Tim Sweeney at GamesBeat Summit.
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Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney fears the Metaverse will be a proprietary technology

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, believes the future of gaming is coming faster than we think. But he’s also worried that industry giants will try too hard to own the platforms upon which those games are built, and that will lead to toll booths, a lack of open standards, and a loss of privacy.

During a talk at our recent GamesBeat Summit, Sweeney said that we’ll figure out how to create the Metaverse —  the concept of a virtual world where people digitally exist simultaneously with other people, as first envisioned by Neal Stephenson in 1992 — within the next several years. That world will immerse us in an alternate reality far more than today’s virtual reality.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.