Tips & Tricks for negotiating The Metaverse with................................Pooky Amsterdam
AltspaceVR is shuttering, Microsoft is shutting it down after its decade long run and approximately 10,000 will lose their jobs. Meta lost $700B in valuation after pumping a lot of money in this space, which in October, Wall Street called it a train wreck, yet Meta keeps pumping money into The Metaverse. And the US Military's metaverse firm Improbable is shutting down it's US defense arm. The Metaverse was supposed to be as ubiquitous as SmartPhones.....what happened?
There was a lot of Hype, FOMO and in the end there are just so many hours in a day for the adult end user to give to elective places to go. We aren't yet at the point where our Metaverse time rivals binge watching numbers. Unless there is an "Emily In Paris" watch-party in Spatial with Lily Collins in the audience, which would incentivize me to get some brand spanking new virtual clothes!
And Microsoft also owns Activision Blizzard which owns World of Warcraft, among other titles. I'd love to see Balenciaga there!
Over $150B was invested in The Metaverse in 2022. And according to the Mckinsey report just cited, The Metaverse could generate $4 - 5 Trillion by 2030. Optimism is still high. Linux is launching an Open Metaverse Foundation. And companies are still looking for the Killer app, or apps.....Can we find the place where the end users right to happiness does not interfere with profit-making?
Q: How Does The Metaverse survive this Hype Cycle?
Does anyone remember Blue Mars? It still has 3,000 users mainly from a university affiliation. There.com? It still runs a blog and more. Even in the 1990's there were a spate of massive Multiplayer Online Games that were virtually happening even before Second Life made its debut. And Second Life is still going strong, despite having closed its VR based Metaverse called Sansar back in 2020. PS, even though SL doesn't support Sansar anymore, there is a dedicated community of people who keep it alive, and according to this events page there are things happening all the time.
The Metaverse is Entertainment, what people get from it is what makes it tick. Here amazing people decided the enjoyment they got was important enough to keep the platform alive without any visible means of support!
That's impressive.
The Metaverse exists, maybe not in it's ultimate mixed-reality incarnation as we are still building it, but the concept has been with us for quite a while. There is a bit of "new toyness" of this hype cycle of Web.3 and NFT gazillionaires has everyone expecting the New Metaverse to take over, on the scale of Facebook. However nothing is Facebook, not even Facebook or Meta or Horizons which are all the same company. NFT's aren't even NFTs anymore......ask Porsche.
Not everyone is going to love the Metaverse, not everyone is going to love your Metaverse, but chances are there are a lot of people who have experience in The Metaverse that this current Hype Cycle left out because they were part of Web 2.0. The Metaverse needs time to develop, needs those with prior knowledge on what makes a great user experience to assist. Because we humans are still kind of v1.0, the same problems which closed down other worlds from inactivity are still with us today. What do we want The Metaverse to do for us? Can it get that job done and pass The MilkShake Test?
In these new worlds where the virtual and the physical are one, there are still all the old problems of; why business in the Metaverse is not yet tearing it up. So the question is: Are you giving the customer what they really want for their time? At this point it takes a bit of a leap, Magic or otherwise for someone/anyone to go into The Metaverse.
When it's as easy as turning on the TV, it will be more widely adopted. This is an entertainment option among many that competes for our time.
Does last year's $150B spend on The metaverse, mean your company's version of success is a fast ROI for the millions invested? If the measure of success is unique daily active users (DAU) and your Metaverse can't get more than 8,000 people in world at any one time but the expectation was 100,000 this week and 200,000 next week, perhaps the problem isn't with your Metaverse but the expectations for it. The goals don't seem to be to break even, but to have some presence using it as a medium for adverts, clothes, NFTs. So what you are offering the players in it besides? How do you keep this alive?
Use it as a media not a medium.
Who is going to invest the kind of money, marketing included to have a great place to play, relax, meet friends and have fun, without a guarantee? We have gone beyond the cool NFT if a blue-chip brand like Porsche can't come in and make a fortune selling them, where it's fans and wannabees can help design Porsches future in virtual worlds. That isn't good for The Metaverse? Posche should sponsor a Luxury Car Talk Show and broadcast it live: From Partyspace, Porsche Talk Live!
(AR, XR and Holographic co-reality will also become more a part of the day. As we spend a lot of time at the computer, taking augmentation with us will take us further, and get us up and outside. This might be the next wave to build on. It would be great to have an AR version of my Call of Duty Buddy as I walked down the street, a fleet of agreeable penguins or both.)
If you wanted to build a rocket ship to navigate the intergalactic gravitational superhighways, you would not need to learn how to build a plane like the Wright Brothers, but you would need to bone up on available rocket science technology to get you to that stop. It is the same with The Metaverse, the technology that builds Multi User Virtual Environments has been around for ages. What is new is our dashboard, or the VR headsets which we need to become fully immersed. And now there is blockchain, perhaps interoperability. While that technology and those price points still have to adjust to the market and human physiology, we can still enter The Metaverse. What makes us want to find all the joys of these new worlds?
The Metaverse could be a media platform, a place to watch media alone, or with company. It is Entertainment the same way we are entertained by watching streaming series except we are the content as well.
Cathy Hackl's amazing new What'sApp group pasted us this: 7,000 Crypto investors were asked what is the strongest Metaverse trend and just about 70% said Entertainment. This is why people keep there.com alive, why Second Life has a million MAU's after 20 years and why RecRoom, Spatial, Decentraland are places to go. Because it is Entertaining and Fun. It is all about providing entertainment to the end user, and that comes in many ways, that's our Milkshake Test, does the Metaverse experience we provide do the job of being fun and worthy of return?
The Metaverse is Entertainment, we are the media in it. Our adventures have to be part of the reward.
If you have a question email info@pookymedia.com with Metaquette in the subject and it will be answered.
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