Who Gets to Embody the Metaverse First?
Michael Spencer
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
In the West, it's the recent IPO startup of Roblox that has seemed to be the clearest embodiment of the metaverse today —?a social world where users can jump between virtual experiences while creating their own experiences inside it. It’s notably not a virtual reality experience, instead thriving largely on mobile and desktop.
What Facebooks Hopes
Now Facebook thinks its VR version of the metaverse could catch on. It's not clear if Zuckerberg really thinks his company can do it or if this is a PR distraction from Facebook's real issues.
Mark Zuckerberg has hailed the so-called "metaverse", describing it as the "next generation of the internet and next chapter" for the company, he told investors in a conference call this week.
As a futurist I'm really interested in ideas on the future of technology and what consumers might actually want vs. what digital advertisers like Facebook or Google think is a good idea. Remember with LinkedIn, now even Microsoft is a digital advertiser too.
FRL’s VP Andrew Bosworth announced the new effort?in a Facebook post, though it’s light on specific details. Sorry, Bos, but WhatsApp is not a "digital world" within Facebook's app ecosystem, it's just an app that has failed to be either respectful of our private data, profitable or a superapp of any kind.
Facebook makes $29.08 billion a quarter but doesn't want to spend the money required to moderate content and misinformation on its sprawling platforms. Is this the company we really want in charge of the next grand social platform?
While Facebook nor Amazon have been into gaming much, many consider some of today’s video games like?Microsoft bought Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite early versions of what a metaverse could be.?Microsoft recently tried and failed to acquire Discord, the gaming group comms product.
Facebook Is Now Promoting Itself as a Metaverse Company
Last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his metaverse plans with the public in an?interview?with The Verge.?The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision, he said in a remote address to employees.?But Facebook doesn't seem to lead to social good, or a way for me to immerse myself in a healthy world. So what then?
Facebook's ecosystem of apps has a huge number of daily active users, 1.91 billion, if we are to believe the numbers. But the company's ethics has shown it's failed in the kind of innovation or bigger ideas needed to manifest the metaverse and the required collective will to lead consumers to a better place.
Facebook mastered social media by giving people an easy way to share their offline lives with friends, family, and complete strangers on the Internet. Yet now, years later, the incentive to keep doing this in stories or on Instagram is limited at best for many of us who have unfortunately had the annoyance to grow up with some of these tools. These unfortunate digital utilities that have harvested our data and preferences for profit, pinging as an ARPU number of predictive analytics algorithms.
Facebook's metaverse ideas seem to be mostly focused on VR.?It's nearly ten years ago, in 2014, that it bought the industry-leading VR hardware maker Oculus. But Facebook has done very little to attract consumers to share Mark's vision of the next internet.
Facebook's Other Bets Are Worse than Google's
How is the metaverse going, really, in Facebook's other bets? Revenue from Facebook’s Other segment, including consumer hardware such as Oculus virtual reality headsets, totaled $497 million, up 36% and less than the $685.5 million StreetAccount consensus estimate. Snapchat's user growth and retention is more appealing, not to mention TikTok's appeal to global consumers and youth. Facebook is simply no longer cool and in fact viewed as a very uncool company.
Facebook said it expects “year-over-year total revenue growth rates to decelerate significantly on a sequential basis as we lap periods of increasingly strong growth". Facebook's anticompetitive practices have been a bar to app innovation for years in the United States, and for SMBs it's been seen mostly as the only game in town, a monopoly on advertising targeting for many businesses who want to grow fast.
It’s clear that Zuckerberg has been thinking about this metaverse idea for a while.?Yet it's difficult seeing a path to product fit with how the internet is evolving and Facebook's supposed vision of the metaverse. Facebook seems like a desperate company. In June they bought a Roblox-like platform called Crayta for an undisclosed sum and they’ve spent much of the last several years buying up a host of VR-focused game studios.
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Facebook's Metaverse Is Destined for Failure
Facebook Reality Labs is “standing up a Metaverse product group” but it isn’t clear what this actually means. The group will be led by former Instagram VP of Product Vishal Shah and will report directly to Bosworth.
It sounds a bit like another boys' club inside of Facebook pretending they are on the bleeding edge of something great. Jason Rubin is returning to VR to “lead the Content team” in this new metaverse group. Rubin co-founded Naughty Dog , directing Crash Bandicoot & Jak and Daxter. He oversaw Oculus VR content (mostly games) from 2014 until late 2019, when he moved to Facebook’s mobile & web gaming initiatives.
Facebook's conception of the metaverse appears to be a ruse. It's nothing compared to what ByteDance is planning in gaming, educational technology and actual spaces of how the future of the internet will unfold that young people are actually interested in. Facebook's conception of the metaverse appears to be top-down, not bottom-up, which is how organic innovation actually occurs in the real world of consumer adoption.
The Power of Rebranding and Envisioning the Future
Coined in?Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, the term Metaverse refers to a convergence of physical, augmented and virtual reality in a shared online space. The problem? Facebook doesn't even integrate or share its online spaces particularly well. It's not able to innovate its own new apps, never mind products within its apps. When you realize this, it becomes easy to spot what a sham Mark's conception of the metaverse actually is.
There’s a very particular distinction in Facebook’s choice of rebranding itself as a “metaverse” company as opposed to an AR/VR one. VR was a promise that never was fulfilled, in part due to the clunky technology and high costs of the hardware. Hardware, something Facebook has shown a particular ineptitude for.
Facebook?said in the second quarter it had 3.51 billion monthly users across its family of apps, up from 3.45 billion in the first quarter. Yet in spite of having data troves on us across its platforms, Facebook is not an innovative company.
Could Facebook intend to build its own game engine, one designed for the needs & constraints of an online virtual reality universe? Will the Horizon Group be able to accomplish that? Facebook has “a history of doing these kinds of technical projects that look like they might be revolutionary at times when they’re being criticized for their lack of social responsibility,” Jen Goldbeck, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Maryland recently said.
Facebook Is Becoming a Failure of A Whole Lot of Copying and Cloning
?Something is being built – Facebook just doesn’t seem ready yet to say exactly what. From Facebook's crypto Libra experiment (now called Diem), to copying Snapchat stories, to now pivoting IG to TikTok-style videos, it's clear Facebook truly embodies the Silicon Valley scam of promising something that it's incapable of delivering.
Facebook's vague presentation of the metaverse is most likely a PR stunt. Its engineers know it's incapable of leading us into a new VR age. Its executives are making so much money on digital advertising, it's hard for them to even care about anything else. What do you think Facebook’s new “metaverse” group is building? Is it an innovative new social platform, a generic marketing term, or something else?
BigTech Will Try to Impose its Metaverse Upon Society
The idea of the metaverse is something for young people to create. It's not something for Microsoft to impose upon us with software upgrades or for Google AI's supremacy to discover. It's not something for Facebook to exist longer than it's intended to exist in the history of the internet.
The metaverse is the future because our future is more digital. It's probably an overstatement to say that the metaverse news was released to serve as an intentional distraction from the company’s current problems. Facebook has been losing market share to TikTok for quite some time, and is facing antitrust and legal scrutiny for its business practices.
In Europe, Facebook is even losing users. In the 2020s other countries will start to delete Facebook's apps as new companies take its place in the matrix. The truth is we might never really unravel Facebook's promise of the metaverse. As in Silicon Valley's history, there are these promises and narratives that turn out to be fake, PR or worse. The 'metaverse' appears to just be another fable of how the rich get richer.
However insiders and some analysts believe Facebook is spending about $5 billion per year on metaverse-related development, according to CNBC. The Metaverse is a dangerous concept, because it becomes Silicon Valley's next scam promise. It’s either the next evolution of the internet or the latest BigTech buzzword to get investors excited over some nebulous innovation that may not even come to pass over the next decade. Thanks, but we've been waiting for VR to mature for a generation already.?