Above: Within's Supernatural on the Oculus store with nearly 10,000 user ratings
Fairly big bombshell just dropped:
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within [producer of the highly popular fitness app called Supernatural], potentially limiting the company’s push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals... John Newman, the deputy director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Competition, said the agency acted on the Within deal because Meta was “trying to buy its way to the top.” The company already owned a best-selling virtual reality fitness app, he said, but then chose to acquire Within’s Supernatural app “to buy market position.” He called the deal “an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief.”
Maybe I'm missing something, but Within's Supernatural is nowhere near "the top", even in the Quest 2's ecosystem of some 10-12 million headsets. With nearly 10,000 user ratings in the Oculus store, Supernatural likely has usage in the six figures.
That's not nothing, but claiming that's "the top" misses the big picture: Meta is currently losing the platform war on its own platform. Compare Supernatural's usage with numbers announced by the metaverse platform Rec Room last April:
Above: Rec Room on the Oculus store with nearly 20,000 user ratings
Just got this pretty amazing breaking news note from Shawn Whiting, Head of Influencers & Partners at Rec Room:
"Shortly after the [2021] holidays, Rec Room crested 3 million VR monthly active users... A majority of those VR monthly active users are Quest 2."
This is quite an impressive milestone for metaverse platform growth -- and more key, for usage of the Quest 2 headset on metaverse platforms. Quest 2 has an install base over 10 million, so at least 15% of that (i.e. 1.5 million) are active on Rec Room...
[Meta] itself reported it only has (as of February 2022)... 300,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds and Venues. So it trails far beyond Rec Room in total users, and users of its own Quest 2 headset.
Both Meta and the FTC seem to miss the reason why Roblox and Fortnite Creative are among the most popular platforms on the Internet, and why Rec Room and VRChat are so popular on Oculus: A metaverse platform with an engaged community is a flywheel for creating content at a momentum that far outstrips anything a professional studio can produce.
Or to put it in specific terms related to Supernatural and other fitness games:
The Rec Room creative community can fairly quickly recreate at a "good enough" level any experience Within might create with Supernatural. (Just as a Rec Room creator built a variation of Beat Saber on the platform -- back in 2019.)
This isn't to say the FTC is wrong to investigate Meta's VR/metaverse efforts, far from it. (Its draconian commission rates for developers sure seems like a better target to me.) But consider how Meta bought the developer of Beat Saber in 2019, and since then, user concurrency (on Steam at least) has remained in the low four figures. So targeting the purchase of a fitness app (that's only a fitness app) seems to miss the virtual forest for the trees.
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