GamesBeat Next 2024 will take place October 28-29 at the beautiful Convene space.
GamesBeat Next 2024 will take place October 28-29 at the beautiful Convene space.
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Tim Sweeney will speak at GamesBeat Next in virtual talk on the path to the open metaverse

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

Hey GamesBeat community! GamesBeat Next 2024 is coming on October 28-29 in San Francisco with a theme of “Back to Growth” for the conference. And I’m glad to announce that Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, maker of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, will be a special guest virtual speaker.

I will do a virtual fireside chat with Sweeney about the path to the open metaverse. Sweeney began telling me about this dream of the metaverse back in 2015 for sure and even earlier. But the road to the metaverse has been decades in the making, ever since Neal Stephenson, sci-fi author and one of our speakers, published his novel Snow Crash in 1992. Stephenson will be a speaker at our event in person this time, but alas Sweeney will only be attending as a virtual guest through a recorded interview. How’s that for some metaphysical twists on the metaverse?

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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.