We just hosted our third annual GamesBeat Summit at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, Calif. It was a beautiful place and a great backdrop for our talks about the inspiration cycle between science fiction, real-world technology, and games. We had 72 speakers and 250 attendees with endless stories to tell, but here’s some of the beautiful threads that stood out for me.
Making the Metaverse
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, wants the Metaverse to happen.
We kicked off the conference with Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games. I asked him where we were in our ability to create the Metaverse, the immersive virtual world envisioned by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. Sweeney said that social VR experiences like Altspace VR and Facebook’s social VR platforms are the beginning of the Metaverse, but we still need technologies like “deep input,” or taking videos of people’s faces (and capturing their emotions) and transporting that into a virtual environment.
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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.
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