Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…That’s the power. Right now, in the current instantiation of Epic—with the Epic online services having just been nascent in adoption, and Fortnite being the first and best customer of it—that network economy’s power only lives in the Fortnite part of Epic's business. What you're talking about is they want to bring all of that network economy and network effect of all these friend connections, and all the cross-platform into everything that is built on the Epic technology. That's pretty powerful. I think that's probably also what's scary to Apple, to Google, and probably to Facebook too. Yeah. This hits at the core of how Tim Sweeney philosophically thinks about what Epic's mission in the world is and how it is diametrically opposed to Apple, Facebook, and Google. It's not only open versus closed. It's more like Tim thinks there's another internet to be built by basically bringing down rent everywhere. Take rates should dramatically go down, and interoperability should dramatically go up. Think about when the World Wide Web first launched—how wide open it was—but Tim's vision is a little bit more privacy protected. That you can't just drop arbitrary Javascript in and collect information on people. Think about the Ready Player One world, but rather than it all being one company, he has this vision of—and he'll name his competitors. It's remarkable to listen to him talk. That the Roblox economy could interact with the Fortnite economy. You could buy goods and bring them between worlds. You can easily shift between those worlds with your friends. I think that the way that he thinks about the world and this metaverse that he wants everyone to live in is commerce is going to be online in this digital space. Social connections are going to live there. It's not just games, and it shouldn't all belong to one company. You look at the way that Apple is approaching this particular fight and this whole 30% battle, it is, we are entitled to 30% of everything that happens on our platform. And Tim is pounding his fist and saying, nothing is yours and nothing is ours. Yup. Tim Sweeney, not Tim Cook who’s pounding his fist.…

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