Facebook recently announced that the company wants to be a metaverse business that could eventually lead to the next frontier for prosperous consumer businesses. The battle of Apple with Epic may subsequently shape the accessibility of this world.
- Starting from June 2020, the time spent on gaming rose by 39%, according to the information given by Statista.
- This year, people’s investment and interest in technology related to augmenting and virtual reality has soared.
In 1981, Microsoft was able to send its MS-DOS operating system to the world. By 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented Wide Web. Because of the combination of these inventions, including the significant drop in the price of computers, the working world has shifted online during the 1990s. It has allowed Mark Zuckerberg to digitize the social life of people by creating Facebook in 2004. By the year 2007, Apple allowed all of this to get into the people’s pockets by inventing the iPhone.
Nowadays, these are the three companies included in the top six businesses that are most valuable in the world. The newest innovation of Facebook is to make the industry evolve into a metaverse institution. In the previews of Zuckerberg’s social reality networking app called Horizon, he has shown people’s avatars playing and working with each other in a virtually simplistic environment.
However, it may appear, Zuckerberg is still planning for something far more complex than the initial view indicated by Horizon. In an interview with Casey Newton on the news website, The Verge, Zuckerberg declared that they got inspired by past Amazon Studios strategist and ventured capitalist Matthew Ball. He has outlined a metaverse that is “persistent and never pauses or resets” as it does not have a cap for the number of users.
He has also written that it needs to become a functioning economy wherein creators can build and sell their products. More importantly, it needs to offer “unprecedented interoperability of data assets and content” that is similar to the platform of Roblox. It means that you can have digital assets transferred seamlessly all over the platform, unlike the existing situation where Google, Facebook, and Amazon use the same technologies but don’t have a design that will allow them to transition into each other.
An example of this is what Fortnite is already offering. It started as a first-person open-world shooter. The environment produced by Epic Games is one of the few spaces where games can wear both DC and Marvel characters’ outfits. It can be unthinkable to do this in any Hollywood property, as Disney has an iron grip on its intellectual property with Marvel. Across all major gaming platforms, users can even interact on Xbox, PC, Nintendo, PlayStation, iOS, or Android, making it a significant step to “interoperability that the Ball called for.
The company that is pushing the hardest to allow Metaverse to become a reality is Epic. Sweeney may have created the online shooter game called Fortnite last 2017. However, since that time, it has turned into something more similar to a social space wherein users share and create content.
The vital aspect that the Metaverse has is that it allows users to create for themselves. This has been what Epic Games has allowed through Unreal, its gaming engine. Here, anyone can get a free license. When Epic had Twinmotion acquired last 2019, it allowed users to create designs online without knowing how to do coding. Now, because of cryptocurrencies, Facebook has begun to invest in its Libra coin, making it possible to visualize a creator economy that is decentralized in the universe of virtual reality.
Retail stores in the high-street have struggled to keep pace with the shift of the consumers online. Eventually, in the future, the same may happen to companies that cannot allow their products to be compatible with the Metaverse.
The Entain (ENT) gambling group jumped on board as it announced that they would launch a VR sports bar and use the virtual reality Oculus Quest 2 headsets that Facebook owns. According to Rob Wood, the chief financial officer, VR is coming, and it will be massive. They are investing £100m in this innovation because they need to keep pace with the changes in consumer trends and technologies.
Investors can check out fashion brands like Prada and Farfetch, who became partners with Snapchat to create a tool in augmented reality that lets users use the app to try clothes on using the app. Roundhill Investments has also launched a metaverse ETF to allow investors to have exposure to companies in hardware like NVDA (Nvidia), designers of game engines like Unity, and content hosts such as Snapchat. Epic Games is the catalyst of the metaverse explosion but is unlisted as of the moment. Despite that, because of its growth, it is clear that it requires so much capital as it acquired $1 billion in its fundraising last April 2021.
The fundraising had an ambitiously headlined press release that announced the “$1 Billion Round for the Support of Epic’s Long-Term Vision into the Metaverse.” If it wants to achieve this ambition, there will be a point when it needs an IPO. However, if you believe in the dream of Tim Sweeney to have a democratized metaverse, it may take some time to get significant profits. As companies like Entain run on betting chains like Coral and Ladbrokes to get into this sector, Epic (with a valuation of $29 billion last April), including other idealists, would have to be quick if they want their vision of the Metaverse to become alive and protect this vision once the internet goes to the next stage.
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Get into the world of decentralized finance with Metaverse.
The Decentralized Exchange on the Binance Smart Chain called Metaverse is an improved version of PancakeSwap and Uniswap. We have been building state-of-the-art open-source apps, so you can access the era of the Metaverse and provide contributions to the world of decentralized finance.
