How COVID-19 Is Leading Us to the Metaverse, Part One
How we get from the digital third places of today to the metaverse of tomorrow
This is Part One of a series about how we get from quarantine to the metaverse. Click here for Part Two.
Now that it’s been two months since quarantine and social distancing forced our entire lives online, the limitations of our current platforms are starting to become apparent. For those of us who are able, the first thing that moved online was work, with Zoom being the breakout star of the moment. And it worked because Zoom (and Teams, and Slack) was a platform built for work. But then we realized that we needed to move our social activities online as well, and as everything from happy hours to proms to exclusive Hollywood parties moved into Zoom, it all started to seem a bit much. We quickly developed Zoom fatigue, partially driven by suddenly being on camera all day, but exacerbated by the lack of cognitive difference between staring at a grid of coworkers and staring at a grid of friends. We needed some distance between work life and our family and friends, even if that distance was a different app on the same home screen. This created a second wave of app downloads, as Houseparty benefitted from a desire for a “third place” that could live online.
The notion of a “third place” was popularized in the 90’s as a way to explain the rise of Starbucks: it wasn’t just about the coffee, but about a place to just exist that wasn’t work and wasn’t home. It could fill the time between appointments, or provide a setting for a date or a casual job interview. It was technically public, but isolated just enough that we could let our guard down. And these third places — whether they were Starbucks, bars, or bowling alleys — were where turn-of-the-millennium American culture thrived. Now, in quarantine, we needed quick solutions for rebuilding these third places online. And while Houseparty provided an easy solution for those looking for a quick respite from Zoom, the future of these digital third places is already being created by a different app from Houseparty’s parent company, Fortnite.
The Rise of the Proto-Verses
Fortnite has been growing steadily since its debut in the summer of 2017, now reaching 350 million players monthly, making it one of the biggest games of all time. But while that would be impressive on its own, it’s the amount of time spent in-game that’s really the game changer: 3.2 billion hours in April. Those are hours that were not spent watching TV, listening to music or podcasts, or reading the news or a great book. And this is why brands need to be paying attention to Fortnite and its kin — they are capturing an ever-increasing amount of attention. While these games have mostly been focused on younger generations, that audience is rapidly expanding to include demographics with more spending power. And of course, tomorrow’s consumers are the kids and teens of today. We know by now that gamers don’t age out of playing; these are lifelong media behaviors.
Even more significant than the number of hours is why players are spending so much time in-game. While it’s far from the only example, Fortnite has become the most popular and prominent third place in gaming — while many of those hours are spent gaming, they’re also increasingly spent going to concerts, racing go-karts, or just hanging out. Fortnite’s concerts, in particular, have been growing and evolving so quickly that April’s Travis Scott premiere rivaled the NFL Draft — the only real sports news there had been for weeks in terms of viewership. So it’s unsurprising that Fortnite’s creators, Epic Games, recently launched a new mode called Party Royale (in comparison to the game’s traditional “Battle Royale” mode) that contains no weapons, no fighting, and a map designed for both casual mini-games and ongoing special events.
Until recently, this must have sounded insane to non-gamers: why would you hang out with your friends on a virtual island watching concerts that you could just as easily stream on YouTube? But games hold a special position as a third place. Rather than just provide the environment to meet up with friends they also give you something to do. You’re not just hanging out after school, you’re playing Fortnite while also gossiping about your friends. Humans crave social interaction, but at some point, when we see the same people often enough — even our best friends — we need to do something and not just stare at each other and talk. Everyone who was invited to one-too-many Zoom happy hours in the past couple of months has figured that out. This is something that games have always been good at, giving us a thing to do to fill the lulls in conversation, to distract our hands and our frontal lobes so we can relax into more meaningful conversations. Games don’t detract from socializing, they enrich it. Our parents knew this: they played bridge and had poker nights. My generation is thriving in a board game renaissance. And Gen Z is carving out virtual worlds as their own social space, away from the prying eyes of parents on Instagram.
It’s not just happening in Fortnite, of course. There are currently three major platforms that fit this mold, social spaces that have day jobs as games: Fortnite, whose combat-focused origins mean it skews towards teens and college-age consumers; Minecraft, whose “digital Legos” style of creativity and inroads with teachers has captured kids around 10–12; and Roblox, which marries Minecraft’s creativity with a twist on Fortnite’s business model that allows players to create and sell their own content in the game, skews even younger, in the 6–10 year old range. All three of these platforms have over 100 million active users, but more importantly, all three of them are building toward something bigger: the metaverse.
“Metaverse” is a term first coined in Neal Stephenson’s seminal 1992 novel Snow Crash, to define a shared virtual space — a platform that would encompass all virtual worlds connected together much in the same way the internet connects various sites and apps. It was the internet, but in three dimensions, and something you could interact with through a screen, or inhabit by donning a pair of VR goggles. Presumably, it was powered by the internet behind the scenes, but had become so engaging — such a better attractor for attention — that the old internet of websites and apps had faded into obscurity. As with all good sci-fi ideas, the metaverse percolated in the background, informing a lot of Silicon Valley punditry, but not really breaking out into the mainstream consciousness until first Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel and then the 2018 movie of Ready Player One, which gave us a metaverse that was built with familiar intellectual property and run as a business that helped its users escape a dystopian offline world, one that had been so successful it had swallowed and virtualized most other offline businesses. While Stephenson’s metaverse was a programmer’s dream corrupted by hackers, Cline’s was cynical only when the sharp edges of capitalism caught the light. Finally, Silicon Valley saw something that could generate returns.
It is well known that Ready Player One inspired Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of Oculus, the breakout virtual reality platform. But only this year will they will begin to deliver on that promise with Facebook Horizon, a virtual social space much like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox, which will allow users to design avatars, build their own mini-games, but most importantly hang out in a virtual world with their friends. It’s Facebook, but brought into virtual space. Unlike those other platforms, it will only be available on Oculus VR headsets. This will almost certainly be its undoing. Despite a recent surge in demand due to the release of Half Life: Alyx, VR headsets are owned by less than 2% of gamers who use Steam, the industry-leading gaming platform. Even in the midst of a pandemic, when VR — a technology that allows us to safely escape our homes — should be having its breakout moment, sales and interest are not as high as they should be. Facebook appears to have seen the eventual evolution of the metaverse into a VR-first social platform, and tried to skip to the end. But in the meantime, they’ll be sacrificing the billions of people on the planet who do have a smartphone or tablet or computer and don’t have a VR headset. Yes, Horizon might eventually drive Oculus sales. But it will be tiny in comparison to, say, a Fortnite that eventually adds VR as an optional interface.
One of Fortnite’s inherent strengths is that it isn’t just a place for Epic Games to deploy their own intellectual property, but that its massive popularity has driven others — most notably Disney — to lend their own IP to the cause. If Facebook declared that Horizons would be a metaverse of the future, they would have to strike partnership deals and pay for the privilege of featuring pop stars and ace athletes on their platform. But by developing one of the largest gaming fan-bases ever assembled, Fortnite can allow influencers to come to them, developing a platform that allows real-world celebrities like JJ Abrahms to co-habitate a virtual space with the fictional characters he created like Rey and Kylo. Anyone who’s anyone would gladly pay to appear in Fortnite with a custom skin, and that leverage will create the cross-cultural mashup that Ernest Cline could only dream of.
But platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft are still incubating; they’re still too small to be metaverses, still too game-like. The metaverse will be a platform on the order of magnitude of the internet itself; what we have now are more like the specialized applications of gopher and usenet, before the web was invented. These platforms are proto-verses, still missing a few ingredients before they can have their Big Bang moment, and birth a true metaverse.
What COVID Normalized
The reason to talk about these platforms now is that our current global crisis has accelerated some of the cultural trends and behaviors that need to be in place for a metaverse to be created. I’m a strong believer that technical capability is only half of the equation for any new platform to take hold — the culture must also be ready to accept it, with enough consumers seeing value in it that a sustainable business can be built, buying time for the platform owner to expand the market and the appeal. The iPhone didn’t break through just because it was a technical leap forward for touch computing, but also because enough people saw the value in having the full internet in their pockets in 2007.
As I noted above, perhaps the biggest shift has been that in the past two months, mainstream online social behavior suddenly shifted from sharing cat photos to encompassing any social interaction with people outside our homes. The online behaviors of young Millennials and Gen Z were suddenly normalized across all age groups and demographics, often with a strong assist from those who already spent much of their lives online showing their parents and siblings how it is done. While we will one day wander freely again, these new skills and behaviors won’t retreat, and the idea of including far-flung friends and family in our happy hours and birthdays, weddings and graduations will never seem foreign again.
We’re also learning to communicate better online, as platforms quickly launch new tools to help with non-verbal communication. In Fortnite, that looks like the new social emotes and facial expressions that were added for the Party Royale mode. But even non-Fortnite players are being trained in this behavior by platforms like Zoom, which recently rolled out tools for raising a hand, requesting the speaker go faster or slower, and even ways to ask for a break or to wrap up the meeting without interrupting. It’s not hard to see how an army of office workers who might not be gamers will now more intuitively understand an emote when they are presented with it.
And we’ve seen an outpouring of creativity online, as talk show hosts and performers learn how to be YouTubers, musicians release content on platforms as diverse as Zoom and Grindr, and a new class of influencers who quickly pivoted their interest in baking, fitness, and gaming into gathering a following. While we’ll always live in a world where most of the content is generated by a relatively modest but active set of users, quarantine has normalized small acts of creativity, like customizing a background and experimenting with AR lenses to spice up the fifth video call of the day. Leveraging this creativity will be key to building a metaverse, as the amount of content necessary to sustain long-term interest and engagement can never come from the platform owner alone.
And lastly, the pandemic has normalized paying for digital goods for a new wave of consumers. Whether it’s spending on indulgences in one of the proto-verses, or simply wanting to invite a llama to your next all-hands meeting (again, anything to make video calls more interesting is booming), older generations will now intuitively understand why their kids would spend real money on virtual goods and services. This will be important for our future metaverses, of course, as they will require a sustainable business model, not just for themselves, but to encourage user-created content on their platforms. Roblox is ahead of the game here, having paid out over $100 million to users last year. In the same time period, Apple paid $35 billion to app developers. Because it will be simpler to create than apps and produced by a larger base, content for metaverses will be an even bigger economy. And while there will be full-time creators in metaverses, many of us will participate in it casually, creating a bit of content to express ourselves and fund our own expenses on the platform.
These digital goods are booming right now, as we all shelter in place and reduce spending on the experiences that had been driving the economy. But even as we come out of hiding and start spending in the physical world, those digital goods will remain as a signifier, something that older generations who hadn’t prioritized them before are now intimately familiar with. Our digital bazaar may be fragmented, but it’s now permanently open for business.
This is Part One of a series about how we get from quarantine to the metaverse. Click here for Part Two.
