Remember the browser wars back in olden times (by which I mean 2017)? Massive companies competing to own the dominant platform for streaming content to the 2D web? Welcome to the metaverse wars:
This round includes an additional $200M strategic investment from Sony Group Corporation, which builds on the already close relationship between the two companies and reinforces their shared mission to advance the state of the art in technology, entertainment, and socially-connected online services. Other investment partners include Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital. Epic continues to have only a single class of common stock outstanding and CEO Tim Sweeney remains the controlling shareholder of the company.
“We are grateful to our new and existing investors who support our vision for Epic and the Metaverse. Their investment will help accelerate our work around building connected social experiences in Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys, while empowering game developers and creators with Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services and the Epic Games Store,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO and Founder, Epic Games.
Epic's vision for the metaverse, of course, is based on its proprietary 3D engine, Unreal. And this comes only a month after ROBLOX, built on the Unity engine, had a massive successful IPO. We are certain to see many more announcements like this in coming months, each a salvo in the battle to win market dominance for the metaverse -- even if the concept is still relatively pretty niche, and hasn't yet been clearly defined for a mass consumer audience. You can see that in Dean Takahashi's recent interview with Sweeney:
I asked Sweeney what the killer attraction of the metaverse would be. He said the killer feature is simply getting together with your friends to have great social experiences, like going outdoors for a walk. That’s more fun than just sitting on a couch and talking.
“In a game environment, you can constantly go back and forth between the real world stuff and what’s happening in-game and it’s constantly engaging and constantly messing up the conversation,” he said. “I think that’s a key ingredient. And I think this mechanic is essential. It’s been mechanically proven out in dozens of different genres of games. Every genre that we know is going to be represented.”
I'm actually not sure how many people would prefer going on a social experience in the metaverse as opposed to chatting on a couch -- or as they're more likely to do now, in between watching sportsball, playing a non-metaversey multiplayer game, or binge-watching a streaming series.
But then maybe that just hints at the next stage of the metaverse wars: The competition to define to a mainstream audience why they should even want a metaverse.
A real metaverse requires imagination from participants.
Those sofa-dwelling pod-people you describe in your penultimate paragraph show me the challenge that any company faces if it wants to reach a mass market: Too many shallow, passive consumers out there.
Until, as E.M. Forster put it so eloquently in a novella of the same name, The Machine Stops.
Posted by: Iggy 1.0 | Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 11:27 AM