Epic Games has announced that the company has raised $1 billion to use it towards building the metaverse. Epic Games, which developed the successful video game Fortnite, while its Unreal engine has been utilized to develop many popular video games. A demo released last May showed Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, which is the company’s next-gen computer program for developing games, interactive experiences, and AR & VR apps. The Unreal Engine 5 is expected to be launched later in 2021. It uses advanced graphics, which look very realistic.

The term metaverse was coined in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash by  Neal Stephenson. The protagonist in Snow Crash travels between the virtual and real-world, battling a computer virus. In the context of Epic Games’ communication, the metaverse will not be just any other virtual world, but the virtual world. It will be a digitized version of the real world where users can exist as a digital human or as an avatar.

“It’s going to be a meeting place for individuals and creators of all sizes, including brands,” he said. “If you are a car manufacturer, your brand presence in the metaverse isn’t going to be a bunch of advertising for your cars. It’s going to be a place where you can actually drive the cars around and feel the experience of it. We have an opportunity for much, much more interesting interactions.” – Tim Sweeney, CEO, Epic Games.

Also, according to Sweeney, the technology required to develop the metaverse is already available. And if a developer is planning to build the metaverse, then Epic is the best possible option for it.

“We need to give up our attempts to each create our own private walled gardens and private monopoly and agree to work together and recognize we’re all far better off if we connect our systems and grow our social graphs together.” – Tim Sweeney.

At the moment, it is not clear how swiftly the metaverse will progress, but Epic Games has a firm base to develop from with the latest funding.

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