Leni, aged 11, spent his Christmas money on clothes for his avatar rather than himself. He plays games within the platform Roblox, like Bedwars, and hangs out with his mates. He lives in both worlds now, the real one and the meta one. The difference is non-existent to him.
His father, Ben Hourahine, strategy partner at creative agency AnalogFolk: “Any children that are in your life, ask around and try to find one that isn’t already on Roblox. My son is pretty forceful with everyone who asks him: ‘It’s not a game, it’s a platform’.”
Roblox, at last report, had 43 million users a day.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg started the latest surge in virtual worlds: “The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.
“In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.”
The metaverse dominated the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and the February Super Bowl included metaverse themed spots from Salesforce and Meta.
“There is not and likely will not be one ‘the metaverse’. Each iteration of a Metaverse will have various ownership models and generate different value.”
MediaCom, Minsun Collier
Trademark applications are reportedly flooding in from big brands staking virtual claims. Among them, McDonald's plans a virtual restaurant featuring “actual and virtual goods" and operating a virtual restaurant featuring home delivery.
In building the internet, from the 1980s into the 1990s, the early winners were those selling shovels and gold panning equipment -- the servers and the software vendors.
Next came the businesses, with many rising fast and falling faster, before new media players, such as Google and Facebook, and retailers, such as Amazon, emerged and made it an art form. Now the internet is business as usual with online selling accelerated by the pandemic.
Staying with the internet comparison, what was then the World Wide Web (WWW) was a collection of individual bulletin boards which eventually became linked. The metaverse will probably develop in a similar way, with a series of virtual worlds, linked by on and off ramps.
Based on that scenario, Amazon Web Services is in a lead position to benefit by becoming an enabler with cloud services to host the metaverse.
If all this sounds futuristic, it isn’t. The metaverse isn’t new. Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.
It’s clear everyone wants a piece. Even when it’s not clear who has, or will have, the winning formula, it is attracting big money.
Meta (formerly Facebook) is tipping in $US10 billion, into the Facebook Reality Labs division, this year alone.
Microsoft is in the game, spending US$75 billion in January to buy online gaming giant Activision Blizzard, a spearhead for the metaverse. Forrester analysts: “What this means is that Microsoft is now holding an ever-increasing number of important cards in the developing metaverse: Back-end infrastructure, devices, and a rapidly growing experience platform.”
According to investment bank Jefferies, the metaverse doesn't exist yet but video gaming will
