Image source: Visual China
A few days ago, a friend complained that as long as it is still using Neil Stephenson and his "Avalanche" as the beginning, and then introduce readers to metaverse and Avatar what metaverse articles are, take it and check it again.
This friend said that he was almost suffering from "meta-universe PTSD", and he had similar symptoms, I am afraid that there are a group of investors. "I am brainwashed by the metaverse every day, and my brain hurts." One investor complained.
For investors who do not focus on this field, seeing the three words of the meta-universe every day does have some headaches. And those investors who focus on related fields, from the beginning of the battle of wits and courage in March last year to the present, have long been refined.
Flipping through all the meta-universe-related articles and research reports on the market, almost all of them clearly stated that roblox was listed last March, which opened the prelude to the investment boom in meta-universe.
"Are you still looking at the Metaverse Project?"
A whole year later, when I threw this question to the investors who were active in the major metaversum exchange conferences last year, some people directly indicated that they had stopped watching, and the remaining investors who were more euphemistic were skilled in using nonsense to reply: it should be seen.
Roblox listing, byte acquisition of Pico, Facebook renamed Meta, metacosm became the hottest term in the capital market this year, but then experienced Roblox's closure of China's service area business, and Facebook suffered a sharp decline in stock prices, not only the decline in media exposure, but also investors said that they did not look at the meta-universe project, and only the big manufacturers and head companies in the market were still holding high the banner of the meta-universe.
Although many investors like to use the Gartner technology curve to explain the ups and downs of the metaverse this year, investment Montić still tries to find an answer: is the metacosm the next Internet form or another typical Chinese outlet?
The wind chaser
Previously, the popularity of Clubhouse allowed capital to see new opportunities in the social field, Tencent, NetEase and other major manufacturers have invested in Genvid, Imvu, paving the way for the arrival of the meta-universe, and Roblox's listing has completely detonated the market.
Roblox official website
How hot is the metaverse?
A game media peer told Investment Montinch that before and after the listing of Roblox in the first half of last year, there was a small outbreak of products and news, and at the end of the year, ByteDance, Tencent, baidu got together to launch their own activities and products, and there were more reports. Flipping through the public account, you can find that after Facebook changed its name to Meta last year, a total of 15 metaverse manuscripts were published in November, almost at a rate of one article in two days.
The overwhelming publicity has created the "myth" of the metaverse, and this Internet information frantically touches people's cerebral cortex, constantly telling us that the metacosm is the most important concept to understand at present.
A senior practitioner of the game industry who started an independent business met no less than 50 investors before and after in the hottest stage of the metacosm. According to his recollection, if you don't mention the meta-universe, some investors will even show some impatience.
Investors who are grabbing the outlet are eager to break an hour into two hours, if the project does not have the three words of the meta-universe, I am afraid that even the time to sit down and drink a cup of coffee is particularly long, in the eyes of some investors, those projects with a low amount of "yuan" are not in the trend at all.
For entrepreneurs, there is also some helplessness, only mention that the meta-universe may have investors who are bright, if they say that they are doing an Internet project, they are basically not interested, and they feel that there is no opportunity.
If you are keen to participate in some meta-universe offline activities last year, you will find that nearly half of them are investors, and an investor friend Guy is not exempt from vulgarity, and he paid great attention to the meta-universe last year. He said that no matter what occasion you can hear investors discussing the metaverse with each other, they need to quickly establish their own cognition, and most institutions will also set up a relevant group to study what the metacosm is and how it should be laid out.
Subsequently, people, gods and ghosts are caught in the melee of trademark squatting in the meta-universe, and there is no shortage of Internet manufacturers participating in it, such as Tencent's "King Meta universe", "QQ meta-universe", Mihayou's "Mi universe" and Perfect World's "Perfect Meta universe".
At the center of the vortex, we did not expect that the companies in the All In Meta universe would suffer market capitalization Waterloo. Meta not only plunged 26.39% in one day, its market value evaporated by more than $251 billion, but its AR/VR division Reality Labs lost more than 10 billion. Roblox, known as the "first stock in the meta-universe", shrank its market value by about $50 billion after the release of the earnings report.
FOMO (Fear of missing out) is probably a common disease in the industry, afraid of missing out on the emergence of new outlets, new hot spots, whether in the past or now, has driven a lot of investment behavior, although everyone usually likes to flaunt non-consensus.
Chaos parallels
Is the Metacosm cold? It seems to be suddenly cold, but there are actually traces to follow.
In the first stage of the conceptual explosion, the metacosm can be said to grow completely barbarically. Grey industries always come with new outlets, such as some non-compliant companies issuing meta-universe virtual air coin projects, raising funds in the name of investment, or carrying out money laundering business in the form of NFT trading. There is also the use of the concept of metaversmonics to do pyramid schemes, forming a distribution model of layered distribution and "metaversmic believers" as the channel.
One of the hottest meta-universe platforms overseas, Decentraland has also launched a casino business. Of course, these are extreme cases, but there are still some compliance but unreliable things happening.
Investors are accurately aware that content building capabilities will be the core competitiveness of the metacosm, and the engine of creating content is the most important tool. So some people pinned the myth of achieving Chinese engine curve overtaking on the metacosm.
The game veteran mentioned earlier has lost count of how many investors he has explained to investors that it is very difficult to make a Metaversy Concept Engine of China's own at this stage, at least a few million lines of code is not to say that it can be replaced.
In his view, it is unrealistic for investors to take advantage of the heat of this wave of the universe to make engines such as Unreal (Unreal Engine) and Unity, which need to rely on accumulation and come to fruition.
For example, why is it that when the metacosm is mentioned, so many companies in China can rush up? In fact, it is also related to the development of our country's cloud industry, Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, fierce competition between each other, everyone is afraid of falling behind, desperately to engage in technology, so it is not a difficult thing for China to go to the cloud. On the other hand, in other countries where it is more difficult to get to the clouds, how can they talk about the metaverse? It's good to make the game, most of the time there are no curves at all.
Subsequently, everyone quickly recognized a fact: the metacosm has a threshold.
Simply split the metacosm into five major investment sectors, namely hardware portal (AR/VR devices and operating systems), back-end infrastructure (communication networks, computing algorithms), underlying architecture (blockchain, engine, digital twin), artificial intelligence (AIG data processing and decision-making), and content and scenarios (games, social networking).
It is these complex technologies and contents that constitute the complete body of the metaverse, and at present, almost only the big factories that have the strength to continue to enter the meta-universe are almost the only big factories, such as the recent launch of the meta-universe brand HoYoverse by Mihayou, the HTC unlocked meta-universe platform Viverse, and Tencent launched the super QQ show with Unreal Engine.
In contrast, startups have too many technical and resource bottlenecks that cannot be broken, and the ceiling is limited, which also leads to the rapid cold of the metaverse concept in VCs. According to Tianyan, from March to December 2021, there were a total of 763 newly established and existing meta-universe-related companies, an average of 76 per month. So far, only 27 companies have been established on average per month in 2022.
In addition, some companies focusing on the underlying technology of a certain meta-universe also have good financing results, such as VR all-in-one machine brand Pico last March to get 242 million B+ round of financing such as Cornerstone Capital and China Merchants Capital; AR/MR equipment developer Nreal got two financings last year, and obtained $100 million C round financing from NIO Capital, Yunfeng Fund and Hongtai Fund in September; VR social platform Oasis obtained Wuyuan Capital, Oasis Capital, etc. in March this year. BAI Capital raised $10 million in Series B funding.
Not to mention the meta-universe, if these potential head companies can become the core suppliers of new big factories or big factories in the future, then they can enjoy the next wave of technology dividends.
This has also led to a shift in capital to more popular segments such as virtual people, games, VR/AR, and social.
Wu Jian, an industry partner at Light Source Capital, said that companies that create top interactive content will be the most important component of the meta-universe ecology in the future, and among the head competitors, game companies are one of the important participants.
At the same time, games are also the most integrated and interactive areas, Roblox has been deeply rooted in overseas communities, has a large number of solid basic users in Europe and the United States, and has set a precedent for the concept of metaverse at home and abroad. However, due to the audience mismatch, localization is general, and there is no complete replacement in the same ecological niche, resulting in its performance in China is not satisfactory.
Similarly, Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard in January for $68.7 billion once again confirmed the content-centric development path of the metacosm. For the early PC players, they may have been exposed to the metaverse in the open world of World of Warcraft twenty years ago.
This is also why the outside world believes that Mihayou, Tencent, and NetEase will have a war in the meta-universe. However, since August last year, the number of domestic game versions has been tightened, and no new game versions have been delegated so far. There is even news that a new version number will not be issued in 2022, although the Game Working Committee of the Music and Digital Association said that there is no such news, but the panic caused by the market is still objective.
Last May, virtual artist AYAYI made her debut in Little Red Book. Then the virtual human concept began to become popular, and a virtual beauty artist who can catch demons, Liu Yexi, exploded on Douyin, gaining 8.64 million fans. Behind Liu Yexi is Chuangyi Technology, and its founder Xie Duosheng previously said in an interview that 50% of Liu Yexi's popularity is because of the popularity of the concept of the meta-universe.
Liu Yexi's official Weibo
AYAYI's first debut dynamic received 10w+ likes, but suffering from no good business monetization model, can only point the talent on the attributes of the goods, which also led to the gradual reduction of the number of likes, from thousands as a unit, to hundreds, as of now, AYAYI's latest dynamic likes are only 42. Liu Yexi's vibrato can always see the comments of "get can't get", but it makes the metaverse completely degenerate into the concept of "rotten street".
A higher degree of emulation is just an upgrade of the visual experience, and there is no need to be named a metaverse. However, Liu Yexi and AYAYI are still the conscience of the industry, and due to the speculation of the outlet, a group of outsourced shoddy virtual people have been spawned, which is constantly challenging the bottom line of the industry. Some even do a blunt face-changing video can be marked with a virtual person, a metaverse tag.
As far as social is concerned, there is no phenomenon-level product, when asked whether to recognize Soul as a meta-universe social platform, some investors said that although they and Soul's founders are still quite familiar, but objectively speaking, Soul does have a certain gap from the metaverse as we understand it now, and the metaverse should have some more subversive interaction methods in it.
At the very least, the end of the metaverse won't be "Hello, Even Mai sleeps?" ”
VR/AR, an industry that was once full of hype and bubbles, is being reborn with the help of the dirt of the metacosm.
Facebook (now renamed Meta) launched the Oculus Quest 2, a VR all-in-one, in September 2020, and it took more than a year to sell more than 10 million units. Device sales are low, and natural developers are reluctant to spend time developing high-quality VR applications. For example, "Half-Life: Alyx", which is known as the VR god work on Steam, has been sold between 2 million and 5 million since its launch in March 2020, and some players believe that if it is not on VR, sales will have already exceeded 10 million. Compared to the recent new "Eldon's Ring of Law", which sold more than 10 million in steam in its first week, the two are not on the same order of magnitude.
In addition, VR/AR-related policies and security issues have not been perfectly solved so far. In Horizon Worlds, a female user who spoke on Meta's open VR social platform, said that within 60 seconds of going online, her avatar was violated by 3 or 4 male avatars.
Rashomon of the Metacosm
All kinds of chaos have broken people's illusions, making the metaverse highly criticized, and the Spring Festival Gala sentence "Upside down dogs in the metaverse" has spit out a new height.
Guy told Investment Montiqi that from the perspective of investment, investing in the meta-universe is an exploration of the future, and many investors are also clearly aware that the meta-universe will fail, but if no one invests, many of the projects we expect it will be difficult to appear, because good ideas are also burned out of money. Neither the team nor the investors knew whether the idea would eventually become a product with a wide audience.
The Internet has created too many miracles, and everyone is thinking about whether the next miracle will appear in the metaverse. It is nothing more than that it is now in a voting stage, and the voting hopes to see which types of products appear more. Of course, in this process, there will be a lot of companies that will die, and finally they will be counted in the cost of trial and error, and no one will mention it again.
For entrepreneurs, it may not make sense for concepts to precede technology. As Wu Jian said, the technologies that triggered the next generation of the Internet are hidden in earlier stages, and under certain conditions, they cross the "singularity" of technology and detonate the demand for the next generation of Internet.
In the Web 1.0 and 2.0 eras, the development of the ultra-large scale integrated circuit industry on the popularity of PCs, fiber optic technology on the popularity of networking, have confirmed the spiral of technology and demand after crossing the "singularity".
Only by making a certain technical field to the extreme can we meaningfully join the metaverse in the future, otherwise it is a matter of standing still. Companies like Unreal Engine and Unity, for example, are naturally unavoidable players in exploring games and the next form of the Internet, with or without the concept of a metaverse.
For some idealists, the metacosm as a concrete representation of future utopias promised by capital just enough to satisfy their imagination of the ideal world. Ordinary users hope to feel a subversive social experience in the metaverse, feeding human spiritual needs with high-quality immersive content, as for whether the Tower of Babel of the Internet is called a metaverse, it really doesn't matter.
Back to the beginning of the question, is the metacosm the next form of the Internet or another typical Chinese outlet? In the face of the rolling support and criticism, I think everyone has their own answer in their hearts.