New bottles of old wine, or the beginning of a new era? Game Industry Annual Conference Hot Discussion "Metacosm"

Since the game is considered by the industry to be the initial entrance to the metaverse, at the 2021 game industry annual meeting held on December 14-16, the metacosm became a hot word, and Ao Ran, executive vice president and secretary general of the China Audiovisual and Digital Publishing Association, said at the scene that technological innovation is the most important driving force to support social development, and the premise of technological innovation is that participants need to have a rich imagination, but only VR, AR, holographic virtual people and other technologies will not form a real meta-universe world.

Since the beginning of this year, the metaverse has become an important topic for most conference occasions. When ordinary people are blindfolded by this emerging concept, giants such as Facebook, Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu have been rubbing their hands, and Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng and other technology giants have stood for it and regarded it as synonymous with the "ultimate form of the Internet". Since September, the concept of meta-universe has gradually led the performance of the secondary market of the entire media sector, following the second-tier game company Zhongqingbao's stock price has doubled by more than 4 times in the past 4 months, and recently Xuanya International has also won 4 consecutive boards due to the meta-universe concept; Baidu recently announced that it will release the meta-universe product "Xi'an" on December 27.

Is the metacosm a new bottle of old wine or the beginning of a new era? Industry insiders said that the metaverse is like a treasure chest, including VR/AR, AI, digital twins, blockchain, 5G and other technologies, but these are relatively independent fields, each has a large room for upgrading, in addition, most of the technologies are still in a state of point-like development, from "gathering points into a network" and truly becoming a "universe", there is still a very long distance.

Liu Guanbo, deputy general manager of Tianshen Entertainment, bluntly said that "there is no hot spot in the world, and the hot spot that everyone rubs must be the future development trend", which from the perspective of another hot spot at present - e-sports, believes that the metacosm is the ultimate form of e-sports, because the cloud e-sports model abandons the shortcomings of offline e-sports with low frequency and high cost, and at the same time can make up for the lack of low participation in online e-sports competitions and low commercialization of players.

Liu Guanbo said that virtual people are the first element of the metaverse, and the breakthroughs made in virtual human technology have made virtual people technically possible, thus making the old concept of metaverse a hot spot sought after by major companies around the world. Virtual people are also the direction of Tenjin Entertainment anchoring, compared with live broadcasting, virtual anchors have more advantages in terms of controllability, risk and cost.

Long Zhiyong, general manager of Alibaba's game division, mentioned at the meeting that from the perspective of the future trend of the entire metaverse, there are two points that are very important, but they are also the most difficult in terms of difficulty. One is immersion, and the other is the richness of the content. How to reduce the cost of content production is also an important step for the future development of the metaverse, and should focus on layout.

In addition, at the meeting, the two major market research companies Newzoo and Gamma Data jointly released the "Meta-Universe Global Development Report", which pointed out that the meta-universe will become the next stage of the game, and will integrate non-game experiences such as virtual concerts, virtual fashion shows, IP linkages, and product co-branding, driven by technology, consumer and game interaction. But in addition to the computing power and hardware issues that have been repeatedly mentioned at the technical level, the report lists a number of practical factors that hinder the realization of the metaverse as a virtual utopia, including the need for stronger and more comprehensive security assurances and review procedures for a large amount of UGC content, the modernization of intellectual property and copyright management, how to better protect personal privacy in the metaverse, and the lack of new standard protocols.

Written by: Nandu reporter Ye Lu