Wen 丨 Wang Xinxi
After announcing the company's name change to Meta, Facebook recently opened its VR world "Horizon Worlds" to North America. This is a very crucial step in Facebook's entry into the metaverse after changing its name.
"Horizon" is essentially an initial VR social platform created by Meta that allows people to create and interact in this metaverse, supporting 20 people online at the same time, although users need to use the Oculus Quest 2 headset to create characters.
As the industry knows, Horizon Worlds released a beta version in September 2019, and thousands of test players have held comedy shows and other activities on the platform, but at that time, many people complained that its effect was similar to the copycat version of a sandbox game like Minecraft.
Now, Facebook is trying to evolve it into a scalable multiplayer VR social platform — users log in to their Facebook account and go into Horizon Worlds to create a 3D avatar where they can build custom worlds and games.
In "Horizon", you can see multiple entrances to other worlds, and there are also guides to introduce you to various ways to play and play in the virtual world, including various mini-games such as aircraft combat and shooting.
The metacosm is a virtual space parallel to the real world but independent of the real world, which has a stronger sense of immersion, interactivity and ultra-low latency than the current Internet. If there is still a long way to go to realize such a vision, it is clear that Zachberg cannot wait.
There is a view that the metacosm is the next generation of physical Internet, the physical Internet is relative to the current Internet, the current Internet is the print Internet - a two-dimensional Internet built of graphic text and video content.
The physical Internet, with the help of VR and AR technology, is a more immersive three-dimensional virtual experience, in this virtual world, you can do more imaginative things - party, work, study, entertainment, shopping, creation, etc.
Judging by some reviews on Reddit, horizon Worlds has built this physical Internet — still crude and unsatisfactory in terms of professionalism — but overall, Meta shows people the prototype of metaverse social and gaming.
Meta is said to have introduced a $10 million creator fund in October in the hope of driving creators to create immersive experiences for the Metacosm.
Facebook's investment and urgency in the metaverse is unparalleled among the current Silicon Valley giants.
Zuckerberg is also very ambitious about the creation of metaverses, he said, "We hope that in the next decade, metaverses will cover 1 billion people, carry hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and provide jobs for millions of creators and developers." ”
Why is it that the most determined to embrace the metaverse is Meta?
The reason is that Facebook has always relied on ads to make money, but now this road is getting harder and harder.
Meta's third-quarter earnings report this year shows that the proportion of advertising business in total revenue has reached 97% (total revenue of $29.01 billion, advertising revenue of $28.28 billion). It is reported that after Apple revised its privacy policy, the ad-tech company Lotame has made an estimate that Facebook may lose about 12% of its revenue in the third and fourth quarters of this year.
Some insiders further pointed out that if Apple's privacy protection measures affect the Android camp, if a number of Android manufacturers also adopt Apple's similar approach, it will undoubtedly cause a further blow to the advertising revenue of Facebook's parent company Meta.
That is to say, if there is no new growth path, Facebook is likely to face the crisis of stagnant or even slippery growth in advertising revenue in the future.
When an Internet giant relies too much on advertising revenue, it is about to face a growth ceiling in the inherent traffic pool, and it is often very active to devote itself to the metacosm, such as domestic ByteDance.
Similar to Facebook, ByteDance is also a content traffic giant that mainly relies on advertising revenue.
According to the data disclosed by ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo in the middle of the year, ByteDance's revenue reached 236.6 billion yuan in 2020. According to a previous report by Bloomberg, its advertising revenue accounted for 77%. But in 2021, the growth of vibrato has also begun to slow down.
According to the Securities Times, on November 18, ByteDance's commercial products department held a full-staff meeting, at which it was disclosed that its domestic advertising revenue had stopped growing in the past six months. This is the first time this has happened in ByteDance's 7 years.
A common feature of content or social giants such as Facebook and ByteDance is that the volume is huge, the traffic advantage of the product matrix is obvious, the user stickiness and activity are high, but it mainly relies on advertising revenue. For example, many social apps such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which are owned by Meta, have high daily activity.
ByteDance's traffic products include today's headlines, vibrato, watermelon video, Face excitement camera, understand the car emperor and other product matrix, the advantage is also traffic.
For such giants, in the past, the Metcalfe effect formed by the snowball growth of C-end users was also accompanied by explosive growth in advertising revenue.
However, with the end of the demographic dividend period, the growth space of advertising revenue has also shrunk, accompanied by strong growth anxiety. According to Norwig's Law: Once a company's market share exceeds 50%, it can no longer double its market share.
One way to break this Norwig's law is to replicate another self in a new growth market, and migrate existing existing users to a new platform to form a new round of exponential growth.
In the past, Tencent from QQ to WeChat, ByteDance from toutiao, in fact, they copied themselves to complete a new round of growth and transformation - from QQ to WeChat, completed the transformation from PC social to mobile social, today's headlines to Vibrato, complete the transformation of graphics and text to video.
In the face of the trend outlet, they have realized the upgrading and transformation of new platform-level products, realized the migration of massive users, and contributed to their second growth curve.
The essence of this is to copy their own genes to recreate a new platform, migrate users to the past, thereby contributing to a new round of traffic agglomeration effect, driving a new round of advertising, games and e-commerce growth.
From the current point of view, in the three-dimensional virtual space of the metaverse, they have the hope of copying a new self and completing the upgrading and transformation of the platform.
In the past, in the mobile advertising market, Facebook has been grabbing the plate of advertising with Google, and then Tik Tok has quickly swept the world, and although they have differences in product form, they are all in the same pot - competitors in the digital advertising market.
As the growth of the global Internet slows down, the competitors of digital advertising plates are more and more numerous, and they are getting stronger and stronger, especially the rise of Tik Tok is a great threat to Facebook.
Therefore, among the five Silicon Valley giants of Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, Facebook is the most urgent and under the greatest pressure to find new sources of profit.
After all, Apple's soft and hard integration revenue plate is very stable, and the iPhone has no opponent in the smartphone market for the time being, so Apple is not in a hurry.
Microsoft Amazon in addition to the main business, cloud business constitutes their new growth curve, Amazon AWS needless to say, has been the boss of the cloud service market, and the development of Microsoft cloud services growth is quite fast, from the perspective of market share, Microsoft cloud services have developed to the Amazon cloud in a side-by-side situation.
In 2021, Microsoft's profit margins also reached their highest level in 20 years. Among them, high-margin server products and cloud services, including Azure, have the fastest growth. Therefore, Amazon and Microsoft are not in a hurry.
Google has a stable plate of Android mobile advertising, coupled with its cloud services are also growing at a high speed, providing it with a new growth momentum, so Google is not in a hurry.
And only Facebook, highly dependent on the digital advertising plate is facing a situation of not optimistic, it does not have the second largest source of growth revenue to drive growth, once the advertising revenue declines, it may be followed by a sharp decline in stock prices, the lack of other revenue sources faceboo is more anxious to need a new story representing the future.
The "metaverse" is to recreate a virtual world with a high sense of immersion, experience and interaction on the current Internet. The closest mode and entry point to this virtual world is social and VR. Therefore, today's meta-universe application released by Facebook, the Oculus helmet is the basic hardware threshold for people to experience.
Judging from ByteDance's large-scale acquisition of Pico, the largest manufacturer of DOMESTIC VR shipments, ByteDance is also more anxious and more attentive than Tencent in embracing the meta-universe.
The reason is also that, relatively speaking, Tencent's revenue is more stable and more diversified, advertising business is not Tencent's main business, Tencent's revenue has advertising, games, investment, cloud services and many other sectors, Tencent is not in a hurry to layout VR hardware business.
Therefore, the strategy of Facebook and ByteDance is actually looking for new profit exports, and they all want to build the VR business as the entrance to the meta-universe experience, form a new round of traffic growth effect, and create an ecosystem of software and hardware integration.
Can Facebook accomplish Google's unbidden business?
To some extent, using VR to create a virtual reality ecology is the unfinished business of Google Daydream (daydream).
As early as 2016, Google launched the VR platform Daydream, and provided a reference design for a VR headset and controller, which hopes to form a huge VR ecosystem through the linkage of smartphones, VR headsets and APP with VR functions, attracting billions of Android mobile phone users and a large number of APP developers to this new platform.
In fact, what Google imagined at that time was actually a meta-universe ecology with VR as the core hardware entrance.
Google's past "daydream" style of play still wants to take the original Android road - to recreate a VR version of the Android platform, that is, Google wants to do the underlying basic platform, sit on the ground to collect rent, with the help of mobile phone manufacturers and other partners to add bricks to the platform ecology.
At that time, Google pulled Xiaomi, HTC, Huawei and other mobile phone manufacturers to cooperate with this plan, for Google's "daydream" to do hardware and performance support, and let developers and entrepreneurs be responsible for the content link, Google also reconstructed YouTube from the bottom to produce VR videos; in addition, Google Street View, Play Store and Google Photos all took the lead in launching VR versions of the application.
Who knows that at the beginning, a group of mobile phone manufacturers for daydreaming, although verbal response, but the action of the embrace is not active, and Google in the VR hardware level lack of technology and application level also lack of control and technical leadership.
At the technical level, Facebook's Oculus is far ahead of Google, and at the application level, the number of applications on Google's Daydream platform is also unable to compete with Oculus, and mobile phone manufacturers also lack enthusiasm, and Google's "daydream" eventually became a daydream.
Judging from the current Facebook metaverse test, the essence of Facebook's metacosm is based on VR experience, the content is still social, game as the core gameplay scene, and its core is also inclined to create a soft and hard integration VR ecology.
However, it has learned the lesson of Google's daydream failure, no longer relying on mobile phone manufacturers and other partners to do hardware, but controlling the hardware link, both hardware and platform framework, software, taking the road of software and hardware integration.
In general, with the help of the macro concept packaging of the meta-universe and the company's name change, Zacker Burke's wave of marketing is actually very successful, first of all, the company's name-changing meta-universe occupies the commanding heights of the brand, and Facebook is also expected to use the social game scene of the meta-universe to drive VR product shipments.
For Facebook, the metacosm is a grand blueprint for diversified growth.
First of all, with the help of VR as a hardware entrance and new content gameplay, if it can drive a certain number of users in Facebook's social system to migrate to this new platform, and replace the flat mobile social experience with a higher-dimensional VR social experience, it will have a huge attraction to advertisers and is expected to open up new incremental space for advertising revenue.
The second is that the hardware business will grow significantly. After Facebook opened its test, some netizens pointed out sharply: "Without Quest 2, wouldn't you be unable to experience anything?" Behind this is actually Facebook's hardware growth strategy - using the social game scene of the metacosm to drive vr product shipments.
Again, paving the way for the e-commerce business, Facebook can't wait to sell goods in the meta-universe. According to media sources, there are internal documents showing that Meta plans to "directly sell more goods" through its many Apps starting next year, giving priority to investment in "on-site commerce and shopping", and the future Meta ecology combines Oculus's VR equipment to refer to the meta-universe social e-commerce ecology.
Therefore, if the meta-universe can help Facebook complete the goal of user migration, their advertising revenue volume will far exceed the current volume, and its revenue will also break the limitations of the single model of advertising, from e-commerce to VR platforms, forming a diversified revenue source pattern.
In this way, it is somewhat similar to Apple in terms of model - becoming a VR social ecology giant with integrated software and hardware.
After all, AR, VR, 5G, cloud computing, IoT, blockchain, artificial intelligence technology will be solved sooner or later, and how to create a benign governance ecology and operating rules, persuade users at all levels of B-end and C-end to join, this is the most difficult.
After all, from the perspective of the entire conceptual system of the metaverse, the economic and rule elements it introduces are much more complex than those of the mobile Internet, including the introduction of virtual currency, the establishment of the economic system, the labor and rule system that supports the metacosm, how to establish a set of effective governance policies, and so on.
The lesson of Google's daydream failure actually shows that the giants do VR ecological platforms, and the difficulty of creating the first entrance to the meta-universe is no less than the difficulty of making mobile operating systems in the mobile Internet era.
You have to make a virtualized platform, in addition to a large number of underlying technology layout, its premise is that a large number of content creators, developers, consumers, various types of B-end companies, sellers, intermediaries, etc. to join, which is the most difficult. In the end, it comes back to the old problem - it is not difficult to make a meta-universe product or platform, the difficulty is ecology.
However, relatively speaking, Facebook' VR products and the number of applications and the perfection of the underlying framework of the platform are more than Google's Daydream that year, and Facebook's odds of winning are greater than Google's, but from the perspective of Horizon Worlds' industry response, user expectations and its future evolution path, Facebook is still far from success.
Can Facebook accomplish Google's unfinished business? This may take time to give an answer.