I Love Tim Sweeney's Vision for the Metaverse -- But Don't Get How Apple & Google Are Such a Threat to It

As a good compare and contrast with Meta's questionable vision for the Metaverse, here's a long weekend read -- a Financial Times Q&A with Epic Games' Tim Sweeney. Who might disagree, but I totally think this is his nice way of saying "WTF is Meta even thinking?":

[Meta's vision is] in many ways broader than Epic’s. We see this as a central entertainment medium, and they see this as a medium that will connect everybody across distances for any purpose including work, and just hanging out chatting. And they talk a lot about open platform principles: they’re not building a Meta walled garden, they’re trying to contribute to standards and practices that lead towards an open metaverse. And I really like that vision that they’ve articulated. On the other hand, there’s all their actual existing business practices and all their actual existing businesses, where they run ads associated with your content feed and don’t revenue share that with the creators of the content that drove the engagement. And there is an ad economy that is completely controlled by them, which is not an open ad economy and has all the manifestations of an entirely closed ecosystem.

Wait, Mark said we're going to go into the Metaverse to do office work... right?

I’m not sure if that vision actually works, because it’s not very fun to sit around in 3D and just talk to people. It gets really awkward really fast. A bunch of guys can’t get together and just sit in a room for hours and have a conversation, right? You have to be shooting darts or playing billiards or shooting hoops or doing something together to break up the dull moments and keep you entertained for a long period of time. And that’s what this medium does. I think if you strip the entertainment aspect from it, you end up with a super creepy version of America Online chat rooms!

I might go a step further and suggest playing with building blocks while in the meeting, as a kind of focus-creating 3D doodler, like Sine Wave does in Breakroom. But yes, if it's not inherently fun, I doubt it will scale.

My one question (and hopefully I'll get to ask Sweeney myself sometime), is why so much concern over Apple and Google controlling the Metaverse? Here's Tim's case:

Epic [is] fighting Apple and Google currently over their smartphone practices. If these practices continue on smartphone, they’re not only going to dominate digital commerce and digital goods on smartphones, they’re ultimately going to dominate the metaverse and they’re going to dominate all physical commerce taking place in virtual and augmented reality.

They’ve said if you’re using an app to make purchases that entitle you to own digital things, then you must use their payment service. So the physical world and the virtual world merge. You’re going to go out and buy a physical product, and you’re going to be entitled to the virtual thing at the same time. You buy a pink Ferrari in the real world and you own it in the metaverse. Or, for example, the clothing or the toys you buy — pretty much anything will eventually have a digital twin. And if you looked at the terms structure, Apple and Google have created terms that will give them a stranglehold over the metaverse, unless there are major changes in the practices they’re allowed to get away with.

But there are many apps that don't pay a 30% cut to Apple , especially those for physical product sales and tangible services like an Uber ride. So what makes Tim think Apple will extend its commission to mixed reality sales on metaverse platforms, especially the massive ones which already own the customer relationship? Epic's own store already has nearly 200 million paying customers, and that's after just 3 years on the market.

And looking at it more broadly, a metaverse platform will never be a mobile-centric experience, since immersiveness works best on desktops/laptops and VR headsets. So isn't it better to treat mobile as a customer-creating loss leader and an interaction point for casual users (who tend to spend less anyway), while growing the platform's own marketplace outside Google and Apple (and Xbox and the Quest store etc.)?

So all that in mind, complaining about Apple and Google's threat to the Metaverse mainly seems like a way to complain about having to pay high commission fees that seems more elevated and visionary, Rather than... just complaining about high commission fees.

But Tim's been at this way longer than me so I'm sure I am missing something. Hopefully more soon!

Comments

[Martin K.]

Apple and Google (and Meta and Microsoft) are probably most interested in controlling the kind of future mobile smartglasses that have the potential to replace smartphones, tablets, laptop computers, desktop computers, TVs, e-book readers, smartwatches, and - why not? - also VR headsets, i.e. the holy grail of personal computing a.k.a. the ultimate display.

Metaverse apps as we understand them today are then just one kind of apps on those smartglasses among many others, and not necessarily the kind of apps that make most money nor the kind of apps where we spend most of our time.

What about a single Metaverse on such smartglasses? Unless Apple and Google can control that single Metaverse, it's probably in their interest that there are multiple competing metaverse apps - if there was only one relevant metaverse app then the owner of that metaverse app would be in a much stronger negotiating position with Apple and Google because they could threaten to limit support for Apple's or Google's smartglasses platform.

But I don't believe for a second that the world would be much better off with Meta or Microsoft running such a smartglasses platform instead of Apple or Google.

And, of course, it's unclear whether and when such smartglasses are technically and commercially feasible. My pet theory is that they are so far in the future that it is impossible to know which other products will compete with them. Maybe the future belongs to tiny projectors that are mounted to sun hats because in 20 years we will all wear sun hats even in-doors. Who knows?

[Luther Weymann]

Very niche markets: Goggles that very few people will wear on their faces to see virtual worlds just for a little while. Glasses people wear on their faces to interact with the “internet of all things” until the novelty wears off, and then they’ll wonder where they put those glasses. Things that tech companies tell us are the next big thing. Only to prove to us the tech companies live in their little geeky bubble and don’t really know the rest of us are not living in their geeky bubble. And the tiniest niche market compared to the worldwide population? Logging into a virtual world to do something you could do in real life is faster, easier, and with more textual feeling. The next big thing…pffff.

[Clara Seller]

From my vantage point, the obvious financial reality tidal wave that is coming for us will wash away the ability for most Americans to hide out in VR. Only those who are swallowing the breath-taking lies being fed to us could even conceive that our lives will allow us to live in this fantasy. The hand full of people who could emotionally afford this luxury won't need it. Their lives are already fantasy. The rest of us are going to be doggy-paddling to stay afloat and trying to save our humanity. The Metaverse is junk food for a starving world.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

All right, so I am biased.

But I'm totally siding with both Wagner & Mark here. Nothing against Epic, mind you; they dared to challenge the pricing structure of Apple/Google, and they have done so rightly — by risking to develop their own online store.

I'm quite the skeptic when it comes to the 'metaverse-in-your-smartglasses' thing. I can certainly foresee that such a gadget might enjoy some sales in a niche market. But I'd be hard-pressed to believe that, 20 or 30 years from now, we'll all be taking the subway or bus, sitting next to each other, each of us happily grabbing in the air while communicating — or playing! — to others via a 'metaverse'.

Then again, people said the same about smartphones, and look at how we use them today...