This article appeared in:Walker AI

Tencent, netease, ByteDance, Facebook, and others have joined the fray. Even Soul, a social software program, calls itself a soul-based social metauniverse for Gen Z.

What is the metauniverse? Why is capital so crazy? It all started with the 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche.

Avalanche author Neil Stephenson envisions a three-dimensional digital space that is intimately connected to society. This space is parallel to the real world, and simply by putting on a headset and eyepiece, finding a terminal, you can connect into a three-dimensional reality simulated by a computer. Here, everyone can have an avatar, through which you can define your avatar, chat, fight, make friends, and spend your income as you please.

This virtual three-dimensional reality is the prototype of the Metaverse.

In 2018, the movie Ready Player One brought the meta-universe concept to the big screen. This time, the metauniverse has a different name — oasis.

This is the “oasis” world, where the only limit is your own imagination. This is the “oasis” world, where the only limit is your own imagination.

The oasis is born out of and independent of the real world. It has its own logic of operation, some in reality, oasis; What is impossible in reality can happen in the oasis. If you want, you can be Gundam, King Kong, chucky, dance with the joker, fight with Chunli, and climb Mount Everest with Batman. Even if in real life, you are a complete loser, in the oasis, you also have the chance to become a young hero, fresh clothes angry horse, a day to see all the prosperity of Chang ‘an.

The meta-universe gives players infinite possibilities, which may be the charm of the meta-universe, and also the reason why the meta-universe attracts the masters of countless capital circles to enter the game. As Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki once said, “Metaverse is something that sci-fi writers and futurists have been dreaming up for over 30 years. Now, with the increasing availability of computing power devices and bandwidth, the time is ripe for Metaverse.

Baszucki sees the metauniverse as an online space where we can work, play, and play. The metauniverse has eight key features: Identity, Friends, Immersiveness, Low Friction, Variety, Anywhere, Economy, Civility.

First, you need a virtual identity. You can be a rock star or a fashion model. You can socialize in the metauniverse, whether it’s connecting with existing friends or meeting new ones. It has to be so immersive that you can ignore the real world. Everything happens in the meta-universe at the same time. There is no delay. In addition, the world should have its own economic system to support its independent operation, and it must have its own civilization system to facilitate its continuous development.

While Roblox’s graphics aren’t as realistic as the real world’s oasis in Ready Player One, at first glance, it feels like a Lego sandbox. But Roblox gives users the freedom to use their imagination to design characters, build new game modes, create their own worlds or join others.

All of Roblox’s users can be the developers of the game, and this model of user-created games and strong interaction with the community ensures a steady growth of users, making Roblox difficult to replicate, and leading the capital industry to see the value of Roblox, or the meta-universe, in the future of the game.

In March 2020, sandbox gaming platform Roblox went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Roblox, the first company to put “metaverse” in its prospectus, opened at $45 on its first day of trading, up 54.4 per cent on the day and pushing its market capitalisation above $40bn.

In April 2021, Fortnite developer Epic Games announced that it had raised a whopping $1 billion in funding for the development of a meta-universe.

Like Roblox, Fortnite has a meta-cosmic bent, but this game is more entertaining. In Fortnite, players have the freedom to rebuild the game, defend the fortress world as a Marvel superhero, listen to a virtual concert by Travis Scott, watch Nolan’s Inception… Take Travis Scott’s virtual concert, an immersive online performance of approximately 10 minutes that attracted more than 12 million simultaneous players across Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the United States. The concert’s constantly changing singing venues, cool game effects, and more than 10 million audience are not comparable to any offline concert.

It’s worth noting that Tencent entered into a strategic partnership with Roblox back in 2019, participated in Roblox’s $150 million Series G funding round in February 2020, and has a 40% stake in Epic Games. Tencent is also behind sandbox games such as Islan And Lego Infinity. This shows Tencent’s determination to win this metacosmic battle.

In addition to Tencent, major companies such as netease, Lillis and Bytedance are also speeding up the layout of the metauniverse. Netease’s Beaver Plan, Lilith’s Da Vinci UGC platform, Bytedance’s investment in The World Reboot… It shows that Daco attaches great importance to the metauniverse. The maturation of VR, AR, 5G, cloud computing, blockchain and other technologies has made the metauniverse, a crazy, fuzzy concept that exists in science fiction, possible.

Metauniverses do happen, but they are too far away to be built by one mega-company on its own. Rather, they need to be explored by more players and by countless content creators. Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, once said, “Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.” We expect metauniverses.

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