The present letter is a proposition for Epic Games for liberating the Unreal Engine technology under a Free Open Source Software license, renouncing to its intellectual property licensed under the EULA, and adopting a business model based on NFTs by fractionalizing the ownership of the Unreal Engine source code into a DAO in order to sustain the development of the project in the future.

In the last decade we all have witnessed the amazing simulation capabilities of the technology that support the most successful videogame titles, empowering them with an outstanding realism and stunning visual effects: The Unreal Engine.

The company behind this technology, Epic Games, has done an enormous contribution for the industry, helping not only AAA game studios but also indie developers and content creators, with a full range of creation tools and an open ecosystem platform. In the year 2014, when Epic Games decided to grant access to developers to the source code of the engine, and also lowering the barriers of entry for independent entrepreneurs with a permissive license, the adoption of this technology has increased dramatically becoming a De facto standard in the industry. This allowed developing a dynamic market of digital assets and educational programs that enriched the collaboration between experts and artists, reducing the costs of the production of videogames and visual productions.

The wide adoption of this technology, and the remarkable innovations contributed by the researchers and engineers that worked at Epic Games, makes this platform the ideal candidate to become the essential technology stack that will empower the development of the Metaverse, as expected to replace the current Web2 environment towards immersive VR and AR experiences interacting with many users online in real-time.

Also in recent years, our society has experienced the impact of the blockchain technology as it has been shaping the digital economy by empowering creators and users to own the means of production of wealth. As these individuals are exchanging digital assets and creating value in total freedom without gatekeepers, they're redefining the concept of ownership in the digital spaces through instruments like NFTs and DAOs powered by smart-contract platforms.

These financial technologies match perfectly with the advent of the Metaverse and the so-called Web3, the next stage of the evolution of the World Wide Web. As more aspects of our lives, our jobs and social interactions are represented in the digital space, the expression of digital assets in virtual environments become more relevant for the creation of wealth in this era of a knowledge-based economy. Avatars, three-dimensional interactive ambients, wearables and virtual creatures can constitute a kind of asset that users would appropriate in order to enrich their experiences in the Metaverse.

Because of the urgent need for a interoperable ecosystem that allows sharing online experiences and facilitates the content creations for users in the Metaverse, it's necessary to adopt open standards and free open source software tools for building the required technological infrastructure. At the same time, is necessary to adopt a decentralized organization approach based on Peer-to-Peer computation preventing big companies from taking control over the networked system where the Metaverse will be based on.

Is remarkable that the founder of Epic Games and the author of the Unreal Engine, Tim Sweeney, has warned us from the dangers of basing the development of the Metaverse upon proprietary technologies, as he already mentioned his concerns in many interviews since 2017, in his words: "if these platforms are locked down and controlled by these proprietary companies then they’re going to have far more control over our lives, over our private data and over our private interactions with other people than any platform in previous history."

Sweeney also said: " So if we build the metaverse on top of protocols and all of the major players in the industry are committed to working together to define these standards and maintain these standards, then we can all interoperate as peers, and avoid any one company taking control over the thing, and having a monopoly over not just commerce, that’s bad enough, but also a monopoly over our private data and the ability to probe in really really scary ways into our private lives when we’re being connected through these digital tools."

But in contrast, despite of having permission to access to the Unreal Technology source code, the limitations that the EULA license imposed over its users makes it very difficult to integrate into decentralized computing systems based on open protocols. Developers still need to share these tools in open repositories and make modifications constantly as they adapt its algorithms and tools for their inclusion of blockchain protocols.

As same as the World Wide Web has been developed based on ECMA standards, the Unreal Engine should be liberated in order to be adopted as an open standard for content representation in the Metaverse, facilitating the interoperability of the engine across platforms with a heterogeneous ecosystem of computing network services.

For the reasons mentioned above, we consider that Epic Games should liberate the Unreal Engine under a Free Open Source Software License for allowing developers to use and adapt the software in multiple use cases without any restriction, and avoid conditioning how they should use this technology for generating revenue.

In the long run this is more convenient for Epic Games company, since for the users outside the U.S. it is already very confusing to complying with the license agreement for sharing royalties from the net sales of their products, and it's even more trickier if they're trying to implement unconventional monetization based on blockchain protocols.

We can understand the motivations behind the adoption of a shared royalties model, as a company like Epic Games needs to guaranty enough financial resources in order to sustain the labor for the exceptional individuals that are working on that technology, as they've invested admirable efforts in research and development.

So we're suggesting an alternative way of monetization for the project which is based on minting a fractionalized Non-Fungible Token that is linked to a digital representation of the engine codebase, being able to raising funds through a DAO participation offering. As we already saw many successful experiments where artists and content creators were able to sustain their labor by capturing enough funds from the sale of tokens linked to the digital representation of their works, we think that this value capturing model could be adapted on the development of Free Open Source Software in a similar fashion as the ConstitutionDAO has raised millions of capital in the crowdsale of their fractionalized NFTs. 

This proposal is based on an idea that have concerned me in the last six months, as I personally have been working hard on conceptualizing business models around the development of intellectual goods; since they're considered public goods that cannot be limited to scarcity-based models for value capturing. An alternative proposal has already been published in the website of my project https://nebairevelations.com, which I consider that also could help for solving the economic problem of the Unreal Engine development in its post-copyright stage.

That's why I'm interested in overlooking the outcome of this experiment, for validating the thesis that the NFT model could provide enough financial resources for sustaining the Intellectual Goods industry,

At last, I want to express my most sincere gratitude for the work of Tim Sweeney and the engineers behind the technology that powered my favorite games (I'm a die-hard fan of Mortal Kombat).

Att:

Nebai León

CEO of the Nebai Revelations project, https://nebairevelations.com