Metaverse: The Future Social Network - Digital Explorers' Diary #62

Episode #62 - Metaverse: The Future Social Network

Welcome to the Digital Explorers’ Diary, a curated collection of thought-provoking topics about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.

Executive summary:

• What does Disney's investment in Epic Games mean: the future of social networks and media entertainment?
• A summary of Apple Vision Pro reviews, where the concession made by the tech giant on the headset finally makes sense.

Metaverse: The Future Social Network

Last week, Disney took a $1.5 billion stake in Epic Games. The studio is mainly known for its mega-hit, Fortnite, one of the most successful games of the last decade.

The game’s success numbers are mind-blowing: billions of hours played, ~75% of users have made in-game purchases and a record of 25 million daily active users. Fortnite is much more than a traditional game in its usual definition. It's a massive multiplayer universe with many game modes, relying heavily on user-generated content. It also hosted some of the most popular virtual events, for example, Travis Scott (12 million concurrent users) and Steve Aoki (7.7 million hours streamed).

Multiplayer. Virtual events. Permanent worlds. User-generated content. Does this sound familiar? Indeed, these are the defining components of a Metaverse. Naming aside, these platforms are gaining popularity over the last few years. In addition to Fortnite, we can name Roblox (70 million daily users), The Sandbox (40K daily users), RecRoom, and VRChat. The Metaverse is not dead; it's never been more alive, not as a monolith as the tech giants and science-fiction movies made us believe, but as multiple universes co-existing on many platforms.

The usage numbers are impressive, especially in GenZ, but there are still many technical challenges to reach “the” Metaverse.

• Most of these games are still limited in the number of concurrent players. When these games announce millions of concurrent users, these users are never in the same virtual space. They are split into multiple instances of the same world, each gathering a limited number of players.
• They are not interconnected and interoperable: one cannot transfer a character and its characteristics from one game to another; the game engines are different and not built to be compatible.
• Most of them are centralized, even if blockchain-based metaverses like The Sandbox or Decentraland have success.

But does it really matter? For the users, not really. They want to play games and build worlds together in a shared space, with customizable avatars to express themselves.

These virtual worlds growing success is a hint at the future of social networks. After Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok, what’s next? A few indicators:

• Creator Economy. Metaverses have this built-in, allowing anyone to create a new world, start events, create custom avatars…
• Brand presence. Many brands already have a presence in these Metaverses.
• Generation push. GenZ is the biggest market for these games.
• Technology progress. Generative Artificial Intelligence and progress in high-fidelity 3D rendering.

In this context, the investment of Disney makes perfect sense. Today, users want much more than a simple movie; they want to interact with it and share the experience with others. The future of film is in a virtual, permanent world where the story unfolds for everybody simultaneously while evolving through audience interactions!

For a deeper exploration of this topic, check the article I wrote last April, where I coined the term Meta-Movies, a blend between a Metaverse and a movie!

Are you curious to know more? Reach out here or on LinkedIn to brainstorm with me!

From the Podcast

Every week, I’m teaming up with Guillaume Brincin and Sébastien Spas on the Lost In Immersion podcast.

This week, we dive deep into the Apple Vision Pro reviews.

• The overall build quality and mixed-reality passthrough quality are on the good side, with impressive stability of the spatial tracking. The Apple ecosystem is seamless between devices and accounts, which was obvious.
• On the downside, the weight and pressure on the face are mentioned by everyone. The eyesight (the mirroring of the eyes on the outside screens) has received mixed reviews. And finally, a common comment for the testers is, “Do I really want to spend my days in it?”

In conclusion, Apple's concessions on the headset finally make sense. Their goal was to impress people when they would put the headset on. They wanted the mixed reality view to be as good as today’s technology allows users to understand what the future of Mixed Reality glasses could look like.
As usual, it's a master play from Apple.

We’ll get our hands on one very soon - stay tuned!

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Did this newsletter spark some ideas? There are a lot of ways we can work together:

• A quick-fire, 30-minute brainstorm with me - book it here!
• We can ideate, prototype, and build your experiences - contact us here!