In an era of hot tech, it’s hard to argue against Epic Games being the hottest.
Unreal Engine is used by around 10 million developers
Into its second year, and Epic Games Store has over 160 million users
Approaching its fourth year, and Fortnite has over 400 million users
Small wonder, Epic’s just raised another $1 billion - total to-date $4 billion - on a $29 billion company valuation
But perhaps more significant is Epic’s direction of travel and swagger.
It’s continuing an aggressive lawsuit with Apple (and Google), partly due to what it believes are monopolistic practices over their app stores, but partly because it believes the future of gaming itself should be more open.
Indeed, the primer mover for this attitude - CEO Tim Sweeney - is pioneering the concept of the “metaverse” in gaming (whatever the metaverse is) and broadly is positive about the power of blockchain to provide the required economic layer.
It’s also interesting to note that as a private company, Epic avoids many of the regulatory and legal issues that bedevil any public US company looking to adopt blockchain technology.
In other words, it’s one of the most likely mass market gaming companies to jump into blockchain.
Of course, that’s not to say it will.
For one thing, lawsuits are expensive - especially in terms of soft resources such as executive attention.
For another, trying to retrofit blockchain to an existing, highly successful product such as Fortnite, is nigh-on impossible; both from a technical and a user experience point of view.
I’m also not convinced that aside from Sweeney, there’s strong blockchain sentiment within the company.
And yet given its strong balance sheet, its large audience and its future vision, I think Epic remains the bellweather in this space, especially given its current propensity for acquiring companies to build out its optionality.
In other words, watch this space.