Mapping the Metaverse
Today we're digging into the trends leading up to metaverse-like adaption of gaming experiences
Ten years ago I ran community-modded games on Runescape. I went through hurdles to get my community set up, including learning how to code in notepad, learning how to port-forward, and eventually how to deploy and manage hardware.
The barriers to entry to creating amazing 3d experiences are becoming lower than ever. ML will be able to start generating previously expensive art assets, and Unreal Engine is seriously blending the barriers between reality and the virtual world, ~4.5B people are connected to the internet, and coding education is widely accessible.
Modding has gone mainstream with platforms like Roblox paying out millions of dollars to creators every month and automating the flow of creating user-generated games. At the same time, we have unique innovations happening around game streaming with xCloud and Stadia, platforms like Discord finally bridging the social platform divide, and companies like Epic building cross-platform social graphs into their games.
So where does this lead us, and when?
The emergence of the metaverse will look a lot like web 2.0: Experience Browsers, Bridge Platforms, and Destinations
Experience Browsers:
With device and content proliferation increasing, so does the need to simplify how we consume experiences.
I suspect we’ll see xCloud and Stadia emerge as the browsers for the increasing amount of user-generated gaming experiences. Windows and Android will continue to be the leaders for competitive gaming as competitive gamers don’t mind the download to let them express skill in a way that removes lag as much as possible.
Platform Bridges:
There are enough gamers in the world to create massive gaming-focused platforms that become massive businesses. Twitch and Discord are great examples of this. These platforms emerge on the fact that they are great at connecting people to experiences, each other, and content they love regardless of the platform the content is played or consumed on. They make it feel like you are connected through a common layer.
Destinations:
I suspect we will end up with hundreds of thousands if not millions of destinations. Creating a social gaming experience will be as easy as creating a TikTok. You will play in some competitive destinations, in the same way you play Soccer or Football today, and some users will spend most of their time there. But the majority of time will be spent inside social destinations, and occasionally we’ll go for deeply immersive pieces of interactive entertainment the same way we go see a movie today.
Instead of there being one platform that becomes the engine you use to create the metaverse, and one platform you use to discover experiences in the metaverse, I think there will be one for each type of player, and the types of players will continue to evolve in the same way the internet has continued to be unbundled over the years.
We’ll start with platforms that are great for building 3 types of destinations:
General-purpose/social destinations (Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite — think about it as the way we spend time on Snapchat, Facebook or Instagram today)
https://medal.tv/clips/25960485/FvPBsSAFF4jFSpecialized Destinations (Unreal Engine, Unity) — great for building interactive entertainment (think about it like the way we go see a movie today).
Competitive destinations (No clear contender yet for the main platform yet - but it’s why I suspect Epic bought Psyonix — think about these like the way we play sports today). These platforms focus very heavily on the competitive aspects of gaming, will generally be lower poly, and be optimized to run on every device, but close to the metal and not via cloud game streaming. Rocket League, CS:GO, Valorant, and League of Legends are great examples today.
These destinations will continue to be unbundled as the users’ needs continue to evolve in the same way that happened on the web. Eventually leading to hundreds of different bridge platforms for all sorts of different types of digital destinations.
The growth will be driven by social inflection points
Experience Browsers, Bridge Platforms, and Destinations will all grow around the releases of new experiences as the main inflection point for adoption. The first big game streaming platform will be the platform that lets you access experiences that you weren’t able to access before on a certain device, in a way that doesn’t subtract sufficiently to make it unenjoyable.
As gaming starts to replace a lot of the time we spend on social platforms, revenues per user and enjoyment are higher than on traditional 2d social platforms, and we find more value connecting with people in 3d environments, the social platforms of today will be forced to adapt in the same way that cable companies had to adapt to building on-demand streaming services after consumers mass-adopted Netflix.
This shift will pull people who aren’t hardcore gamers today into the ecosystem, and that’s when I suspect it will truly start feeling like a metaverse.
Until next time!
Pim