Version 12: Disappointingly Not a Gamer
Version 12: Disappointingly Not a Gamer
Content as venture, Quest Pro gaming, moving beyond escapism, and another Swift vs. Kanye showdown
Welcome back to Threshold, your weekly guide to understanding "metaverse" ambitions from Big Tech and the path to commercial viability of AR/VR hardware for mainstream consumers. This week on Threshold, I want to be positive on what the world of content looks like for AR/VR, and what the next 5 years might look like for entrepreneurs and creators like me.
Don't Do Content, They Said
During a fancy party at E3 many years ago, a virtual reality director came up to me and said something to me I never forgot. He said, "Now, they just need to view our content." He meant that the burden was on they [the audience and the consumer], to get with the times and put on a VR headset or be left behind.
"Content" can be a dirty word. I can't imagine calling a novel or a film "content" even though they might deliver similar entertainment value as this newsletter or the latest YouTube video. I instead thought that as technologists, we have a responsibility to show audiences why they should be bothered with learning something new (which is always hard work!).
Around that time, on the cusp of finishing my graduate work, I was also given the advice to never pursue content as an entrepreneurial endeavor. It might have been good advice at the time, as not many content studios had sizable venture exits and the term "content creator" was only just beginning. I thought I might be too early to it all anyways, and that the medium best fit for my creative chops (story-driven virtual worlds, perhaps experienced via VR) wasn't a viable career, yet.
The media and venture landscape has changed considerably since then. Now, cutting-edge and successful content studios are on the forefront of acquisitions and exits. Tech giants like Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Unity, Epic Games, and Meta are all in the business of competing for attention. As AR/VR technologies advance, they will continue to be part of the consumer media diet, and companies will spend to acquire its talent.
Most venture success is timing, yet it's impossible to predict when things might be too early or too late. Like Goldilocks, I think the timing is just right now, which is why I co-founded a VR content studio called Throwback Studios. We’re focused on what VR technology offers now: casual and social play, along with a reoccuring reason to put on a headset.
Outlandish Dreams
Let's talk about video games. Last week, New York Times tech reviewer Brian X. Chen had the most distilled view of VR devices, including the upcoming Quest Pro. He wrote:
"Based on extensive testing of that device, along with the myriad competitors that came after, and the new Meta Quest Pro set for release next week, it seems safe to conclude that the tech has found its sweet spot. The headsets are wearable, immersive video game consoles. People should buy them for the same reasons they get PlayStations and Nintendos: to be entertained and to find brief escapes from the real world. Not to live out the outlandish dreams of tech leaders."
I love his practicality. If you're a versed gamer, then immersive games are pretty great! There are plenty of fun things to do while wearing one, but they mostly involve gaming from a first-person perspective. Controllers/hands let you do fun stuff like dodge bullets, plant interactive gardens, shoot robots/zombies, throw basketballs, solve puzzles, and generally play in a physics sandbox.
As a medium, VR is still young. Its gamer audience is comfortable with touch controllers and input schemes like "teleportation" to navigate spaces larger than a living room. It makes sense that developers would lean on control schemes of older consoles, which taught gamers to navigate large open 3D worlds using a joystick or a mouse+keyboard. But in VR, navigating this way becomes tedious.
Eventually, developers will adjust to smaller, micro-sized game environments. These games will rely less on huge, open environments, and more on complex, intimate ones. They will probably be social, have a sandbox physics component, and lift the simple delight that comes from knocking over a stack of blocks in VR. This will bring in a new market of gamers that were held back by previous barriers to VR headsets. I mostly want to build for those people.
Graphics probably won't matter as much. But a new clip from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 going viral reminded everyone what "indistinguishable from reality" can look like. And it looks good!
Chen wrote in summary of the upcoming Quest Pro:
"There’s a valuable lesson amid all the hype surrounding virtual (augmented, mixed, whatever-you-want-to-call-dorky-looking) goggles: We shouldn’t spend our dollars on a company’s hopes and promises for what a technology could become. We should buy these headsets for what they currently do. None of this — a first impression that the Quest Pro will be great for playing games and primarily be used for entertainment — is a bad thing. The fact that we can get visually stunning, immersive gaming in a lightweight, wireless headset means virtual reality has come a long way in less than a decade. For now, that’s the only reason to buy one of these."
Beyond Escapism
When it comes to macro consumer trends, I tend to side with Benedict Evans: a pretty smart and well-informed analyst on mobile adoption. He pointed out that even though technology can get better (the NES became a PS5) game console install adoption can remain significantly less than other technologies (say a TV or a smartphone).
Part of the problem here is that VR "feels" real and effective. For those that love it, they can't imagine why nobody else would feel the same way about it, and that it must play a role in the future of gaming/tech. On the other end, are analysts like Evans that point to the actual sales or usage data, reminding us that VR adoption is still currently niche.
This "feel faction" between the two types of consumer adopters (early and late) reminds us that every new technology needs to show us what it can uniquely do. Generative AI for example, makes the process of creative output easier and more fun.
Metaverse ambitions need to be anchored in more tangible fun, instead of a byzantine of advertisement spaces. Digital Trends wrote last week, "As long as Meta insists on constructing it from the top down for the purpose of extracting your money, the metaverse is always doomed to look more like the Mall of America than the buzzing cityscape we’re all pining for."
Dystopian entertainment like "Ready Player One," and the more recent Amazon show "The Peripheral" do little to convince those to jump into a virtual world who haven't already. Even Scott Smith, a showrunner for The Peripheral, said during an interview, "I definitely would [visit a VR world]. But I am so disappointingly not a gamer, so I apologize."
To go beyond escapism, VR and "metaverse" ambitions need to prove they can exist outside pure gaming contexts. Gaming is more popular than ever, but cinema would have never evolved if it didn't challenge the expectations of the silent films that audiences had come to expect.
I'm excited because AR/VR entertainment still has the space to challenge current expectations. I don't think we'll be swinging beat sabers and dodging slow motion bullets in headsets forever, and instead find more relaxing ways to hang out and experience a narrative or event together.
One way to do that: weird, digital concerts!
Swiftverse vs. Yecosystem
Are celebrity fanbases already metaverses? The Atlantic was on it last week, dissecting the recent Taylor Swift album drop and how to interpret her cross-platform marketing approach. The Atlantic wrote:
"A mass of people are gathering to participate in a large virtual world with direct ties to the real one. Talk about it enough, and it kind of starts to sound like another much-discussed concept: a metaverse."
If Swift launched her own 3D hangout space would we call it a metaverse? Maybe. The Atlantic interviews Second Life reporter James Au about his perspective. Although Au gets hung up on the 3D graphics definition, he said:
"People building metaverse platforms, most of them think it’s a technology question. But it’s really a community and culture question. That has to be built. Horizon World only has about 200,000 to 300,000 users. So Taylor Swift could launch a Fortnite island on her own, and she would have 100 million users within a month."
Of course, Swift's mortal enemy Kanye West also announced last week he was building his own product metaverse called the "Yecosystem." The Rolling Stone wrote:
"Yecosystem has filings that would establish a production arm for movie, television, and radio programs, as well as an online media site that features “information on a recording artist in the fields of beauty, fashion, modeling, acting, music, [and] the arts.” The Yecosystem also hopes to create its own “residential buildings and houses.”
Well, that's a metaverse if I've heard one! No 3D graphics required. Both TSwift and Kanye's efforts point to an evolving media literate approach to their fan communities. These happen across platform, product, and content medium. The downside is that Kanye also recently made a purchase bid for the conservative social media app Parler, threatening an ecochamber for his recent anitsemtic comments. A multiverse of celebrities controlling their own metaverses might be far worse than what we already have with Twitter and Facebook.
Gamified concerts like Ariana Grande and Travis Scott (both in Fortnite) are some of the most memorable online experiences I've had in the last decade. As artists continue to experiment, and fans communities rally in large numbers around them to socialize in real-time, that digital space is starting to look more like a metaverse as The Atlantic described.
All this means a commercial opportunity for those involved with a virtual event, which is usually Epic Games and their technical artists in the case of big names. But as the tools become easier, indie bands might tour virtually, too. When a VR Chat gig become as easy as a Tik Tok Live session, the “metaverse” might be ready for the mainstream.
Quote of the Week
“I can only deal with one universe, l can't deal with a multi-universe." - Tim Burton (EW)