Metaverse: a new era for new generations
A few months ago, and before the craziness around the Metaverse we wrote a first article about it. Focused on defining and clarifying what was the meaning of this new buzz word, we went through how it was currently built and how it could be applied within the sport industry.
But with the recent events and the increasing number of companies that are jumping on it not to lose the momentum, we also wanted to take this opportunity to extend our thinking, go through the main concepts of the Metaverse, illustrating it with more or less recent use cases. This article is the second opus of our series dedicated to the Metaverse.
The Metaverse is today what the Internet was 25 years ago. It is a new era that is slowly opening up, marked by the rise of new generations and technologies. It is the start of a new economic revolution that will surely be applied in a lot of different industries with great promises of development that we can already see within the gaming industry.
Gaming as new social places
In many ways, the gaming industry has developed the key infrastructure of the metaverse. Technologies such as Epic Games' Unreal Engine are now underpinning the evolution of proto-metaverse environments, experiences and content in every industry.
A switch has happened in online gaming where it went from being a game with others to being with others in a game. Online games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Grand Theft Auto are great examples where players go to hang out, not just play.
Games aren't just for teenagers. Roblox is a massive multiplayer online game aimed at younger users. Roblox has 36.2 million users a day, 54 percent of them under the age of 13. What's more telling is that "455,000 of those young gamers purchased Robux, the platform's virtual currency—handing over real-world cash that totaled nearly $700 million in the first nine months of 2020."
Each month, Fortnite has tens of millions of monthly players across seven different platforms— it’s the first truly cross-platform game. In terms of total players, the last official figure was revealed in May 2020 at 350 million.
But for decades people have been playing video games and enjoying their free time in virtual worlds. Who remembers the game Second Life, released in 2003? Principle was as simple as that: allowing people to have a second life in an online virtual world, meeting other residents, socializing, participating in both individual and group activities, building, creating, shopping, and even trading virtual property and services with one another. It was 18 years ago and at this time, companies didn’t have the vision and all the business perspectives offered by the Internet.
Now, two decades later, with the rise of social networks, virtual interactions, and the change in consumption patterns, our entire society seems to be ready to invest in this concept, and especially the younger generations who were "born" with the internet. Kids growing up learning and socializing via games have that experience as part of life.
Live Performance in Game Worlds
The pandemic has fastened the expansion of our digital lives -- No one will be able to challenge us on this specific point. People are more and more shopping online, meeting online, enjoying their life online. And once again, Epic Games and Fortnite have shown amazing clarity. They expanded the Fortnite world beyond its core gaming purpose. With physical cultural institutions closed to the public, organisers of concerts, film screenings and art installations have used Fortnite's creative and social tools to connect with wider audiences. In May 2020, the Party Royale game mode was released, offering a space within Fortnite where players could hang out, interact and watch in-game concerts, films and DJ sets away from the main game.
The best example still remains Fortnite's Astronomical Travis Scott concert on April 24 2020 boasted 12.3 million concurrent viewers, trumping the previous record held by DJ Marshmello, who performed in February 2019 to 10 million viewers. In total, it garnered more than 27.7 million views across the five events that ran until 27 April 2020. A skyscraper-sized Scott teleported as he performed his most popular songs, as well as debuting a new song “The Scotts” with Kid Cudi. Reviewers have called the virtual concert “stunning” and “spectacular” as they celebrated the event with exclusive themed in-game items and a psychedelic trip through space. In Fortnite, players spent more than 3.2 billion hours in April 2020 alone (Fortnite, 2020) – game revenue for 2020 is expected to hit $5bn (Bloomberg).
And why should Epic stop here when they are on such a good way? In September 2020, they made another step forward by revealing their own soundstage in Los Angeles, where artists can record concerts that can be broadcasted to players in the Party Royale environment. Similar to StageCraft, the studio's backdrop is a huge LED wall that can be updated with graphics in real time, enabling the virtual performance to mimic a live event.
These kinds of activations spilled over to other games such as Minecraft, hosting not one but two DNB retro-looking raves or Roblox, inviting the artists Lil Nas X and Royal Blood.
Launch of Virtual Events
The Entertainment space is definitely adapting to new trends and generations, using the gaming area and new technologies to reach a broader audience. After raising $30 in June 2020, the firm Wave that builds virtual concert experiences for digital platforms, has capitalised on the desire for online gigs and powered a virtual performance from Canadian star The Weeknd on TikTok. Fans could comment on the app and the comments would appear in the live stream in real time. This performance attracted more than two million unique viewers. It is first interesting to notice that concerts and events are not anymore only promoted but also hosted on Social Media platforms. Secondly, people are more virtually attending events. And the engagement generated is colossal. Fans can interact, play, discuss together which is in fact what we are doing when attending such events in person.
Some of the biggest entertainment brands also tried new virtual experiences to promote content. In September 2020, HBO promoted its show Lovecraft Country with a companion series of social VR experiences, created in collaboration with British production studio The Mill. The Lovecraft Country: Sanctum experience was accessed via VR headsets. Within the virtual world, the participants were able to explore theatre performances, live concerts and art installations.
For viewers without access to VR tech, HBO hosted online live streams with influencers serving as guides and avatars – a secondary engagement strategy that will become more important as these sorts of experiences grow in popularity.
Bornt as “quarantine experiences”, these events have surely accelerated and triggered a little more the digital transition that the world is about to live in.
Virtual Event #1 | ‘Lovecraft Country: Sanctum’ | Social VR Experience ‘Garden of Eden’
Real-Time Shared Co-Creation
If we go further than the social dimension, real-time shared co-creation is surely one of the next big things too. Again coming from the gaming industry, it is mixing socialisation with creativity to let people be social creators in a community. Launched in July 2020 Cloud gaming service Google Stadia's Crayta brought multiple players to collaborate in real time. Previously, the time spent building game levels or outfits was a solitary activity. Crayta has made the process – from placing premade assets to complex actions such as coding original game architecture – a communal experience, with hands-on, in-the-moment teaching opportunities between players.
But what if we were talking about a broader experience? What if we were talking about collaborating on the new Fortnite or Roblox? To a certain extent, it is as if you were asked to build the future digital world in which you will be able to live and have fun. This has a name: web3. An internet-based system where decentralized applications run on the blockchain. “In web3, communities and companies are built from the bottom up. Ownership can be created and issued to people in the form of tokens. Almost anyone can invest and participate in these communities and protocols much earlier on. Ownership is distributed much more evenly and fairly than in traditional companies. Developers and others can help build these communities, apps, and protocols in exchange for ownership.” Nader Dabit wrote in his article “The New Creator Economy - DAOs, Community Ownership, and Cryptoeconomics”.
But enabling anyone to design, build and publish immersive, interoperable experiences and Metaverse items for others to consume, is not so easy to do.
“The moment you take your first step into the Metaverse, you'll immediately notice the passionate community of builders that are architecting the future of the internet right before your eyes. And they're not going at it alone—instead, they're leveraging the power of collaboration to move at a speed that would be impossible for any single creator.” These are the worlds of Adweek's Metaverse Marketing Podcast Episode 2 called: Collaboration and Co-Creation are Kings
In this episode, the CEO of Futures Intelligence Group, Cathy Hackl used her own story with Fabricant, a digital fashion house from Amsterdam fabricating digital couture and fashion experiences, to highlight the collaboration side of the metaverse and the new digital culture which is increasingly emerging: Gismart let musicians promote themselves and their work in Gismart's games through music integrations or walk-ons of lookalike characters. Balenciaga presented its fall 2021 collection in a closed gaming environment called “Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow,” created using Unreal Engine, Gillette collaborated with a graphic artist to launch a body-positivity campaign through the costume creation tools of Animal Crossing. All these projects are following the same process: collaboration. The Metaverse will be co co-created by the community that engaged with it. That is the thing. Epic Games is collaborating with Unity, Unity is collaborating with Facebook etc.
Virtual Worlds and Reality Technologies
Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented-Mixed reality (AR/MR) technologies are also acting as a gateway into proto-metaverse experiences. Obviously, we did not pass through the recent announcement of Facebook, now named Meta, whose main focus will be “to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.”
Since 2019, a division of Meta, Oculus is developing virtual reality (VR) headset, a standalone device that can run games and other software to provide people with immersive virtual experiences. The October 2020 release of Meta’s lightweight Oculus Quest 2 VR headset – which doesn't need to be tethered to a PC – looks set to bring VR closer to the mainstream.
The Quest 2 can now be used to explore the in-beta Horizon, a virtual world where you can interact with digital versions of your Facebook friends. For Mark Zuckerberg, these developments represent "major steps forward in building the next computing platform".
In his recent declaration, he said that “the Metaverse will bring enormous opportunity to individual creators and artists; to individuals who want to work and own homes far from today’s urban centers; and to people who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited. A realized Metaverse could be the next best thing to a working teleportation device”
Mark In The Metaverse
Of Course, Meta is not the only pretender to the development of this new world. Just days after Facebook’s rebranding, Microsoft brought Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, directly into Microsoft Teams, to combine the company’s mixed reality and HoloLens work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.
During his keynote talk at the Microsoft Ignite event, taking place virtually this week, CEO Satya Nadella described an emerging "Metaverse" of digital experiences that will sustain businesses in the new world of hybrid work. With big tech giants activating their research and work on the Metaverse, it is hard to think that it will forever stay close to the gaming and entertainment industry. If brands, games editors, developers, designers and players are collaborating all together to create immersive and digital experiences, the Metaverse could take on a whole new look, a lot more bigger. But in that case, will everyone succeed in collaborating in order to create only one new giant virtual world?
Avatars or Digital Clones
As explained in our NFT piece, we are moving to a Direct-To-Avatar economy whereby consumers and creatives are investing more in digital selves – personalized avatars through which they socialise and interact with others in virtual spaces. US avatar firm Genies is a pioneer, enabling anyone to create digital versions of themselves for use on social platforms and apps. Fashion brands have been quick to collaborate with the firm.
In summer 2020, Fox Sports used Unreal to add digital fans to empty stadiums for Major League Baseball events. The digital audience could be tailored to specific venues –dressed in home team colors, for example – and Fox is considering advertising opportunities: avatars could wear branded clothes or hold up brand-related signage, similar to how the Biden-Harris campaign created in-game yard signs for Animal Crossing players during the US election.
Let’s quickly jump into the past, and more precisely in 2004, when the company IMVU was founded. IMVU is an online Metaverse and social networking site where members use 3D avatars to meet new people, chat, create, and play games. In 2014, IMVU had approximately six million active players, and had the largest virtual goods catalog of more than 6 million items as of 2011. Nowadays, the company has more and more physical events hosted on their virtual worlds. Why? because brands and companies understood that a huge amount of people are now virtually represented. And more than just being represented with an avatar, people want them to be unique. This leads to buying your avatar some clothes, accessories, goods, etc to differentiate from others.
As the Metaverse develops, we see more and more opportunities for brands to market to, and provide services for virtual beings. Virtual goods and assets are becoming as valuable as their physical counterparts, expanding engagement and revenue touch points.
Evolution of Behaviors
It has been said many times, we know it, but all this is the consequence of a drastic change in our consumption patterns. As explained in Matthew Balls’s PART IX of ‘THE METAVERSE PRIMER’ “The most obvious behavioral change of the past year has been the increasing amount of time we spent online and in virtual worlds”.
For a long time spending some time on the internet and on virtual spaces has been seen as an anti-social activity. Nowadays the picture has completely changed, mainly because (or thanks to) of the Covid-19 hitting us over the past 2 years. More and more people are playing games such as Roblox, Fortnite, Animal Crossing; are consuming content on digital platforms; are attending virtual events/conferences/summits; are ordering food online etc. These moves are undoubtedly pushing the boundaries of what we can do online as a human being and it is reinforcing the desire of tech companies to further extend the field of possibilities within the metaverse.
If we come back to those who were born with the internet, it is hard to believe how much different they are from older generations (X or Y). A child borned mid 2000s is now around 15 to 18 and will not understand most of our consumption behavior and why we are using tools such as Snapchat or Instagram.
To quote Matthew Balls again: “Today’s generation of children express themselves, often learn, and constantly socialize through virtual worlds they can touch, change, and collaborate in. That’s not going to stop. “Virtual world native” generation will continue to mature. Most are still consumers, a few are creators, and almost none are business leaders. They will be. And their frames of reference will lead to transformative change.