content moderation and ecosystem safety costs. We're having humans intervene to make sure that what players are doing or what creators are doing are safe for everybody. There's a massive, massive set of costs.
And if you let Apple and Google set the ground rules for the Metaverse, that tax they collect at the front end is going to constitute the far, far majority of profit that will ever be made from the Metaverse. And it would just go into their stock buybacks rather than those profits going to creators to reinvest in creating content, building better stuff, and engines and payment processors and other contributors to the overall Metaverse ecosystem. It would just be collected in junk fees and dividend it out to shareholders for doing absolutely nothing, which is what Apple and Google really do for the Metaverse. Nothing at all.
And I guess equally importantly, they've placed themselves in a position of gatekeeping and saying the apps aren't allowed to do certain things. If you look at the Department of Justice's complaint against Apple, they're preventing broad categories of apps from even existing. If a US developer wanted to offer the same variety of services in the US that WeChat does in China, Apple would simply say no. They don't let you bundle together a useful app with a distribution vehicle for other companies’ apps. They don't let you advertise other companies’ apps or promote other companies’ apps. They don't allow you to run vast facets of an app economy that you'd normally have because they simply say, you cannot do this thing. There's all of that. And I don't think that the Metaverse can even exist on these mobile devices so long as they have those sorts of rules.
By imposing huge sets of rules on what their competitors are allowed to do on devices customers have bought, they can prevent entire categories of software from existing and they will prevent the Metaverse from existing to the extent that they can't fully tax it. And if it is allowed to exist in the future, then it will exist as a vassal to Apple's fiefdom.
And that's why it's so important that we win all of these fights and that world regulators and law enforcers stop these monopolies from using their control of the operating systems on these devices and over a trillion dollar digitally connected economy, which is exactly what they're doing now. Regulators are taking notice. The European Union, Japan, and UK have now passed really robust laws that will stop this, and the US is too captured by Apple at the moment to pass laws, but progress may be made and the fight continues worldwide.
Ball: I have two final, more fun questions. The first time the three of us played Fortnite, Neal, you were Silver Surfer, Tim, you were an anthropomorphic jellyfish. Why those outfits? Neal, I'll start with you.
Stephenson: A Silver Surfer is just a vintage comic book character who was sort of a cult favorite. Not one of the big name comic book characters, but had a cult following. And he was sort of brooding and kind of always going on about philosophical stuff. And there was a brief moment in the 90s when somebody wanted to make an update of Silver Surfer called Cyber Surfer, and my phone rang and that project went nowhere. I never really did anything or got paid. But so just when I saw Silver Surfer come up on as a skin you could get, I just clicked on it.
Ball: And Tim, the jellyfish?
Sweeney: I was on Twitter and telling a story about one of my Fortnite games and somebody replied saying like, "Gee, you're CEO of Epic. When you beat somebody in Fortnite, don't you feel bad about that? This is one of your customers, and you just caused them to lose a Battle Royale game." That made me feel bad. But when I switched to a giant jellyfish that's like a foot taller than all the other characters with giant colorful tentacles sticking out of his head, the one character in Fortnite, that doesn't blend into any environment we've ever had, I feel better about that. And so playing as a giant jellyfish, it's bright purple and pink, makes me feel okay about playing a Battle Royale game and perhaps defeating other people because they have plenty of notice that I'm coming.
Stephenson: Oh, is it generally known that that's your outfit?
Sweeney: Yeah. And basically everybody who has a jellyfish profile picture, I follow them on Twitter because we Jellies have to stick together.
Ball: Speaking of things we can see a long time coming, when the Metaverse does arrive to the extent in which that's ever a definable thing, do you think we'll use the term? And if not, what will it be?
Sweeney: I hope so. If we use one company's word for it, if we call it Fortnite, then we've kind of failed to build the open version of it. So I would hope that it would actually be called the Metaverse and not some company's brand like Googling when you're searching the internet. So I hope so.
Stephenson: We've kind of hit this topic previously earlier in the conversation. Matt, you were talking about is the Metaverse Dead? We see postmortems for the Metaverse. And yet on the other hand, Fortnite and Roblox and other such platforms have got vast numbers of people using them. We just don't generally refer to them as the Metaverse, but people who kind of understand the concept know that that's what they are. So I think it'll be something like that.
But it's always been the case that the new technologies have a sort of currency in the language that eventually comes to seem sort of dated. So in the 30s, radio was this amazing kind of newish thing to a lot of people. And so you can still buy a little red wagons called Radio Flyer. It's just a wagon, it has nothing to do with radio, but 100 years ago, somebody thought it would be cool to put the word radio on the wagon because it had connotations of this is the thing of the future. And we see that with internet and with a whole lot of tech buzzwords that come and go over time.
Ball: Finally, Neal, it has 32 years since Snow Crash. We're now just a few months from your next book, which comes out October 15. What can you tell us about?
Neal: Yeah. It's going back to writing historical novels about science, which is something I enjoyed a lot when I wrote Cryptonomicon and then the Baroque Cycle. And so in this case, it's the beginning of a series about science, the development of physics in the 1930s and the 1940s, eventually leading up to the bomb. And in that world, there's a lot of amazing stories that for some reason haven't been told. And so I just found it to be a really exciting part of history when I started to kind of learn about it. And so each volume is going to center on a different specific character, but they all kind of know each other and they interact.
So for Polostan, the character is a young woman who's got an American mother and a Russian father, and lives on the cultural boundary line between those two worlds during the Great Depression. She's a big fan of Bonnie and Clyde. She's a really interesting character, I think. So, yeah, that's coming out in mid-October. I'll be doing a book tour, be passing through Cary, North Carolina. So, but purchase your advanced copy now at a bookseller near you.
Ball: I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but eagerly looking forward! Tim, Neal, thanks again.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity.
“The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet” is now available everywhere.
