Disclaimer: This article is intended to convey more market information and does not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the views of the author and does not represent the official position of Mars Finance.
Editor: Remember to pay attention
Source: Vernacular Blockchain
On January 18, Microsoft announced its acquisition of game developer Activision Blizzard in an $68.7 billion "all-cash deal" that, upon completion, will become the world's third-largest game company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said that "we are investing heavily in world-class content, communities and the cloud to usher in a new era of gaming that puts players and creators first", and the official announcement also mentioned that the acquisition will accelerate the growth of Microsoft's gaming business and pave the way for the development of its meta-universe.
Blizzard, Microsoft's Meta universe admission ticket?
"Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category of entertainment on all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of the (Microsoft) Metacosm platform."
Indeed, for the current metaverse, the game is almost the best entry point, such as Sandbox, Decentraland, which has now become a blockbuster metaversmic game project, itself has been initially verified by this track players.
For those traditional Internet manufacturers and traditional game companies that want to layout, the "metaverse + game" is almost a track that cannot be ignored - as shown in the movie "Ready Player One", under the blessing of the metaverse, in the future, people only need to wear VR equipment to enter this prosperous virtual world that contrasts strongly with the real world.
In this way, players can not only get a completely realistic new game experience, but also experience different lives - have independent life, work and other forms of existence, and even build everyone's "second world" in it.
This also means that the "metaverse game" will change the carrier or form of the game, which can be described as a dimensionality reduction blow to the traditional experience form of the game (mobile phone, PC, etc.). But for now, everyone's exploration of the "metaverse + game" is blind, aiming to get the "ticket" of this competition as soon as possible through trial and error and groping.
The race to develop metaversal games requires endless money and time to smash manpower, including the subsequent development of the track to truly usher in the fast lane, which itself has higher requirements for VR hardware.
So for Microsoft, although it spent $68.7 billion in real money, it can acquire Blizzard, which has a rich game IP and a first-line game development team, so combined with its own hardware capabilities, then whether it continues to engage in traditional games or enters the metaverse, there are sufficient resources and will be a great help.
Last year, Microsoft actually said that the Xbox game platform will also join the "meta-universe" in the future, which also shows that Microsoft's ambition to cut from the game to the meta-universe track has a long history.
What the Metacosm means for the game track: the real player economy
I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized service can bring.
Vitalik Buterin, a "cyber addict," has been addicted to World of Warcraft for three consecutive years since 2007, until Blizzard unilaterally cancels the "life siphon" skill of his beloved warlock.
Later, even though Vitalik Buterin emailed several times and contacted Blizzard's engineers in the official forum to ask them to restore this skill, the response was always the same - it could not be restored.
Vitalik realized how weak it was for an ordinary player to be in front of game developers - those centralized game platforms are undoubtedly the absolute arbiters of many of its games, giving and taking, and weak players are helpless no matter how dissatisfied.
So he realized how terrible centralized services were, and since then he "completely abandoned the game world of Warcraft" and turned to Bitcoin, thus starting his legend in the decentralized world, and Activision Blizzard, which is now acquired by Microsoft, is the developer of this World of Warcraft game.
Grass snake gray line, going around, all the historical coincidences seem to be so dramatic, once the "Internet addicted teenager" Vitalik Buterin has now become the "V god" of the blockchain industry, and his experience also reflects the insurmountable diseases of traditional games.
Traditional centralized game service providers, out of their own interests or the natural design flaws of centralized servers, can hardly avoid the occurrence of things that erode the interests of ordinary gamers, such as data breaches, changing rules, closing accounts, freezing props and equipment, etc.
Once a similar unfathomable event occurs, the unquantifiable and estimated time and energy invested by ordinary gamers in a weak position in the game, including points, props, characters, etc., which can be assetized, almost all have the risk of zeroing.
"V God" is an ordinary gamer like us, compared to the game developer is a typical vulnerable group - the core mechanics of the game are still completely controlled by the game development team, the game planning and design team for the player to circle a clear boundary, and has the absolute right to speak, can take away the gamer to buy or get anything through the game.
From this point of view, as a new world based on blockchain and carrying technology ideals, the metacosm is also positive for one of the core meanings of the game track, even if the innovative restrictions on gameplay such as hardware are temporarily removed.
Game assets, props, and equipment are fully owned by the player and can be freely circulated, giving the gamer "sacrosanct ownership of game assets".
On this basis, the game and social networking are further combined through the metaverse, so as to create a fully on-chain world that is completely based on the chain and contains various asset interaction behaviors, of course, this is a more grandiose of the imagination space.
Gradually "Inner Volume" of the big factory "Meta-universe War"
In fact, long before the big acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft had announced the preliminary layout of the meta-universe at the end of last year - on November 2, 2021, Microsoft announced at the Ignite conference that it would launch a new Mesh for Microsoft Teams software, turning its Microsoft Teams into a "metacosm".
In short, it's incorporating Mesh, Microsoft's mixed reality platform, into Teams, a video conferencing tool that allows people in different geographic locations to collaborate and share holographic experiences, enabling more to join virtual meetings, send chats, collaborate on shared documents, and more.
This means that people can meet and work with colleagues from all over the world in the virtual Teams space (perhaps before long, people will be able to write Word and do PPT in the metaverse), completely breaking down the barriers of traditional forms of work such as geography.
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the end of June 2021 that the company's future plan is far more than social media, but to build a metacosm, and Zuckerberg even announced that he hopes to build Facebook into a metacosm company in the next 5 years or so.
In addition, although Apple has not yet disclosed its plans to enter the meta-universe, investors predict that it will launch VR/AR devices around next year, with a focus on games, communications, and content consumption.
The exploration of domestic manufacturers seems to have made more efforts in the virtual idol, and in the second anniversary party of "Peace Elite", Brilliance Chenyu was invited to hold a virtual concert, and the game 3D modeled the avatar of Brilliance Chenyu, restored the MV screen of his song "Bullfighting", and launched a series of player interaction methods.
There is also a rather stunning "Teresa Teresa" New Year's Eve party chorus - the virtual person Teresa Teresa using the most advanced technology synthesis appeared on the stage and sang with Zhou Shen.
In April 2021, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivered a GTC 2021 keynote speech, which was watched by more than 20 million people at the time, while Nvidia had 15 seconds of the self-eruption table in August through "virtual Huang Jen-hoon", and the rest of the time was played by Huang Jen-hoon himself.
Behind this, the 3D simulation and collaboration platform developed by NVIDIA omniverse is indispensable - RTX ray tracing technology scans Huang Jenxun, takes thousands of photos from various angles in the studio, and then post-compiles through 3D modeling, and the kitchen behind it is built by art creators on the Omniverse platform, and finally uses ai to combine the two to break the boundary between the real and the virtual.
"Facebook becomes Meta, Microsoft buys Blizzard, Apple vr/AR," the meta-universe vision of the big manufacturers is also becoming more and more inward-volume, the meta-universe has become the "place where the soldiers must fight" in the second half of the Internet giants, and we seem to have smelled the arrival of an inevitable war.
The battle of the meta-universe era of the giants may have begun.