Fortnite was once a metaverse leader, but now it's stalling in the face of increased competition.
Fortnite’s main push into the metaverse has mainly been to simply start collecting every and any IP you’ve ever heard of in order to fulfill that portion of the Ready Player One fantasy, the one where Chun-Li and Tracer join the Iron Giant in taking on a bad guy at the end of the movie. I’ve beenof all Fortnite’s licensed skins and it’s a massive collection unlike anything else in the industry.
There is no larger, connected Fortnite world outside of the battle royale map itself, and that’s in a constant state of chaos, serving its main purpose as being a competitive video game. We may laugh at games like Decentraland poorly emulating past experiences like Second Life or PlayStation Home, but I’m frankly shocked to see Fortnite has not produced some sort of off-blockchain version of that by now.
This isn’t to say it’s not impressive, but it doesn’t appear to be evolving very rapidly anymore. Epic got bogged down with this futile case against Apple where it claimed the app store was constricting its vision of the metaverse.
I don’t know what the future holds, but it feels like Fortnite needs to expand dramatically past its battle royale and limited creative modes to be a truly major, long term player in this space. Maybe that is what they have planned, but it does seem like it’s taking a while for anything to get here except more and more new licensed skins.