Meta acquires three studios, can VR games gain for the dream metaverse?

21st Century Business Herald Reporter Zhu Weijing Intern Qiu Shuang reported from Shanghai

At the annual Connect conference held a few days ago, in addition to releasing the new VR headset Quest Pro, Facebook's parent company Meta also announced the acquisition of Armature, Camouflaj and Twisted Pixel three game developers.

Meta said the three studios are currently part of Meta's VR publisher, Oculus Studios, but did not disclose the future actions of these studios. But according to a press release from the Meta Connect event, the studios will be committed to "bringing ambitious and forward-thinking games to VR."

VR games, will be Meta's metaverse layout, gain geometry?

upsurge

Game industry analyst Zhang Shule pointed out in an interview with 21st Century Business Herald that Meta wants to build a complete meta-universe ecology, and what is most lacking at present is meta-universe content used with platforms and glasses.

He believes that the entire metaverse "playground" does not have many games and types to experience, and in the face of traditional video games with rich experience, its "playground" has insufficient customer retention capacity and user freshness, and its consumption frequency will be greatly reduced.

"The start of VR games can allow Meta, which has initially built an amusement park (platform) and entry method (glasses), to have amusement facilities that allow users to stay in the metaverse for a long time and immerse themselves in the experience." He said.

According to public information, Camouflaj was founded in 2011 and is the developer of the adventure game "Republique". The studio will bring its original PlayStation VR-exclusive Iron Man VR to the Quest 2 headset on November 3.

Armature Studio was founded in 2008 by a leading member of the Metroid Prime franchise and has worked on games such as Recore and Where the Heart Leads. Last year, game developers released Resident Evil 4 to Quest 2.

Another acquired company, Twisted Pixel, was owned by Microsoft and is best known for its Xbox games, including "The Gunstringer," "The Maw," and "Splosion Man."

The 21st Century Business Herald reporter combed and found that in recent years, Meta has acquired 17 game companies, of which 9 are VR studios. Since acquiring Beat Games, developer of Beat Saber, in November 2019, Meta acquired Asgard's Wrath developer Sanzaru Games in 2020, Ready At Dawn, the developer of Echo VR, and has acquired Onward developer since 2021 Downpour Interactive and Population One developer BigBox VR.

But given Meta's roughly 90 percent market share in the VR headset market, its aggressive acquisition strategy in just a few years has led critics to question whether Meta has had an anticompetitive impact on the VR software market.

In November 2021, Meta announced the acquisition of Within, the developer of the VR fitness game Supernatural. But a month after the announcement, the acquisition was halted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In July, the FTC said it had filed an antitrust lawsuit against Meta, accusing Meta and Zuckerberg of "planning to expand Meta's VR empire by illegally acquiring a dedicated fitness app that proves the value of VR to users."

Chasing dreams

"Software and services are the areas where I really want to make money." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent interview with The Verge that the pricing of the Quest Pro is only "capital preservation" in order to allow more people to experience the metaverse by purchasing hardware. In his view, Meta's goal is to get as many users as possible to join the metaverse so that a new social experience can be built.

Revenue from VR games also supports this enthusiasm. According to Meta, users have spent about $1.5 billion on games and apps in the Quest Store so far, and about one-third of the nearly 400 games have at least $1 million in revenue, and more than 30 games have earned more than $10 million, up from 22 in February 2022.

Among them, some of the blockbuster games have shown amazing gold-absorbing ability: "Sword and Witchcraft: Nomad" earned $1 million in two days, and "Resident Evil 4: VR" earned up to $2 million within 24 hours of release. THE RECENTLY RELEASED BONELAB SOLD ABOUT 25,000 COPIES IN ONE HOUR AND GROSSED $1 MILLION.

But is VR game revenue really helping the metaverse business as a whole? In February this year, Meta announced the results of its metaverse business for the first time in its financial report, including hardware, software and content related to AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality). According to Meta's Q2 2022 financial report, the business revenue was $452 million, a year-on-year increase of 48.2%, but the loss reached $2.802 billion.

Zuckerberg responded to the controversy in the aforementioned interview, saying that he should be patient with the metaverse: "I think if you want to build something on the scale of billions of people, [this thing] won't happen overnight." ”

However, according to statistics, Meta's stock price has fallen by more than 60% this year.

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