Last week, Facebook changed its company name to Meta, a reflection of its efforts to create more tools and products for a concept called the metaverse.
Around the same time, Epic Games, the Cary, North Carolina-based video game developer, pried away one of Facebook’s lead executives to lead its own efforts at creating a metaverse.
Matthew Henick, a former vice president of content at Facebook, joined Epic in October to help lead the company’s efforts at creating metaverse applications.
The metaverse, a term created by science-fiction novelist Neal Stephenson, refers to virtual worlds where people can interact with each other via online avatars. People already do this in a limited fashion on Epic’s hit game Fortnite, but online companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to create virtual ecosystems where people can interact for a variety of reasons, whether it’s work, commerce or entertainment.
Henick’s hire was first reported by the tech publication The Information.
Epic confirmed his hire to The News & Observer, but declined to comment or make Henick available for an interview.
The hire could give Epic insight into the plans and thinking of one of its main metaverse competitors.
At Facebook, Henick helped launch a reality show called Rival Peak. The show involved dozens of digital characters who compete against each other in a remote location, tech outlet Protocol reported.
The main difference the show had with traditional reality television was that the characters were controlled by artificial intelligence and Facebook users could interact and communicate with the digital characters in real time. The AI characters make choices based on the collective feedback they got from the audience.
“When you think about the spectrum between passive video and gaming,” Henick told Protocol, “there’s always been this belief that they’re going to merge somehow into some sort of new format, but ... we haven’t really seen a partner or an industry take the technological advances we’ve made in terms of the social internet and cloud, and use that to build an experience that actually puts people at the center.”
Before working at Facebook, Henick spent time at the digital news website Buzzfeed, where he worked on its efforts at film and television.
Prior to Mark Zuckerberg’s foray into the metaverse, Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic, has been one of the most prominent backers of the idea.
He has raised billions from investors in recent years to fund his vision of a metaverse.
Perhaps the best example of the potential of a metaverse has been the way Epic hosts concerts and movie showings within its Fortnite video game. Rather than simply existing as a place where players compete, the online version of Fortnite has morphed into a place where people can socialize through their avatars in the game.
Epic has also invested heavily in improving the way people can communicate with each other in the game, buying the video chat app Houseparty, for instance, in 2019.
The metaverse even became a recurring subject during its lawsuit against Apple earlier this year.
Sweeney told the judge in that case that Apple’s fees on in-app purchases made it hard to fulfill its complete vision for shared digital spaces. People would not be motivated to do business in a metaverse-type environment if Apple was going to take a 30% cut of all those transactions, he argued.
“The long-term evolution of Fortnite,” Sweeney said at the time, “will be opening up Fortnite as a platform for creators to distribute their work to users.”
“With Apple taking 30% off of the top, it makes it very hard for Epic and creators to exist in this future world,” he added.
