Introduction

Continuing in our discussion over the fine piece of analysis that is the Metaverse Primer by Wall Street financial firm Jefferies, I wanted to take some time to highlight and discuss some of the more strange and peculiar aspects of what the metaverse economy will look like. In addition to our source material from last week’s Part 1 (link below), we’ll also add a video released by Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) about Mark Zuckerberg’s (The Zucc) vision of what the metaverse will look like to him, and likely a siginificant portion of the future metaverse for whatever that will look like. Beginning with the Jefferies article before we move on to the video from the Zucc, we’ll slide into the first peculiarity below.

Link to original article: https://assets.website-files.com/61152de79f1b0a81f1dcf4b7/615e101cf1cda13c40ee4d13_Metaverse%20Primer.pdf

Peculiarity 1: Digital Consultants for Everything?

One of the strange things that authors of the Metaverse mention on page # of the article is the possible extension of professional services into the digital realm. They specifically mention the rise of professional services in the Metaverse as they expect the new digital world to be managed similarly to equaivalent or similar assets in the physical world. Now, I don’t want to say that this isn’t exactly new. It’s not uncommon for people to provides services and even consultation servces for people who mak the majority of their money online. The first cases of this sort of economy that comes to mind are the creator networks that are available to youtubers and twitch streamers [1].

In this arrangement, content creators join a network, which is a business that does not usually post content on the site, but have made arrangements with the site like youtube or twitch to act as intermediaries or managers of different content creators on the platform by concerning themselves with visibility, algorithm optimization, content consulting, and more. Thus, this deals as a proto-metaverse type of business ineraction as the primary matter of the business is entirely about affiars that happen over the internet, but this does not necessarily all take place within the virtual sphere as far as I can tell.

What Jefferies forsees on page 8 of their document is only slightly more different than the example of creator networks. They envision a complete transfer of certain sectors into the metaverse. They particularly see financial services undergoing a complete engulfment in the metaverse as they predict that finacial life will be even more complex and metaverse dependent. They don’t exactly elaborate as to why they in particular would be submerged in the metaverse, perhaps they’ll build on that in a future report. Some of the other professions that they give by name that would also be heavily inserted in the metaverse are; interior designers, real estate, home décor, and artistry.

Peculiarity 2: Live Events...Just Online

On page 5 of the document, Jefferies documents the story of how Fortnite created a live concert for rapper Travis Scott in the game. They recount how much work it took to arrange this sort of live event within the game. They mention how in order to get a live concert done in a distributed sort of way, much coordination needed to happen. Users needed to install an update to get local copies of the concert environment, then times were scheduled by Epic Games to allow the creation of more than a million server sessions with a limited capacity of 100 people per session to broadcast the concert asynchronously. Truly Epic, I suppose.

However, what really caught my attention in this story was the fact that the concert was free for all users provided they could install the update and join a session on time. We can call this the discount for being an early adopter to new ideas, but I don’t envision these sort of live metaverse events to be completely free forever. In this sense, the next iteration of live metaverse events will likely follow a freemium model where users can purchase private servers/sessions for the events and invite their friends to it instead of public servers with limited capacity and grouping options. The next question would be to posti what else would follow this format? Could large scale business conferences work? Perhaps, smaller enterntainment venues like speed dating, art classes, and hobby groups could fall under such conditions as well? Who knows, but expecting convenient meeting spaces to be free in the metaverse would be a foolish assumption.

Peculiarity 3: Would you like to extend your time?

This last peculiarity of the metaverse economics comes from a video publish by Meta Platforms on their vision of the metaverse, which I have linked below.

Link to video:

At time markers, 4:30 to 5:30, it’s easy to overlook it but there’s some interesting detail that was tossed into the video. In this part of the video, The Zucc and friends are in a meeting room to hang out and chat. While they are enjoying their time in a meeting and playing cards, The Zucc calls his friend Naomi to see if she will join the meeting or not. The friends inform them that they found an interesting piece of artwork available through an augmented reality experience. The group in the virtual meeting space ask to see the artwork through a link and receive it In the meeting space that they are at. Once the artwork makes it back to the group, they’re able to view it until it starts to fade for some reason. Then Naomi suggests that by tipping the original artist of the work, they can extend the time of the artwork. If for some reason you cannot view the video, I have the relevant frames below:

So, let’s get this straight...In the metaverse as envisioned by The Zucc and Co. artwork will be made time limited and would require constant payments to the artist to consistently view the piece. It can be argued that in this case, because the original piece was left out in the open for people to explore, a freemium model of the artwork can be done where there is a free trial or preview of the artwork and then the artwork Is available for full purchase and ownership. This is the business model behind many apps and software. However, what is being proposed here is the demon spawn between freemium and subscription models where you neither own the artwork once paid for access, and then have to make continual payments to have time to view said art piece. I understand that payment for art can be a spicy topic that evokes a lot of feeling over the starving artist, but the lack of ownership of a piece of art removes any semblance of reason for purchasing virtual art that makes NFTs much more reasonable than whatever The Zucc is proposing here. With NFTs at least there is a claim and proof of ownership of the ditigal image once purchased, what good can this model of artwork payment do if the art piece ot show others does not appear on command to show others and runs the risk of needing a time-based rental just to show it to friends. Will other types of metaverse content be the same? Will virtual home decorations need consistent funds, will virtual decorations simply fade away without consistently tipping the artist? We’ll likely figure out how these sorts of arrangements will work, and if alternative payment structures will survive the transition to the metaverse. But for now, this is pointing towards “you will own nothing and you will be happy” territory.

References

[1] YouTube Networks: What Are They and Is It Worth Joining One? [Internet]. Hotmart. 2020 [cited 2022 Feb 15]. Available from: https://blog.hotmart.com/en/youtube-network/.