Tips & Tricks for Negotiating The Metaverse
Weekly Q & A with the Doyenne of The Metaverse......Pooky Amsterdam
The Metaverse has arrived! And is arriving, and is on the way, and is being built, yet has some places which have existed for over 2 decades....but this is an entirely new phenomenon worthy of increases in share prices. The New Metaverse Days are here and you will be expected at any of 67 locations plus new ones which will add up to 138 live and in development all waiting for you! The charts in the photo are from the wonderful company headed up by the awesome Nic Mitham & Kelly Loter who run Metaversed Consulting They have been in this space for a very long time. So has Dubit, the sponsor of these photos, as you can see on the lower right hand side. Dubit has been around since 1999.
Q: There are so many Metaverses coming out, do you think they will all survive?
Right now there is so much activity in bringing metaverses to the market, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is the first time Massive Multi-Player Online Worlds have been explored. Indeed it is not, but perhaps the recent pandemic and the way we were all driven home by the Covid Effect has realized a greater ability to work collaboratively and from home. Zoom took the brunt of our time and faces, the Metaverse offers other ways to meet and enjoy shared virtual destinations using them both for business and pleasure.
There is such intense competition for users in this area right now though that Metaverses will have to offer increasing incentives for people to become real residents, or offer niche interests that no other Metaverse can. It is hoped that these Metaverses monetize their user base with monthly dues, currency exchange and the creation of virtual goods. It will not be easy to differentiate however as most of theses metaverse offer exactly the same things.
The question then becomes, how much bandwidth do people actually have for an investment of time and energy towards building a new digital home, new virtual relationships and spending time in new places? And learning a new user interface each time as well? Even if it is from the best location we have: The internet connection right in front of us.
Let's look at Facebook way back when they started. It has grown to include just about everyone in the world, but stock price growth is dependant on numbers growth and everyone who can be on Facebook is already on Facebook. After you max out your user base, where do you go? To Meta Horizons of course, but they enter this market not just against four places to knock out like MySpace, Google+, Orkut and Friendster, but many many more.
Mckinsey recently released a report on the Metaverse. As of 2022 investments into infrastructure supporting the Metaverse exceeded $120B in the first few months of 2022 alone. 95% of the polled executives believe that their industry will benefit from the Metaverse, while only 15% believe that the Metaverse will represent significant portions of their margin growth in the next five years. There are tremendous dollar investments which must be recouped. how will that be done?
Mckinsey categorizes the Metaverse into five different activities: Gaming, fitness, commerce, socializing and remote learning. And according to their data, 60% of surveyed consumers preferred to perform one of these activities virtually, e-commerce being the most lucrative. (I have always wanted to go the bank dressed as a furry, or elven princess). I guess I am not alone here, because Mckinsey predicts that the value of e-commerce in the Metaverse will settle between $2T and $2.6T by 2030. The only question is which Metaverses will take the lead? The ones with the most security i would think both in terms of data breaching and mining.
All in a Metaverse day, my friends, will this be the future? You wake up and go to Roblox, then Decentraland, then Fortnite. You will have lunch at your desk, but that isn't different from usual, maybe you will have lunch while you visit The Sandbox? Then onto Somnium Space, VRChat and Odyssey. After a quick dinner because you dont have much time, you can have fun in Epic Games New Metaverse in the making or Axie infinity or Cyrptovoxels or Spatials. Maybe you have an awesome computer rig and you can be several avatars in multiple metaverses at once! You can be in two or three or four places at once then. Something you really can not do on the Earthly plane!
That would take a lot of mental, as well as internet bandwidth, perhaps more than most people have. There will be some shakeout therefore of where users go, and that will depend on what value, both quantitative and qualitative people find for their time. Time being the new currency, and where you spend it. For younger age groups right now Roblox has 230M active users, Minecraft 165M (educators do use these places as virtual platforms for teaching and Unilever has an education effort going with Minecraft). Fortnite has 85M, Avakin Life 12.5. For older users there are Zepeto with 20M, IMVU at 7M, RecRoom with 5.5M and Second Life at 1M holding steady. Underneath those are at least 11 other virtual worlds with under a million or so active users. The first Metaverse to hit one billion members will be crowned King of The Virtual Playground, but it is too early to tell who will survive in these early days.
As more and more people become familiar with the term Metaverse, and want to take part in these exciting new places, what will determine stickiness becomes increasingly important. Will there be Pay 2 Stay? Does a Metaverse gift the new user with a virtual pet of their choice that needs tending to like a neopet of old that had to be fed and walked with alarming regularity? Is it the wardrobe of unbelievable fabulous clothing that you either make or wear, or make and wear that calls you back? Will it be a concert or lecture series you can sign up for that takes place at intervals you must be signed in to receive? Is it an opportunity to talk to an industry leader that you couldn't come within an arm's length of in real life, who is willing to take your private message within a virtual world? Or will it be one of a kind NFTs, with unlockable content that allows you to know something no one else does? Most often it is where you find friends and people you want to talk to again, minting those is always the greatest gift one can give oneself as the saying goes and also the most elusive thing to find.
If you have a question please email it to info@pookymedia.com with the subject line of Metaquette, and it will be answered.
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