You install that new Parkour game that everyone’s talking about, and instantly your avatar gains a new set of skills. After a few minutes in the tutorial level, running up walls and vaulting over obstacles, you’re ready for a bigger challenge. You teleport yourself into one of your favorite games, Grand Theft Auto: Metaverse*, following a course set up by another player, and you’re soon rolling across car hoods, and jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Wait a minute… what’s that glow coming from under that mailbox? A mega-evolved Charizard! You pull up a Poké Ball from your inventory, capture it, and continue on your way…*

This gameplay scenario couldn’t happen today, but in my view, it will in our future. I believe the concepts of composability—recycling, reusing, and recombining basic building blocks—and interoperability—having components of one game work within another—are coming to games, and they will revolutionize how games are built and played.

Game developers will build faster because they won’t have to start from scratch each time. Able to try new things and take new risks, they’ll build more creatively. And there will be more of them, since the barrier to entry will be lower. The very nature of what it means to be a game will expand to include these new “meta experiences,” like the aforementioned example, that play out across and within other games.

Any discussion of “meta experiences,” of course, also invites discourse around another much-talked-about idea: the metaverse. Indeed, many see the metaverse as an elaborate game, but its potential is much higher. Ultimately, the metaverse represents the whole of how we humans interact and communicate with each other online in the future to come. And in my view, it’s game creators, building on top of game technologies and following game production processes, that will be the key to unlocking the potential of the metaverse.

Why game creators? No other industry has as much experience building massive online worlds, in which hundreds of thousands (and sometimes tens of millions!) of online participants engage with each other—often simultaneously. Already, modern games are about much more than just “play” – they’re just as much about “trade,” “craft,” “stream,” or “buy.” The metaverse adds yet more verbs—think “work” or “love”—to that list. And just as microservices and cloud computing unlocked a wave of innovation in the tech industry, I believe the next generation of game technologies will usher in a new generation of innovation and creativity in gaming.

This is already happening in limited ways. Many games now support user-generated content (UGC), which allows players to build their own extensions to existing games. Some games, like Roblox and Fortnite, are so extensible that they already call themselves metaverses. But the current generation of game technologies, still largely built for single-player games, will only get us so far.

This revolution is going to require innovations across the entire technology stack, from production pipelines and creative tools, to game engines and multiplayer networking, to analytics and live services.

This piece outlines my vision for the stages of change coming to games, and then breaks down the new areas of innovation needed to kickstart this new era.

For a long time, games were primarily monolithic, fixed experiences. Developers would build them, ship them, and then start building a sequel. Players would buy them, play them, then move on once they had exhausted the content—often in as little as 10-20 hours of gameplay.

We’re now in the era of Games-as-a-Service, whereby developers continuously update their games post-launch. Many of these games also feature metaverse-adjacent UGC like virtual concerts and educational content. Roblox and Minecraft even feature marketplaces where player-creators can get paid for their work.

Critically, however, these games are still (purposefully) walled off from one another. While their respective worlds may be immense, they’re closed ecosystems, and nothing can be transferred between them—not resources, skills, content, or friends.

So how do we move past this legacy of walled gardens to unlock the potential of the metaverse? As composability and interoperability become important concepts for metaverse-minded game developers, we will need to rethink how we handle the following:

• Identity. In the metaverse, players will need a single identity that they can carry with them between games and across game platforms. Today’s platforms insist that players have their own respective player profiles, and players must tediously rebuild their profile and reputation from scratch with each new game they play.
• Friends. Similarly, today’s games maintain separate friends lists—or at best, use Facebook as a de-facto source of truth. Ideally your network of friends would also follow you from game to game, making it easier to find friends to play with and share competitive leaderboard information.
• Possessions. Currently the items you acquire in one game cannot be transferred to or used in another game—and for good reason. Allowing a player to import a modern assault rifle to a medieval-era game might briefly be satisfying, but would quickly ruin the game. But with appropriate limits and restrictions, exchanging (some) items across games could open up new creativity and emergent play.
• Gameplay. Today’s games are intimately connected with the gameplay. For example, the entire joy of the “platformer” genre, with games like Super Mario Odyssey, is achieving mastery over the virtual world. But by opening games up, and allowing elements to be “remixed,” players can more easily “remix” new experiences and explore their own “what-if” narratives.

I see these changes happening at three clear layers of game development: the technical layer (game engines), the creative layer (content production), and the experience layer (live operations). At each layer, there are clear opportunities for innovation, which I’ll go into below.

Side note: Producing a game is a complex process involving many steps. Even more so than other forms of art, it’s highly nonlinear, requiring frequent looping back and iteration, since no matter how fun something may sound on paper, you can’t know if it’s actually fun until you play it. In this sense it’s more akin to choreographing a new dance, where the real work happens iteratively with dancers in the studio.

The expandable section below outlines the game production process for those who may be unfamiliar with its unique complexities.