Hot on the heels of last Thursday’s announcement that Fortnite publisher Epic Games and world-famous, plastic brick builder The LEGO Group would be entering into a long-term partnership to build a family friendly Metaverse, comes Monday’s news of a huge $2 billion fund to help Epic realise its Metaverse plans.
The funds come from Japanese multinational Sony and Danish private holding and investment company KIRKBI. Sony have previously invested $200 million in Epic Games in 2021 and KIRKBI own 75% of The LEGO Group. This is significant as it shows how bullish the two companies are about the potential of the Metaverse, with each party investing $1 billion each. Sony Group Corporation’s Chairman, President and CEO was quoted as saying: “As a creative entertainment company, we are thrilled to invest in Epic to deepen our relationship in the metaverse field, a space where creators and users share their time.”
So, what will Epic use this money for? CEO and Founder, Epic Games Tim Sweeney gave some clues in his statement that: “This investment will accelerate our work to build the metaverse and create spaces where players can have fun with friends, brands can build creative and immersive experiences and creators can build a community and thrive.”
Are Epic following the same roadmap to Metaverse dominance as Qualcomm? As previously reported on The Metabite, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Metaverse Fund has supported the creation of hardware, developer tools and access to venture capital. Effectively creating an ecosystem of XR developers focused and incentivised to create Metaverse applications based on Qualcomm hardware and tools.
Similarly, if Epic were also to provide grant funding opportunities for developers, oen would assume that some of those developers would be creating immersive, virtual worlds for Epic’s Metaverse, using Epic’s Unreal Engine 3D creation tool.
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