Could Epic Games Bring Fortnite to the Metaverse?

Gaming goliath Epic Games has entered the metaverse offering seed funding for the U.K. tech startup Hadean.

The company behind Fortnite joins fellow investors 2050 Capital, Alumni Ventures, Aster Capital, Entrepreneur First and InQTel. European tech-focused VC firm Molten Ventures led the funding round which raised a total of $30 million.

Hadean was formed in 2015 with the aim of providing the infrastructure and computational power to run, and perhaps more importantly, monetize the metaverse. According to Hadean this monetization is achieved with, “distributed, spatial and scalable computing.”

The overarching aim of the project is to kick the metaverse up a level with new infrastructure and experiences at maximum scalability.

“We want to bridge physical and virtual worlds – to help us make better decisions and ultimately improve the quality of our lives in the physical world,” said Craig Beddis, Hadean co-founder and CEO to tech.eu on Friday.

“Today’s virtual worlds are a limited experience – small scale, siloed, and insecure. The true success and mass adoption of the metaverse will rely on the ease by which creators will be able to build their own experiences at scale, leveraging open and robust metaverse-as-a-service technologies.”

The convergence of Hadean and Epic Games is a potentially intriguing one. Some commentators already view Fortnite, Epic Games’ flagship title, to be a metaverse or proto-metaverse.

As one fan said, “Fortnite isn’t really a video game. It’s a crackin’ virtual hangout space.”

The partnership could help Fortnite to bridge that final gap into Metaverse territory and even become a fully immersive 3D world. As of yet, Epic Games have yet to release a virtual reality version of the game. Now, it just might have all the tools it needs to do so.

The recent investment in Hadean is another positive indicator for the nascent Metaverse industry. Other Metaverse projects to recently conduct successful crowdfunding rounds are Alethea AI which raised $16 million in Aug., and Ready Player Me which raised $56 million the same month.