Unreal Engine 6: Upcoming Opportunity for Ecosystems & Web3 Monetization

Game development is notoriously time-consuming, expensive, and resource-heavy, especially for teams building multiplayer or live-service games. But with the rise of UGC platforms like Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), a new path is emerging where creators can build, publish, and monetize game content faster and more efficiently.

Building Ecosystems in Unreal Engine 6

We're still in the middle of the UE5 lifecycle, and while Unreal Engine 6 is a few years away from being officially launched, we can look at Epic Games' official statements. UE6 aims to seamlessly integrate user-generated content and creator tools into the next iteration of Unreal Engine. At the heart of UE6 is Verse, Epic Games' new programming language currently used in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN).

Looking ahead to Unreal Engine 6, Epic's stated goal is:

“The ultimate version of this enables a game developer to build a game of any sort, either or simultaneously both ship it into Fortnite as a Fortnite island that players can go into bringing their Fortnite items and cosmetics and interoperate properly or ship as a standalone game or both."

— Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games

With Verse, Epic Games isn’t just evolving Fortnite; they’re laying the groundwork for a broader structure of interconnected ecosystems. And Verse is built to empower user-generated content (UGC), multiplayer logic, and cross-platform gameplay at a large scale.

"Disney was one of the first companies to believe in the potential of bringing their worlds together with ours in Fortnite, and they use Unreal Engine across their portfolio. Now we’re collaborating on something entirely new to build a persistent, open and interoperable ecosystem that will bring together the Disney and Fortnite communities."

— Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games

Already live inside UEFN, Verse is helping over 70,000 creators build and monetize their own game content since it was publicly released in March 2023 as part of the UEFN launch. According to Epic Games, UEFN creators earned $352 million in 2024 alone. In the near future, Verse will become a core part of Unreal Engine 6, enabling developers to write code once and deploy it across Fortnite and standalone ecosystems, like Disney's.

Web3 to Monetize Creator Economies

While Epic hasn't made statements on Web3 and Verse, every creator wants to monetize the content they build, and Web3 seems like a natural fit.

Creator Monetization: Epic already pays creators an average of $5,000, which is expected to grow. Web3 can position itself to drive the creator economy as it is the most creative approach to in-game monetization, with the ability to come up with new onchain features using smart contracts.
Composable UGC Worlds: Chains or platforms could host their own UGC ecosystems, letting creators spin up worlds and directly monetize their content with primary- or secondary sales or even custom strategies.
Integrating Licensed IPs: IPs have proven effective in hooking users into games like Scopely's Monopoly GO on Mobile in a phase where Mobile Games became increasingly less popular. Or Fortnite's partnerships with Lego or Disney. Chains and Studios could integrate licensed IPs to hook players into their UGC platform and allow them to create, own, and monetize content onchain from their favorite TV Shows.

Key Features of Verse

So what makes Verse so special? Verse is more than just another scripting language, it’s an attempt to solve major technical limitations in a world of massive multiplayer and cross-platform experiences, such as live updates or extreme scalability.

Live Updates: Verse supports live updates inside UEFN, meaning developers can edit and test code quickly without long compile cycles.
Scalability Vision: Today, Fortnite events can support 15 million players, but across many server shards. Epic envisions Verse enabling a future where 15 million could coexist in one persistent world.
Cross-Platform: Verse is engineered to be platform-agnostic, enabling consistent behavior across all front-end environments and facilitating direct, real-time updates to server-side logic.
Concurrency with Transactions: A key part of making Verse scalable is by using a software transactional memory model. Instead of writing fragile multithreaded code, developers write "normal" code that the engine runs safely in parallel behind the scenes.
Deterministic & Immutable: Most data is immutable, helping prevent many common bugs seen in traditional game scripting. With deterministic execution, the same input will always produce the same output—crucial for multiplayer synchronization.
Functional & Logic Paradigms: Verse emphasizes declarative code and control flow through fail/succeed expressions, rather than booleans. This makes code more readable and expressive.

What Verse looks like

Let’s better understand what it looks like to code in Verse.

Here’s a snippet that defines a device in Fortnite Creative that spawns an item when a player enters a trigger area:

module MyGame

public class ItemSpawner : creative_device = {
    @editable
    var item_to_spawn : item_definition

    @editable
    var spawn_location : vector3

    @editable
    var trigger_area : trigger_device

    spawn_item() : void =
        spawn(item_to_spawn, spawn_location)

    OnBegin() : void =
        trigger_area.Triggered.Subscribe(spawn_item)
}

module MyGame
This defines a namespace or package. It helps organize your code and prevent naming conflicts.

public class ItemSpawner : creative_device
This creates a device (a placeable object in Fortnite Creative) called ItemSpawner. It inherits from creative_device, giving it lifecycle events like OnBegin.

@editable
These are properties you can customize in the Unreal Editor—like which item to spawn, where it spawns, and what trigger sets it off.

spawn_item()
This function spawns the chosen item at the defined location.

OnBegin()
This is a built-in function that runs when the device starts. It listens for the trigger's event and calls spawn_item when the area is activated.

Open Asset Economy

Epic Games is building toward an open asset economy—a creator-first ecosystem where assets can be created, traded, reused, and monetized across games and virtual experiences. This includes everything from 3D models and animations to logic scripted in Verse.

Epic wants a seamless pipeline where content moves from concept to creation to deployment. They want to open up the Fortnite asset economy and their acquisitions of platforms like ArtStation (for concept art) and Sketchfab (for 3D models) hint at a broader ecosystem—one where visual assets and code authored in Verse can be combined and shared across the Fortnite ecosystem and, eventually, Unreal Engine 6.

In this system, creators aren’t just building content—they’re building assets with long-term value and interoperability, ready to plug into future games, platforms, and even third-party ecosystems.

Final Thoughts

Verse is still in its early stages and comes with some limitations. Its functionality is currently constrained by Fortnite’s exposed APIs, debugging tools are minimal, and you can’t yet deploy Verse code outside of Fortnite Creative.

However, Verse won’t just be a new scripting language, but one that enables new product opportunities with its advantage for scalability, live updates, and deployments across many Ecosystems at once. It could help developers build content quickly in a time where it's too risky to spend months or years making one game, making content creation a viable alternative to traditional indie game development.

Start monetizing your own game using Sequence's Unreal SDK.

Sources

Lex Friedman Podcast #467 with Tim Sweeney - 30.04.2025
Disney & Epic Games Partnership - 07.02.2024
Official Fortnite Ecosystem Review for 2024 - 22.01.2025
Tim Sweeney on UE6, Collection of Art Studio Acquisitions - 09.01.2024
UEFN: Sleeping Giant - 28.06.2024
Statistics on Integrating Licensed IPs
Decline of Mobile Game Popularity - 24.03.2025
Verse Language Reference from Epic Games