Yeah no, I’m with you on the term and on NFTs. But I also figure anyone who explicitly uses the term these days have declared their allegiance, even as we know some other groups try their best to separate “metaverse” and “crypto”. We know crypto circles like to insert themselves in a lot of places to just grasp at anything that remotely looks like it might be a use case for them. It’s probably better to find a better term, especially since “metaverse” was coined as a cautionary tale than a dream.

As for Epic games/Tim and crypto, from what I’ve read, there seems to be a lot of fence-sitting. Like the typical “it’s a lot of good ideas and innovation” and “when these problems are fixed” fence-sitting. So I wouldn’t put it past them to have some sort of weird blockchain thing playing a big part of their monetization/ownership infrastructure. With as much heat on the matter these days, it makes sense for any company trying to race to be the one big platform, to play neutrality than outright say “we’re using blockchain”. There’s still the belief that the nature of the technology and the behaviors it’s breeding are separable. Who knows? Epic might just want to be the super-neutral platform who won’t use blockchain directly but will be perfectly willing to allow all sorts of blockchain stuff in it.

The “metaverse-ness” of Fortnite was pretty apparent years ago when they started doing promotional events and non-battle modes.

People are totally fine with this, and FFXIV and WoW and VRChat (and maybe Roblox?), even reddit and discord. They have never needed blockchain to be what they are. And they’re fine as they are.

I’m not one to hate on Epic Games either. Tim and Epic contribute a lot of good for the creative industry. It makes me a bit nervous, this direction they’re going on. I’m not gonna go around telling people not to use EGS or claim their free games, but I can understand people who do. And for any BS they and their subsidiaries do, we need to call them out for it.