Two years have passed, is the metaverse still "hot"?
The answer is yes, 2023 has just begun. Even the "king of wine" Maotai has joined the embrace of metaverse and officially launched the metaverse platform APP "Sundown", which allows users to visit, explore, socialize, trade and do tasks in this APP. On the first day of the platform's launch, it topped the free overall list of App Store.
From the perspective of publicity and brand culture, the attention, market value and appreciation space of "Rabbit Mao" have been significantly enhanced through the addition of this new form of meta-universe, which also promotes the innovative exploration of digital-real integration. However, compared to the prosperous start of 2023, looking back at the past 2022, the development of metaverse seems to be a bit high and low.
The "honeymoon period" has passed, and the "bottleneck period" is coming
In March 2021, after Roblox, an American sandbox game platform with the concept of metaverse, went public on the New York Stock Exchange, its stock price rose 54.4% on the first day, and its market value exceeded $40 billion.
From that day on, the metaverse became a sensation in the capital world, and 2021 was regarded as the "Year of Metaverse". In this year, if a company could get a little bit related to the metaverse, it would receive the attention and pursuit of the market. To take an extreme example, CYB, a previously unknown small company, has seen its share price soar because of the launch of "Master Brewer", a "super low-cost meta-universe game", with an increase of 252.7% in 2021.
However, what the market didn't expect was that it only took one year to go from "bursting into flames" to "slightly cooler".
The two representative points of time for the meta-universe in 2021 are Roblox' IPO and Facebook's name change to Meta, but in 2022, these two most representative overseas companies laying out the meta-universe are starting to hit some bottlenecks.
Comparing to the latest three quarterly data, the capital market, which foresaw something bad before the announcement of the earnings report, had already made Meta's share price close down 5.59%. After the disclosure of the earnings report, Meta's costs and expenses increased by 19% year-on-year to $22.1 billion, and its operating margin dropped to 20% from 36% a year ago, based on which its share price once fell over 19% to its more than five-year lowest point in more than five years. As of Dec. 31, 2022, Meta closed at $120.34, down 64.45 percent for the year, and its market capitalization had evaporated by more than $600 billion.
Roblox didn't fare much better, as its revenue rose 2% year-over-year to $517.7 million, but compared to a 102% revenue gain in the same period last year, this year's growth rate can be considered a significant plunge.
In addition, Roblox reported a loss of $297.8 million in the third quarter, compared to a $74 million loss in the same period last year, and Roblox's DAUs (daily activity) were 58.8 million in the third quarter, up 24 percent year-over-year, a decline from 31 percent in the same period last year, while average Bookings revenue per DAU was $11.94, down 11%. As of December 31, 2022, Roblox reported $28.46, a cumulative decline of 71.2% for the year.
Because the institutional pieces fell test less than standard, as well as the software development tool schedule later than expected, repeatedly jumped Apple AR/MR headset development progress and new problems, in short, overseas giants 2022 in the meta-universe exploration can be said to be wailing, the same for the domestic big manufacturers.
In June, Yingke Mutual Entertainment Group announced its name change to Yingke Universe, but there was no further action; Tencent's digital collectibles platform "Phantom Core", which has been online for only one year, announced in August that it would stop its operation; Shadowtron Technology, which claims to be the "Microsoft of the metaverse era", was exposed to unpaid wages, and its social security provident fund has been cut off for more than 4 months, and the company's large group was forcibly disbanded by its founder and chairman Sun Li. Sun Li, the founder and chairman of the company, was forcibly dissolved.
Is it possible that the "honeymoon period" has just ended, and that Yuan Universe is about to "flame out"?
In fact, although all the signs show that the development of Yuan Universe in 2022 seems to be not so smooth, in fact, in the view of "Intelligent Relativity", it is more like a transition from "big steps" to "small steps", and Yuan Universe is encountering a small bottleneck on the way of development, but the overall trend is still positive.
On the one hand, whether an industry has potential, policy is the most conspicuous "weathervane".
At the local level, more than a dozen provinces and cities nationwide have released meta-universe-specific policies and consultation drafts in 2022, among which, Shanghai, Guangdong and Jiangsu have released a larger number of special policies. At the same time, the support policies of each local government are gradually being refined, and some of the implementation plans make detailed provisions for the introduction, cultivation and subsidies of the metaverse industry.
In November, the Ministry of Industry and five other departments also jointly released the Action Plan for the Integrated Development of Virtual Reality and Industry Applications (2022— 2026), proposing that by 2026, the overall scale of China's virtual reality industry (including related hardware, software, applications, etc.) exceeds 350 billion yuan, virtual reality terminal sales exceed 25 million units, cultivate 100 backbone enterprises with strong innovation capabilities and The overall scale of China's virtual reality industry (including related hardware and software applications) will exceed 350 billion yuan, virtual reality terminal sales will exceed 25 million units, 100 backbone enterprises with strong innovation capability and industry influence will be cultivated, 10 agglomerations with regional influence and leading the ecological development of virtual reality will be built, and 10 industrial public service platforms will be completed.
On the other hand, although some enterprises have encountered bottlenecks in exploring the metaverse in 2022, there are still some enterprises that have delivered good "report cards".
In the field of metaverse infrastructure, Baidu released the world's first independent metaverse solution — — Shiyang metaverse base MetaStack; in the AIGC application scenario, Wanxing Technology's Wanxing Meow Shadow 2023 desktop and mobile end integrated AIGC capabilities, the first in the industry to launch AI painting function, to achieve the online video creation field picture material In the field of "meta-universe + cultural tourism", China Mobile MIGC has reached cooperation with Zhangjiajie Wulingyuan, Fuzhou Yeshan Wisdom Scenic Area, Luoyang Museum, Dunhuang, Xuedou Mountain and other domestic famous cultural tourism landmarks, relying on 5G+T.621+AR capability to implement intelligent spatial scene empowerment, and carried out strategic cooperation with Xiamen Municipal People's Government to build "Gulangyu meta-universe". In terms of "meta-universe + sports", following the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, China Mobile MIGU launched the first 5G ice and snow meta-universe, and during the 2022 Qatar World Cup, China Mobile MIGU again refreshed the user experience with a series of World Cup meta-universe bit space games.
In terms of market size, Bloomberg industry research report expects the meta-universe to reach $800 billion market size in 2024; PwC expects the meta-universe market size to reach $1.5 trillion in 2030.
Only, there is still a long "platform period" to be survived before the metaverse can really take hold.
As a new round of reshuffling begins, when will the metaverse move past the "plateau period"?
"The "plateau period" often occurs after high growth, during which the industry is in a delicate state of equilibrium, with growth slowing down, or perhaps even going backwards instead of forwards.
After the wild ride in 2021, the meta-universe in 2022 is in the "platform period". This stage, in addition to accelerating the industry clearing, sieve out a number of dabbling enterprises, there are three hurdles to overcome.
The first is arithmetic power. In the world of metaverse, a huge flood of data is generated all the time. "New Moore's Law" points out that every 18 months, the amount of new data added by human is the sum of the amount of data ever added by computers, and the demand for arithmetic power of massive data has reached an unprecedented height and intensity. In the words of Zhou Di, a national science and technology expert from the Ministry of Science and Technology, the realization of complex meta-universe scenarios also requires very large and complex arithmetic networks, and "arithmetic power is becoming the core of the future meta-universe battle".
In this field, the advantages of the three operators to be more obvious, China Mobile has built the world's largest 5G network, with more than 1.27 million 5G base stations, and constantly optimize the mobile cloud "N + 31 + X" network-wide resource layout, data center construction, mobile cloud online 33 directly managed resource pool, 13 central nodes, 16 provincial nodes, 3,000 edge nodes. The new national pulse of China Telecom also proposes to provide a platform and cloud network infrastructure capacity to serve all kinds of virtual world business in the process of combining a series of large and small virtual worlds based on the real world.
The second is the content, to seize the meta-universe this windfall, it is inevitable to make articles on the content, to VR, AR and other hardware products, for example, the content and revenue is positively correlated, only the more quality content, to stimulate consumers to buy.
At this stage, however, whether it is the domestic PICO or the world's largest game platform Steam, are facing the problem of the lack of quality VR content. PICO vice president Ren Lifeng has used a set of figures to explain the current situation of the lack of VR content: the current Chinese market, the annual production of traditional long-form video can reach 50,000 hours, while the annual production of high-quality VR video is less than 20 hours of new production.
Content dragging its feet, P
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)