Why B2B Industrial Businesses Might Want to Check Out Fortnite

Last week, Epic Games released a beta called Unreal Engine Fortnite (UEFN). It's basically a tool for game developers to import their own custom assets into Fortnite. We’ve been using Unreal Engine for a few years now for animation projects, I can tell you that it's sweet - photorealistic work, very fast rendering of lighting, complex environments, etc. Unreal Engine is already one of the most powerful animation platforms in the world, and it's free to use (basically).

Epic is doing this to expand the creator system and get more developers and animators using and building their own “islands” inside of Fortnite. (The long game is that they consider this the foundation of an open-source, cross-platform metaverse, so that's the incentive to make this so open.) Anyone can create an island and build on it.

But until now, creators could only use Fortnite assets that already existed. Also, Fortnite already has 100,000,000 active users, a very very friendly interface for anyone to learn /"drop in" ... and it can be installed on most platforms.?

Where I’m headed with this is this …

Imagine being able to create your own virtual showroom, where customers can interact with your products in a 3D environment. They don’t have to download Altspace. They don’t need a VR headset. They don’t need to have a Facebook/Meta account.?

This is what UEFN could offer for B2B industrial businesses. It's still early days, and we don't know for sure if this is the direction UEFN will go, but I can see this being a big deal for B2B companies that need to explain and show their product to customers, and it’s a pain to get them to their facility. It could be a big deal.

Here’s the other reason I get excited about it …

Right now, the assets we create in Unreal Engine only live in videos or still images. But with UEFN, we could potentially flip our process on its head — create a digital twin of the facility and products, a place for people to explore and interact with our stuff.?And, only then, create a video showcasing those same things.

And like I said earlier, the fact that UEFN is built on top of Fortnite, a platform that already has a huge user base and is easy to access for new users … makes it butter-smooth for businesses to try out.

I should also mention that Epic Games is building UEFN with an open-source spirit, which means it could eventually be compatible with all platforms, even competitors like Roblox. So this could be a future-proof investment for businesses looking to create virtual showrooms.

If you're a B2B industrial business, you might want to keep an eye on UEFN and see how it develops. Creating a virtual showroom could be a really effective way to showcase your products and services to potential customers, and UEFN could be the platform to make it happen. It's still early days, but it's definitely something worth exploring.

And listen, I get it. Facebook just admitted that their Metaverse experiment was a massive misstep. Disney is shutting down their Metaverse division. And if I ask 20 of my industrial clients if they have even an inkling of interest in this, 19 of them are going to tell me to pound sand. The other is gonna say "meh."

But I’m excited about it. I think there’s something here and I think it’s a thread worth pulling on.