Blind men and the elephant originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent. 6 blind men have never come across an elephant before and they imagined what the elephant is like by touching it. This picture itself is very descriptive: everyone has their own perspective. Same thing like Metaverse definition: scifi, virtual work room, game, blockchain, etc. The ambiguity of the Metaverse makes it even more interesting. Out of curiosity, I did some research on a few current metaverses.
Questions I want to answer
- How easy is it to start? Is it fun to play?
- Business model / economy in the metaverse
- Active user number
- Creator tools
Sandbox
The Sandbox developed with Unity is an Open World, Play-to-Earn Metaverse with Voxel style artwork. Is it fun to play? No, I wouldn't even call it a game. Platform is also very limited. I wouldn't call this product even a beta version. MVP the most. How many active users? Very little. However, Sandbox has a creators' tooling, The Sandbox Maker which doesn't require you to code. That's game changing. It is similar to Axie Inifiny but more than that because it enabled creators to create experiences. Similar to AWS, Amazon provides the services/machines for developers to build products. It is a win-win ecosystem.
In summary, Sandbox is still in MVP stage, and their strength is the creator tooling.
Horizon World
Horizon World is a virtual hangout on Oculus. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend it. As soon as I walked into the plaza in Horizon, I was greeted by a community guide. Talking with them makes me feel that I am in the same room with them because of the nature of virtual reality. I went to an escape room and a maze. It was pretty cool. I also created my own world, and it is like Minecraft on VR. A lot of fun.
However, Oculus headset is uncomfortable after I wore it for more than 20 mins. The frames in VR can still make people sick. Sitting could help, but still it's not like human eyes. There aren't many interesting virtual worlds. The economics hasn't been built. The application itself has bugs sometimes and it loads very slowly. With 5G and more developing time, I think the product will get more reliable.
To me Horizon world or Sandbox metaverse is like a hub portaling people to different experiences that are created by creators.
Fortnite
Does Metaverse have to be in VR? I don't think so. From a social network standpoint, as long as the application is fun to play, people will stay there. Fortnite is a great example. Monthly players are approx 200 Millions.
Fortnite has 10.5 billion revenue not including the year 2021. It had 3.8 billion cumulative spend of game days from 2017–2020. Time is money. That's 10 million years and it is crazy.
I played Fortnite and it is fun, exhilarating, and addictive. A group of players are dropped on one island which is full of loot and danger. You can die from other players' shooting, wolves, sharks, cars, jumping from the cliff… There is a storm zone which constantly shrinks and pushes the players together. You can just have fun like driving a Lambo, be a spiderman or focus on shooting to win the game. Fortnite matches you with similar levels of players so it gets harder when your level gets higher. It is super well made and challenging which makes it even more fun. Fortnite's parent company the Epic Games uses Unreal Engine.
How to allow millions of people to interact in one virtual place at the same time is a real challenge. In order to handle a large number of traffics, current applications use lots of shards. One single shard may only host tens of thousands of users. This is definitely not enough for the metaverse. In Computer Science, we have CAP theorem which means we cannot have Consistency, Availability and Partitioning maximized at the same time. Most social apps nowaday choose Availability and Partitioning over Consistency because they didn't have to. (One other example, banks would prefer strong Consistency.) You may have heard the word “shardless” somewhere. Maximizing CPU, threading, memory utilization and network bandwidth to an extreme efficiency will be a real technical challenge. Along with that, a good monitoring system to handle the unexpected events reliably is also needed.
What did I learn?
Over the past few weeks, I have put a significant amount of time into playing Fortnite so I could understand the younger generation as I think it is the “social network” for them.
I learnt that making the experience fun is more important than monetizing it. Meta invented the “Like” button, Instagram focused on pictures, and Tiktok made short videos fun. Interaction is the key, and making the interactions fun is more important than the story.
By the time I write this article, I don't see many brand collaborations with Fortnite. In the future, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to open up to more collaborations and interoperability.