Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, is valued at $28.7 billion. That's a lot of money to me, but not much compared to Apple. All of Apple's shares combined are currently worth over $2 trillion.

In other words, Epic has room to grow, and the company (not publicly traded like Apple) just got another $1 billion for its growth. 200 million of this came from Sony, which invested $250 million in Epic last July; Epic CEO Tim Sweeney remains Epic Games' controlling shareholder after this investment.

The $1 billion will help Epic "build connected social experiences in 'Fortnite,' 'Rocket League,' and 'Fall Guys,' as well as provide a platform for Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services, and Epic Games Store. In a nutshell, Epic intends to use the funds to build a "metaverse."

"Metaverse" is a word that Mr. Sweeney likes to use from time to time, but one that I kind of wish he wouldn't. I think what comes to mind for many is a virtual reality space where people live virtualized lives, as in "Snow Crash" and the recent "Ready Player One". In other words, a very sophisticated MMO with its own economy. To some extent, I think that's what Sweeney is talking about. Fortnite has gone from a game to a place where people can hang out, watch movies, and experience unique events simultaneously.

But if we accept that we are already living in a virtual space, with games, Instagram stories, YouTube videos, Twitch streams, Zoom calls, emails, Discord servers, etc., then the "metaverse" is a small universes all connected together so that people can travel back and forth between them. This is also what Sweeney is talking about: single account login that works across services, cross-platform game ownership, shared development APIs, cross-play, etc. [In his keynote at the 2020 DICE Summit, Sweeney articulated the Metaverse vision: "Players will get together with their friends, transition from game experience to game experience, spend time together as a group as friends, walk across all platforms and and have these experiences without worrying about which company made the device or which company runs the server they are playing on.

He concluded his talk by saying that he fears we are entering a "lost decade" where platform holders like Microsoft and Apple will continue to fight it out. His goal is to stop that from happening.

Here's the easy version: if you're wondering what Epic is really up to besides suing Apple, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exclusive content for the Epic Games Store, and buying empty malls, the full 30-minute DICE keynote is worth watching Sweeney explains his plans in considerable detail.

Aside from Sony's cash, the bulk of this billion dollars comes from major investment groups with names that could be used for a bunch of cyberpunk bad guys: Luxor Capital, BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Ontario Teachers' Pension Board Such as. (Teachers probably deserve a cut of the action more than anyone else, since they have to put up with kids constantly playing and talking Fortnite in class.)

You can read a bit more about this funding in the blog post. According to Chairman, President and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida, this investment is in line with the goal of "filling the world with excitement. "We can't wait to see what $200 million worth of excitement looks like.