Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is in… rough shape.
Nearly a year after its much ballyhooed rebrand, the company’s stock plummeted an eye watering 57 percent. CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost roughly $70 billion of his net worth, making him just the 20th richest man in the world (cue the world’s smallest violin). The financial strain also forced the company to slash budgets across its workforce and freeze new hiring—even ones that were already accepted.
Much of Meta’s woes can be pointed to grim financial outlooks across the entire tech industry and the world at large. However, it’s also a hurdle of their own making At a shareholders’ meeting in May, Zuckerberg made the surprising announcement that—despite sinking billions of dollars into the metaverse—the platform “isn’t really going to be a meaningful contributor to the business until at a minimum much later in this decade.” He added that profits aren’t expected to really take off until the 2030s at the earliest.
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Waiting a decade to turn a meaningful profit isn’t likely going to let investors sleep easy at night. Neither does it bode well for their public brand which has taken a lashing in the past year. It doesn’t help that, after getting bullied online because his avatar on Horizon Worlds, Meta’s de facto metaverse platform, looked like it was legless character from a PS1 game, he decided to roll out the red carpet and hype the announcement that the avatars now do indeed have legs actually—which resulted in him getting roasted even harder on the internet. (And even that declaration is running into pushback.)
Legs.
MetaIt’s easy to take delight in the schadenfreude of one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world taking L after L—especially when they’re attempting to create something that seems like a ludicrous pipe dream at best and an absolute waste of time, money, and resources at worst.
However, the truth is the metaverse is inevitable. Not only that but, in many ways, it’s already here—and has been here for decades.
Even Neal Stephenson, who first coined the term metaverse in his 1992 book Snow Crash to describe a fictional virtual reality world, has alluded to this. In a tweet from June, he said that when he first came up with the term, he didn’t conceive of the fact that a metaverse might not be through VR—but then came along a video game called Doom.
Stephenson touched on a key component of any successful metaverse that many folks within the web3 (a term used to describe the next evolution of the world wide web) and metaverse space tend to miss: video games—or even just gaming in general.
“It’s not so much that the metaverse is the future of games. The future of the metaverse is games,” Jon Radoff, the writer of the Building the Metaverse blog and founder of metaverse consulting firm Beamable, told The Daily Beast. “Games are going to be what the metaverse is all about.”
In fact, Radoff believes that the origins of the metaverse go back even further, to the creation of games like Dungeons & Dragons, saying that the popular tabletop game is actually one of the first metaverses. “It’s a space for social experience, storytelling, shared imagination, and everything that’s happened since then are technologies that break down spatial and temporal barriers for participation in that,” he said.
The most successful metaverses now like Roblox, Second Life, and Fortnite are based in video games. By co-opting the term with their rebrand, Meta might have inadvertently done themselves more harm than good. Rather than accepting the fact that there are already plenty of thriving metaverse platforms like Roblox and building off of those existing technologies, the company has instead backed itself into a corner where the only way to access their rendition of the metaverse is by purchasing an expensive and cumbersome piece of equipment.
Currently, the Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset retails at $400, while the recently announced Meta Quest Pro runs for a staggering $1,500. These are not exactly prices that someone who has zero experience or knowledge of VR platforms would likely want to purchase, especially when they could spend that money on something like a PS5 or a new phone. But those same products are the very foundation of Meta’s future if it ever hopes to have one. The company needs people to buy into them.
“The ergonomics of the technology are terrible,” Radoff said. He added that this is an issue with much of the recent wave of web3 trends from clunky blockchain and crypto platforms that are hard to use and learn for most new users. “The hardware itself, like the VR headset, is still pretty heavy. We’re not at a point where people are going to be wearing it all day long to do anything. They’re fun for a little bit at a time to play a game or show up for an experience. But we’re not at a point where this stuff is all going to fuse and integrate into our daily lives in the way that phones are.”
However, Radoff said that one of the things that Meta is doing right is that it’s recognizing and meeting most people where they are in terms of their comfort level with new technologies. For example, Horizon Worlds is getting a mobile app treatment. That could be a good way to introduce the company’s concept of the metaverse to a wider audience.
“Before these things get huge on VR headsets, there’s an opportunity to bring it to the masses using a mobile phone you already use,” Radoff explained. “That stuff maybe isn’t sexy enough to talk about, but I think it’s important in terms of executing a strategy to get these experiences in front of people on a global basis regardless of their ability to purchase a $1,500 device.”
For now, though, they can and should take a page out of the playbook for current successful metaverses like Roblox or Fortnite. These are platforms that have fostered communities filled with people with digital personas and identities that are just as important—if not more so—to the users as their own actual in-person identities. It’s only by creating fun and engaging environments that they were able to thrive, grow, and ultimately succeed.
Meta on the other hand seems to be taking a top down approach, trying to force unwanted and unasked for technology into the hands of the masses based on their deep pockets.
No matter the approach however, Zuckerberg and Meta were always in store for a Herculean task. They’re trying to create a product like the cellphone in much less time than it took for the cellphone to arrive in our pockets.
Radoff actually believes there’s something noble in these goals—especially when it comes to how Meta is willing to take big risks to develop potentially groundbreaking technology.
“Meta gets a lot of credit for taking on some super challenging problems,” Radoff said. Hardware like sunglasses-style AR/VR with a battery life akin to mobile phones aren’t exactly easy to build after all. “These are epicly complex undertakings,” he said. “I do think they deserve a little bit of credit for taking on that amount of technological risk. It just takes a lot of courage to do that.”
Time will ultimately tell the story of whether or not that courage actually bears fruit. For now, the fact remains that the metaverse has already been here for a while—and it’ll continue growing and developing into new and different ways for people to socialize and collaborate. It just might not be the one that Zuck has in mind.
