In the summer of 2021, the entire crypto world seemed to turn around for a moment Decentralized Finance, Non-Fungible Tokens and the Metaverse to turn. We are now almost two years later and we hear relatively little about the Metaverse, but according to the CEO of Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, the concept is anything but dead.
600 million users
In a new tweet, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney lashes out at Business Insider for claiming the Metaverse is dead. “The Metaverse is dead! Let’s host an online funeral so that all 600 million monthly users of Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, Sandbox and VRChat can mourn together in real-time 3D,” said a sarcastic Sweeney.
His tweet came in response to a publication by Ed Zitron, the CEO of EZPR, who claimed that the buzzword “Metaverse” has died and been abandoned by the corporate world. Zitron criticizes, among other things, Meta’s Horizon Worlds, which so far cannot live up to its promises as “the future of the internet”.
Zitron also claims in the article that Decentraland and Yuga Labs’ Otherside also failed to live up to the hype expectations. Investors, he says, have long since moved to artificial intelligence, which should be the next big hype.
Sweeney now refutes those claims, with the fact that there are 600 million monthly users who log into various virtual worlds such as Fortnite and Minecraft. In that respect, we can say that the Metaverse is indeed not dead yet.
Big parties are quitting
Zitron is somewhat right in his conclusion that the Metaverse is dying. Several major factions chose to suspend their expedition in the Metaverse for the time being. For example, how about Disney choosing to close its Metaverse division, which is expected to cost 7,000 employees.
Furthermore, Microsoft has also stopped its Industrial Metaverse Core team. The project was only four months old and aimed to promote the use of Metaverse applications in the industry. The tech giant is said to have fired 100 people who worked on the project.
Yet there are also companies that fully believe in the Metaverse. How about Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, for example? That company even changed its name from Facebook to Meta to show how much it believes in the future of the Metaverse.