How COVID-19 Is Leading Us to the Metaverse, Part Two
What we need to get from the Proto-Verses to the true Metaverse
This is Part Two of a series about how we get from quarantine to the metaverse. Click here to start at the beginning.
While the pandemic has accelerated trends towards all generations living more online, there are still big gaps that need to be filled before we can properly call any of these platforms a metaverse. So how do we get from there? Consider this a roadmap for thinking about what we need to get to the next billion-user platforms, the ones that will dominate the next generation of attention and media consumption. Some of these components will be built by existing and future platform owners, but some of them can and will come from startups, who will either be acquired, or carve out a common layer across metaverse platforms, like a future AWS.
1. A persistent, shared experience at scale
One of the core principles of a metaverse is that it be persistent — if I leave an apple on a table and come back tomorrow, it should still be on the table, unless another user or an in-universe event has moved it. And while there is some persistence in some platforms, because the current crop of proto-verses have their roots in gaming, many elements get reset between sessions. For Fortnite, this is a feature, not a bug, as the nature of its traditional Battle Royale gameplay mode necessitates resets not just daily but for each round. As they look to move into more lifestyle content and build a true metaverse, persistence will become increasingly important. Despite its weaknesses in other areas, and no true aspiration towards becoming a metaverse, Animal Crossing is the current game which gets this the most right, as a player’s island only changes based on their own actions, the actions of their non-player villagers, or natural events created by the game engine. The first true metaverse will behave more like Animal Crossing: time and seasons move in parallel to the offline world, and most actions not taken by players are caused by some form of “nature”.
The other side of this coin is that the world of the metaverse must be shared across all users on the platform. It will probably surprise non-gamers to know that, when we talk about 12 million concurrent players watching a Travis Scott concert in Fortnite, they’re not all in the same Fortnite, but in 120,000 identical versions of the game, sliced up into 100 player silos. Indeed, our current platforms are more like multiverses — parallel realities unfolding slightly out of sync, and without the ability to communicate between them. Unlike everything else on this list, this is the one true technical limitation that is not possible with current computing and networking technologies. Unlike, say, a YouTube stream, where we can easily have 12 million users watching at once, the interactive nature of these platforms means that the servers must be rendering at least some of the content in real time. Adding more concurrent users to one instance will mean more variables and thus more computing power and memory. We are not yet at a place where we can host millions of users in an interactive environment. There are some glimmers of hope on the horizon, with platforms like Google’s Stadia, whose streaming technology promises to one day be able to scale to such numbers. This is one reason why all of our major cloud platforms — Google, Amazon, and Microsoft — invest so heavily in gaming: concurrency in gaming at scale is a huge technical challenge, and the first one who can do it will have a significant advantage in powering the platforms of the future.
2. A more accessible interface
This is the legacy of our proto-verses coming from gaming, but until they outgrow the trappings of game onboarding and interfaces, it will be difficult to expand a metaverse beyond those who are active gamers. Currently, to participate in an event, a user must design and outfit a character avatar, identify the correct version or mode of the game where the event takes place, and navigate a series of character choices and menus that have nothing to do with the reason they’ve launched the app. Presuming they’re able to navigate the onboarding experience, the most daunting task lays ahead, as they have to be familiar with using a game controller or keyboard and mouse to navigate in three-dimensional space. To a gamer, who has built up muscle memory and an understanding of UI and control conventions, it might sound ridiculous that these would be major obstacles rather than minor annoyances. But the reality is that nothing about video game interfaces is intuitive, it’s all learned behavior. In fact, when 3D worlds were first possible, there were a lot of games which tried and failed to deliver a coherent control scheme, until Nintendo came along with Super Mario 64, which shipped with the new Nintendo 64 console, and a new controller specially designed for navigating in three dimensions. That game and controller established how we still move in 3D space today, even if it has evolved to include a second thumb-stick for camera control.
Getting to that point wasn’t easy, but making those controls even more intuitive is going to be even harder. But it’s an important point that needs addressing before any metaverse can go mainstream. For it to become a truly mainstream platform, a metaverse needs to reach non-gamers. Now, clearly every user interface has some learning curve, and the calculation of “will users put in enough time to learn this” changes as the in-world content gets better and more broadly appealing. But more accessible interfaces will attract a mainstream audience sooner, and give the platform which creates them a big head start in adoption and retention. Anyone who lags too long will risk being relegated to the gamer niche. And while that will continue to be a lucrative niche, it will never compare to the scale of a true metaverse which reaches gamers and non-gamers alike.
3. Varying levels of engagement and attention
Another legacy of being built on top of games is that all of our proto-verses require your full attention to participate. To take just one example, trying to watch the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite while you answered an email would have been challenging. This wasn’t a problem because of the short duration of the event, but as a metaverse expands, we will want everything from movie-length experiences to multi-day music festivals, and it will be impossible to accommodate those things if they must dominate our attention and our screens for the duration. This is another factor that will limit a proto-verse’s growth — the first platform to figure out a way to multitask, with one foot in the metaverse and one foot outside it, will gain a significant head start.
This is why I’m so skeptical of Facebook’s entry into the space. Despite being able to leverage their social graph into a new social platform, thus far they have focused all metaverse-aligned efforts on virtual reality. While it is largely accepted that VR will be an eventual channel for any metaverse platform, I don’t think it will be the only channel. To get to a billion users, it can’t be, not any time soon. To reach that scale, you must reach users with casual investment, who can dip in and out while they work, commute, or watch TV, as Facebook themselves have proven. Those in-between times shouldn’t be excluded from participating in metaverse activities, especially activities rooted in communication. No one wants to wait for a large game to load — let alone put on a VR headset — just to answer a message or browse some dating profiles.
What we need are windows into the metaverse, different interfaces that allow us to peek in without fully engaging. Ironically, it was Facebook themselves who shipped the best example yet of how that might work, when they launched the now-defunct Facebook Spaces. Spaces allowed you to hang out with friends in VR in what amounted to virtual chat rooms. But its most important contribution is that it connected to Messenger, allowing you to place video calls in VR to friends in the real world — you would show up as your avatar, and your friend would show up in a floating video window in your virtual space. This was certainly perfect for communication, but if you imagine it scaling to content and events, it would be a way for you to consume in-world content without having to be an active participant. In a way, this is what users who watched Travis Scott on YouTube or Twitch were doing, and yet it feels like such an important component to user recruitment and engagement that it must be a platform-controlled interface. This is, presumably, what Epic Games has in mind for Houseparty, the social video app they acquired in 2019. It’s not hard to see how Houseparty could evolve into being a window into Fortnite, for those moments when you need to send a message, or just need to answer some email while you watch a concert.
4. An ecosystem of multiple platforms
This one may be the murkiest to envision today, and hardest to manifest, but ultimately it is a critical component that will separate the metaverse from being a collection of apps and services and allow it to be a platform-of-platforms much as the internet itself. For the metaverse to succeed, it must not be owned or controlled by any one company or country. Yes, there will eventually be behemoths of the metaverse who dominate certain sectors — there will be a Facebook of the metaverse for social connections, and a LinkedIn for work, and a Netflix for content — but it’s critical to note that no one player will own the full set of experiences. This is certainly counter to what many platform owners in the space (particularly Facebook) may be aiming to accomplish today. But they should recognize that an interoperable platform that would allow our current proto-verses to carve out a meaningful position is the best way to manifest a metaverse that truly becomes the next major platform. Trying to do so within a single company would be a fool’s errand, potentially producing great value, but value and creativity that are necessarily capped. Think of it as the difference between the open web, and Apple’s App Store: certainly the App Store has generated enormous value for Apple, its users, and its developers. But it pales in comparison to the value of the entire web.
But why would an individual company, acting with autonomy, want to give up the value of the App Store just to help the web exist for everyone else? The trick here is that the metaverse is not guaranteed. It it not an act of nature that will cause it to come into being. Instead, the debate is to whether the next platform will be several siloed virtual worlds, each with their own social network and economy, slowly growing in silos. These worlds would be phenomenally profitable and successful, no doubt. But not as successful as if they were built on top of an ecosystem of interoperable services. Virtual worlds will never capture everyone, because they cannot possibly individually offer enough variety of content, a wide enough social network, and robust enough creative tools for every kind of work to occur within them. By fostering interoperability now, it will create a detente among current photo-verses, allowing them to grow naturally towards their strengths. And by encouraging new entrants in areas they do not cover, it lays the groundwork for a metaverse that appeals to everyone, and that arrives sooner. Yes, we could wait for one platform to get big enough that it can encompass every need, but why wait when a platform approach will get us there faster, allow the incumbents to reap their rewards sooner, and provide new opportunity for innovation?
Epic Games has many advantages in their proto-verse Fortnite, but more important than the game itself is their CEO, Tim Sweeney, a longtime metaverse visionary who has bided his time searching for the right game that would serve as a foothold, while also investing in the foundational tools that would make it possible. What’s extraordinary is that even from his industry leadership position today, when Fornite has 350 million active users and billions of dollars in revenue, Sweeney understands that to win the bigger prize he must cede some ground in the short term, advocating for an interoperable economy between games across a standard protocol like email. It’s a radical stance, but a rising tide that would lift all boats. And it’s refreshing to have the leader of a major tech company look outside his own four walls to find a community-led path to a better future for all his peers, even if he ultimately stands to benefit at least as much as they do. After all, Facebook’s revenue is still 35 times of Epic’s, so there’s a lot of room for growth.
For those of us not actively building the metaverse — consumers, brands, startups, or established companies — it’s important to keep track of how this new platform develops, so that we can ensure we have a place in it. The proto-verses have already captured the attention of Gen Z, and over time will capture more and more attention from the population as a whole. If the metaverse does turn out to be an internet-level platform for the future, we must start understanding how people will use it and how it will shape their attention and media habits, or risk being wiped out by the changing tide.
The Lab works closely with all of these platforms, and can help you define a strategy for executing with them now or in the future. Please reach out to discuss how we can help your business make the next great leap.
