TIM SWEENEY

Augmented reality will change the world more than a lot of other technologies. Traveling around to meet people will be much less important when you can stand in a room and chat with a virtual representation of a person that's so close to reality - it'll be a whole new level.

This Metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else. If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government and be a god on Earth.

In many ways 'Fortnite' is like a social network. People are just in the game with strangers; they're playing with friends and using 'Fortnite' as a foundation to communicate.

I understand the concept of advertising. It makes sense. Companies want to reach customers with information about their products. It's a completely legitimate and valuable notion.

Onstage at Build, Phil Spencer said the Xbox is an open platform - which surprises me, because you have to get your game concept approved before you start developing it. Then you have to get every update approved. Microsoft has absolute control.

When lots of stores compete, the result is a combination of better prices for you, better deals for developers, and more investment in new content and innovation.

I think it's necessary for VR to start with an early adopter audience that's highly engaged, and I think that means gamers. They're the ones who have the high-end hardware and the expertise and the patience to sort through the uncertainty of it all.

Both multiplayer games and online forums have this property of virtual anonymity. Other people can't really see you; they don't really know who you are. And so the sort of social moderating mechanisms in real life, and your desire not to offend people around you, don't really adjust.

Games have become a social phenomenon.

We all remember the tech bubble of the late '90s, but companies like Amazon survived. Wherever there's strong, enduring value, it can last through that kind of turmoil.

Epic Games and Microsoft have been close partners for more than 25 years.

We'll turn down crappy games that are submitted to the Epic Store.

Every application designed for 2D interfaces will be obsoleted by AR.

I welcome Microsoft having a store on Windows; what I've always resisted was a push to close down Windows to competing stores.

Hollywood is moving movie production into VR because it may be more immersive. We see a convergence of different forms of media. VR and AR provide next-generation viewing experiences for games, movies, and visualization.

When gamers can play a game together with all of their friends, regardless of the devices they own, you have a much more compelling social experience. That applies to all multiplayer games.

I feel like it really marks a new era for Microsoft under Satya Nadella, Alex Kipman, Phil Spencer, and a number of other people who are really committed to the platform being a healthy ecosystem for everybody and not just an extracted business like you see on the Facebook or Google side.

Fortnite, because of its visual style, it's widely acceptable to just about everyone. It's open up to a much wider audience than a realistic, military-style simulation.

At Epic, we succeed when developers succeed.

The awesome thing about 'Fortnite' is it's brought a huge volume of digital commerce to Epic.

VR as a display technology, as it's miniaturized and made comfortable and mainstream, will be a replacement for all other forms of display technology, input and output. So for anybody who works with computers all day, this is going to be our future.

The mobile gaming experience is fundamentally limited by this very small screen in front of you that occupies maybe 15 degrees of your field of view. The PC and console experience, you have a 45-degree field of view. VR is 120 degrees: your entire view space. The expectations of users on the platform will rise to levels we've never seen before.

Asian online games are far ahead of Western games in terms of business model, but the Western games do have a real advantage in terms of production values.

I can imagine an automotive designer or an industrial designer building a product in 3D, all in real-time. That's the way a lot of people are going to work in the future.

If you throw a frog in boiling water, he'll just hop out. But if you put him in warm water and slowly amp up the temperature, he won't notice and end up boiled.