đź‘€ My journey of understanding the #Metaverse and making sense of it as a Millenial who never graduated to playing any #videogames other than #Mario in #1999.
🤯 ⚠️ How I was averse to the idea of living in the Metaverse…
Metaverse, the entire concept was strange to me. I have never even played a first-person POV game. Never used snap chat, and never played Pokemon go. Only used my cellphone for the basic and essential services. Hence when the Metaverse enthusiasts spoke about a spatial, virtual world with concurrent presence, I immediately snubbed the idea to be a niche that would never see the light of the regular consumer’s day.
How I was wrong as I did not have enough data points to understand what and how the current generation lives:
- 👩🏻‍💻On research, I realised that the current school student, teens, and most other working GenZ were born with phones in their hands. Their primary way of communicating, socialising, and community building happens through an app.
- ⏰People spend 2.5hours a day watching video content and a whopping 19 hours/week in 2021 compared to only 10 hours/ week in 2018. While Youtube is the largest platform for creation and consumption, newer more interactive and immersive platforms are on the rise.
- 🎮Gaming platforms are becoming the new social media platforms where there is an increasing trend of higher timeshare spent on them instead of streaming platforms. ( This was evident when Netflix’s CEO was scared of Roblox, and Fortnite and called them competition instead of Disney +)
- ✅Facebook bought into the idea of metaverse — while their version of the metaverse might not be the one that will win, this is a huge signal to the market. Recently, they have partnered with Solana to make Instagram a place where we can view NFTs — Great. Why should I download OpenSea, Coinbase, etc., to view a new NFT drop, while I am used to Instagram’s drops — beauty, fashion, new products, giveaways.
- 🚀How pandemic accelerated the use of interactive tech, democratised them and gave us a glimpse of how entrenched tech is in our lives. Even Tesco has created a virtual shopping experience that adds to their new online ordering/ digital business.
Metaverse Definition: IMHO:
There are many versions of the definition. Well, I am going to define it in the way I visualise the space.
Metaverse is all of the internet as we see it today but more interactive, spatial, and immersive. This doesn't mean you are a character in the new reality. You just will interact with it like you might playing FPPOV. People follow the same behaviour in the metaverse, web 3.0, as they did in web 2.0 — buying website names, and land in popular virtual worlds that can be sold later.
How I see Metaverse now — Few trends that I see emerging:
Dev / Creator economies: Only 6 developers for Roblox earned $328.7Mn in 2020 and $248.7Mn just in H1 2021. A big opportunity to create value over multiple platforms — ex: YouTube, notion, apple charging 30% of all app store revenues
Ads: $500Bn market disruption for Ads. In-platform ads that promote real-life physical items as well as ads for digital metaverse-oriented items, including games, accessories, experiences, and other products.
Social Commerce and Retail Experiences: It’s the intersection between e-commerce and social media with >$500Bn rev potential, where one could look at items with friends, talk to an influencer about the product, and digitally try out the good before purchasing
Digital Events: Events will be beyond the gaming world. Imagine a changed theatre, classroom, and sports experience. The global virtual event market is estimated to be $94 billion, of which revenues are likely to be split between the content and the platforms
Hardware: Imagine the evolution of phones. VR, AR, XR headsets, graphic chips, Data centres are just some of the high-tech hardware that is likely to play major roles in building an interactive and immersive metaverse with estimated market size of $300Bn
Finance: To seamlessly operate in the metaverse there is a need to easily convert Fiats to Digital currencies to commerce and investment activity, that will adopt the web.20 Fintech models
That's it for now. This is a developing story. I'll keep adding to this space. So maybe bookmark this link, and follow me.
Some top companies define the landscape — 🔜
Signals that more and more investors and companies are getting on the wagon: 🔜
M&A
