Epic Games believes the Internet is broken and the metaverse can fix it

To Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, people are tired of how today’s Internet operates. He says the social media era of the Internet, a charge led by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, has separated commerce from the general audience, herding users together and directing them to targets of the company’s choosing rather than allowing free exploration. “Now we’re in a closed platform wave, and Apple and Google are surfing that wave too,” Sweeney said. “As we get out of this, everybody is going to realize, ‘Okay we spent the last decade being taken advantage of.'" For years now, he has eyed a solution: the metaverse. And steadily, over several years, Epic has been acquiring a number of assets and making strategic moves with the goal of making Sweeney’s vision for the metaverse a reality. Today’s always-online, smartphone-centric culture of curated feeds revolves around social media and monetization through advertising, a dynamic Sweeney believes various companies have exploited to their benefit and the detriment of users. For creators, the promise of the Internet goes beyond haggling for likes and competing for space on an infinitely scrolling feed. “You’re going to have hundreds of industries entering this, each one cognizant of the need to protect their brand,” Sweeney said. “I think that’s going to be the ultimate checks and balance system in a way that it was not in the social media revolution. … I think that’s going to lead to very robust development in the way the Internet was.”