By Ashoke Agarrwal
The world woke up to the Metaverse concept when Facebook Inc decided, in October 2021, to change its name to Meta Platforms Inc and announced a $10 billion bet on making the Metaverse a reality soon.
Zuckerberg’s gambit was an exercise in re-positioning.
However, he seemed to have instead raised both public expectations and internal strife.
A New York Times reporter, Kashmir Hill, spent many hours our days donning Oculus 2 and logged into Horizon Worlds, Facebook’s nascent Metaverse platform. She filed a report that broadly expressed disappointment.
A few days later, another New York Times article laid bare the internal strife in Meta over the Metaverse bet.
Zuckerberg seemed to have gone public with a concept too soon. Sooner than the concept itself was anywhere near being realised. And when his company was a clear laggard in the core technology race to the Metaverse. As a result, Zuckerberg faces the twin storms of falling revenues in his legacy business and cratering capital markets valuations.
In his book “The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionize Everything “, Matthew L Ball masterfully outlines this race.
He starts with a carefully crafted definition of the Metaverse that portends the technology challenge in its every word.
“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
Mr Ball believes that the Metaverse will change the world on a scale that the Internet has done. However, he clarifies that a fully realised Metaverse is still decades away.
The critical technology challenges that the builders of the Metaverse face are in the areas of:
:: Real-time 3D rendering,
:: Assuring synchronicity
:: And persistence and inter-operability
The leaders in the race to real-time 3D rendering are Epic Games and Unity Technologies. Their gaming engines – Unreal and Unity – are currently game developers’ favorite real-time rendering engines.
Further, Mr. Ball identifies three gaming platforms much closer to the proto-Metaverse concept than Meta Platform’s “Horizon Worlds”. These are Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite Creative.
Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite Creative are far ahead of Meta’s Horizon Worlds regarding the number of developers building virtual worlds on these platforms and the number of daily and monthly users. A key difference is the leading platforms do not require a VR set, while Horizon Worlds is accessible only through the Oculus 2. Mr. Ball does not think immersion through a VR set is a definitional feature of the Metaverse.
The leadership of Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite Creative is also evident in terms of the response of marketers and brands. A recent paper by McKinsey titled “Marketing in the Metaverse: An opportunity for innovation and experimentation.” lists some ongoing brand initiatives.
Gucci launched a Gucci World on Roblox to start forging a brand relationship with Gen Z. Epic Games of Fortnite, and Unreal fame has announced a partnership with Lego to build a virtual world for kids. Skateboarding retailer Vans has tasted success with a Vans World on Roblox, where visitors can explore skating skills with friends and collect points to spend on virtual sneakers, apparel and even custom-made skates. Last November, NASCAR partnered with Badimo, the developers of the popular Roblox game Jailbreak, to add a branded vehicle to the game for a ten-day event. In this nascent era of the Metaverse, marketing and brands need to focus their Metaverse initiatives on brand-building rather than sales. However, a decade or two down the road, the Metaverse will be an economy by itself, and marketers and brands will see it as a key market in terms of the following:
:: Direct-to-Avatar (DTA) sales of branded digital goods: Every brand and marketer will need to focus on creating digital goods as most people will live a parallel life as digital avatars and spend significant money on products and services for their avatars.
:: Virtual-To-Reality (VTR) and Reality-to-Virtual (RTV) commerce, as coupons earned in the real world, are exchanged for goods in the virtual world and vice-versa.
Brands and marketers who experiment with the emerging Metaverse today will be in pole position as the Metaverse matures and becomes a whole new market by itself.
Mr. Ball, in his book, outlines the use case in a world that is part of the mature Metaverse that captures the impact of the Metaverse in the world of education:
“Students from around the world will be able to strap into a virtual classroom, sit alongside their peers while making eye contact with their teacher, then shrink down to blood cells which travel through a human circulatory system, after which these previously 15-micrometre-tall students re-enlarge and dissect a virtual cat.”
In a section later, Mr. Ball envisages these students converging after class for a game of basketball and then test-driving a digital version of the latest car (designed to the smallest detail to be a digital version of the real-world model).
The impact of the Metaverse is going to be multi-dimensional and profound. However, the full realization is still a decade or two away. Despite that, it is imperative that every profession, including marketing, starts experimenting today to meet the opportunity and the challenge.
In conclusion, let me lay out a few pointers, as suggested by the McKinsey team, for brands and marketers as they begin to experiment with the proto-Metaverse:
:: Look for build engagement and brand presence rather than sales
:: Choose carefully within the existing platforms – Roblox, Fortnite, Decentraland, Minecraft and Horizon Worlds.
:: Create experiences.
:: Explore partnerships and collaborations
:: Proactively plan for risks to the brand
:: Rethink how you measure marketing success