Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney has sounded off on one of the hottest issues in tech and gaming right now, that being digital economies, including cryptocurrency. Speaking to Fast Company, the billionaire founder of the Fortnite studio said he believes digital goods will become massively popular and lucrative, running into the trillions of dollars, but right now the market is filled with bad actors and scams.
“The idea of a digital economy that’s not gate-kept by any one company, which is decentralized and open to all participants and has incredibly low transaction fees, that’s an awesome aspiration,” Sweeney said. “I support the idea of universal ownership–the idea that if you were to buy an avatar in one place that you’d own it in every other place where it’s conceptually compatible… the field of zero knowledge proofs–the idea that you can verify that something happened without receiving any private details about it–that powers a number of the cryptocurrencies in protecting privacy while running a decentralized system, I think that’s going to be the backbone of a large part of the next century in technology.”
Right now, however, Sweeney said he’s observed that the crypto market is “bundled up with a lot of speculation and a lot of outright scams.” Sweeney also said he believes companies are promising more than they can realistically deliver in the name of making money.
“You know, like the blockchain avatar economies for example, there are a bunch of companies aspiring to make avatars that you universally own, but none of them I’ve found, not a single one, has actually made any effort to foster actual adoption of these avatars by any actual games or ecosystems,” he said.
“They just want to build this thing and sell people avatars, but they’re completely useless in practice.”
Sweeney went on to say one of the main issues right now is around utility–companies are selling digital goods that don’t have much in the way of actual use. “They’re showing you digital goods you can’t do anything with except to say that you own it. You can cryptographically prove that you own it, but who cares?,” he said.
Looking further into the future, Sweeney said he is optimistic that crypto will become massively successful and ubiquitous. “I firmly believe there’s going to be a multi-trillion dollar economy around digital goods in the future,” he said.
The full interview touches on many other subjects like the metaverse; go read it here.
Source: Gamespot
