The DeanBeat: Sorting out the Epic-Unity-Improbable mess

If I’ve concluded one thing from the spat in the past week between Unity Technologies, Improbable, and Epic Games, it’s that it won’t be easy to build the Metaverse, or the universe of virtual worlds that we’ve been served up in science fiction like Ready Player One and Snow Crash.

If these three foundational companies can’t agree on how to cooperate, then good luck trying to get all companies to cooperate on a common technological foundation for connecting virtual worlds. I’ve been going to the NiTron Summit, where the hope is that blockchain will provide the technological glue for connecting the game worlds of the future. But this dispute reminds me that getting companies to cooperate will be the hard part. I’ve tried to summarize it, but I feel like this issue isn’t really over or resolved yet.