It looks like kind of a bad week for the metaverse. The Walt Disney Company laid off the roughly 50 employees of its metaverse division yesterday, sparking a renewed bout of hand-wringing about the nascent virtual world’s fate. The Wall Street Journal dubbed it the “Meh-taverse.” We’ve covered the metaverse winter here in DFD, as the economic crunch facing the tech sector has led to tough layoffs at Meta, Microsoft and other firms that were leading the charge into VR. In the short term, it’s not surprising that the capital-intensive project of building an entirely new computing platform from the ground up — and one that requires inelegant, expensive new hardware to boot — was bound to take a major hit. But is it really so “meh?” There’s a case that the pullback by corporate giants could have the opposite effect. Assuming that some kind of 3D internet is developing (which it is already), it might ultimately owe its widespread adoption to the kind of grassroots enthusiasm that drives most new technologies’ adoptions (like the internet itself!) One of these more grassroots uses, as we have written, is gaming. In an interview with The Verge last week, Epic Games CEO and founder Tim Sweeney doubled down on his vision of an interoperable metaverse, one where users can freely port their virtual identity across different companies’ 3D worlds. He argued that beyond the up-and-down headline hype, the slow, grinding process of building a real shared digital infrastructure for it is underway. “There were a bunch of different networks, a bunch of different network protocols, and over time, they moved away from the proprietary ones to standard ones… We don’t see this as replacing today’s game companies’ ecosystems with new ones but enabling everybody to go to a much more connected future,” Sweeney said. As that happens, the rule-setting contest is also well underway. As of right now that’s all happening under the penumbra of groups like the Metaverse Standards Forum, launched last year to establish communication around potential technical standards for a 3D internet and including heavyweights like Epic, Meta and Nvidia. The XR Association has begun to throw its not-inconsiderable weight around on the Hill, helping enshrine “immersive technology” as one of the “key focus areas” in last year’s CHIPS and Science Act. And the European Commission is already running a research initiative to explore the metaverse’s potential regulatory frontiers. As all this early dialogue and position-jockeying takes place, that means there are real stakes for the companies involved in the nuts-and-bolts building of the metaverse. When it comes to the big corporate players, there’s also another way to look at the recent news. When companies like Disney shutter their official “metaverse division,” that doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned the technology altogether, but simply pivoted to using it a different way. “Disney’s parks have been deploying [augmented reality] and [location-based entertainment] experiences for a few years,” Matthew Ball, author of “The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything,” told me via Twitter after that news broke. “We know the Marvel and Star Wars seasons in Fortnite, which were done in collaboration with Marvel Studios and LucasFilm, predate Disney’s metaverse division and are Fortnite’s most successful IP integrations… We also know [CEO Bob] Iger is personally interested in metaverse avatars, where Disney’s IP will doubtlessly lead.” Rather than push into the metaverse, giants like Disney might be just as comfortable letting it come to them. (Ball also noted that Disney’s Pixar created the so-called “HTML of the metaverse,” and Industrial Light and Magic remains the world’s leader in visual rendering.) The technical underpinnings of the metaverse are being driven by devoted techies, but its main attractions might still end up being plenty familiar to the “casual users” among us. Yonatan Raz-Fridman, co-founder and CEO of the Roblox-focused gaming company Supersocial, saw it similarly when I spoke with him this morning: “With a company like Disney, and definitely with Iger, they understand there are fundamental shifts happening with these emerging technologies,” he told me. “They’re just going to be more thoughtful and strategic on what that means over the next 10 or 20 years, versus doubling down on any new tech buzzword that comes along.” With apologies to the chief metaverse officers whose spines that might send a chill down, that could mean a mass retrenching toward “core strengths” for companies that went out on a limb during more robust economic times. And for companies whose entire raison d’etre is building that virtual world, work continues apace on the unpredictable hit games, weird AI integrations, and wonky digital scaffolding that will make it actually functional and livable.
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