Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, promised to bring the metaverse to life through its Quest AR/VR headsets. Disney seems to be the new metaverse benefactor as it announced investing $1.5 billion in Epic Games, developer of the popular game ‘Fortnite’.
Epic Games ‘Fortnite’ is an online shooter and building game and is already home to online concerts. It recently showcased a Lego Fortnite, a racing and music-based game.
The metaverse is supposed to be a series of interconnecting permanent online worlds, but Meta has been struggling to bring it to its full potential.
Disney stated that “The new persistent universe will offer a multitude of opportunities for consumers to play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar and more. If that isn’t a kind of metaverse, I don’t know what is. That’s especially true considering the ‘persistent universe’ will be run through Epic Games’ ‘Fortnite,’ the wildly popular competitive online shooter and building game.”
Meta is still investing in Metaverse development but has recently focused more on AI development, although their Reality Labs segment still showed a quarterly profit of $ 1 billion, and its Horizon app is still among the top ten most used apps for Quest. Their new Ray Ban Meta smart glasses are said to offer a better experience due to AI tech.
The metaverse has significantly stagnated as companies like Microsoft shifted focus to AI. Despite this, Meta and Epic Games have still moved forward in the Metaverse, with Meta developing its Quest product range and Epic Games adding characters and intellectual property to the Metaverse, like Dragon Ball Z, Marvel, Halo, John Wick and Stranger Things, to ‘Fortnite’.
Hopefully, Epic Games can reignite the Metaverse as Meta battles to get users for its Horizon Worlds app, especially with the addition of Disney ‘magic’ that might bring gamers back to the Metaverse.
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