Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Last year, after the listing of Roblox, revenue growth and stock price rise suddenly made the outside world show a high degree of attention to meta-universe. Then Meta announced the name change, and in China, from byte jump, Tencent, to hardware companies, Internet companies scramble for layout, domestic meta-universe-related concepts are improving. The year 2021 is also known as the first year of the meta-universe.

So one year after the explosion, what is the development of the meta-universe at home and abroad?

Meta and Roblox continued to lose money on September 29, and it was reported that Meta announced plans to lay off staff and restructure the team for the first time to cut the budget. This is the first time the company has slashed its budget since its founding in 2004, or marks the end of a period of rapid growth for Meta.

It was only a year before October 2021, when CEO Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta and went all out to meta-universe.

In July, Zuckerberg said Meta would reduce some of its teams to focus on higher-priority businesses such as short video software Reels and meta-universe-related projects.

The meta-universe project remains a priority for Meta, but according to its second-quarter 2022 results, Reality Labs, Mate's line of business responsible for realizing meta-cosmos vision, had revenue of $452 million, up 48.2% from a year earlier and the worst quarterly performance in the past year, with a loss of $2.802 billion. For the whole of 2021, the line posted a net loss of more than $10 billion.

In addition, Meta's second-quarter revenue was $28.822 billion, down 1% from $29.077 billion a year earlier, the first quarterly decline in revenue from a year earlier. Net profit was $6.687 billion, down 36% from $10.394 billion a year earlier, and has fallen for three consecutive quarters.

According to previous reports, Meta said it would invest about $10 billion in meta-universe-related technologies this year, about five times the amount it spent on Oculus VR in 2014 and 10 times the amount it spent on Instagram in 2012.

The imagination of meta-universe is beautiful, but the reality is very bony. As growth in the number of users and advertising revenue slows, Meta is facing the worst recession in recent history. While investing heavily and seeing no hope of profit in the short term, Meta is trapped in meta-universe, entering a phase of layoffs and budget adjustments.

On the other hand, the performance of Roblox, known as the "first stock of meta-universe", is not very satisfactory. Its 2022 Q2 results show that revenue and the number of daily active users are still growing during the period, but well below market expectations. Of this total, revenue was $591.2 million, up 30% from a year earlier, and the number of daily active users (DAU) was about 52.2 million, up 21% from a year earlier. But at the same time, Roblox's net loss widened further to $176.4 million.

Roblox presale service revenue (bookings) was $639.9 million, down 4% from the same period last year; the average presale service revenue for the number of daily active users was $12.25, down 21% from the same period last year, the fourth consecutive quarter of decline, further indicating that users' willingness to pay is declining. Roblox's main source of income is generated through the sale of virtual goods (the core is virtual currency) on the Roblox platform. Other sources of income include advertising, royalties and so on.

The financial bubble of meta-universe is being punctured. After experiencing the highlight of meta-universe, foreign technology companies are also being trapped by lack of stamina and profits. The domestic meta-universe company also has the same problem.

Last year, the stock prices of Zhongqingbao, Tian Xiu and Blue cursor all soared on the east wind of Meta Universe. But in the second half of the year, the share prices of the three companies fell one after another.

In addition, some of the first meta-cosmos companies have fallen into operational difficulties. Yingchuang Technology, a unicorn company that once claimed to be the "Microsoft" of the meta-universe with a valuation of up to 12 billion yuan, was revealed to be in arrears in August.

Some industry insiders said that the dilemma of Creative Technology also reflects the embarrassing status quo of the current VR technology and even the development of meta-universe. "although smart terminals such as VR are expected to replace smartphones as a new generation of smart terminals, there is still a high threshold for related products. As a result, relevant companies are unable to stabilize hematopoiesis on the C side, and can only rely on capital financing to continue their lives."

At the same time, the "real estate speculation" fever that sprang up because of meta-universe also began to cool down, and real estate prices in meta-universe plummeted. Meta-universe real estate fell 85 per cent in the first half of 2022, while overall sales fell 87.5 per cent from 16000 last year to 2000 in August, according to meta-universe analysis platform WeMeta.

Sun Jiashan, an associate researcher at the Chinese Academy of Arts, said that after more than a year of development, various concepts of meta-universe are in the ebb. The so-called meta-universe, putting aside the technological concept that is far from being realized, has not even established the most basic ecology, and the bubble including the real estate with the loudest hype has burst. The so-called meta-universe real estate is actually a digital simulation scene, all outdated technologies that have been available a few years ago, this year has been applied a very big concept, in essence, it is not a new creation.

"first of all, the financial bubble of meta-universe was punctured because its underlying logic is some platform enterprises that want to catch up with the new round of financial valuation cycle and then pretend to be financial hype in the name of meta-universe. Take Meta as an example, hype about the nature of meta-universe is to complete the hardware layout of a new round of Internet portals."

Sun Jiashan believes that any great leap forward in finance and technology is undesirable, and the industry should return to respecting the objective laws of the financial market and science and technology itself. Any excessive hype will burst the bubble sooner or later.

Meta-universe will not produce huge industrial value in the short term. "the development of meta-universe is a long, step-by-step iterative and continuous process of expanding the boundary."

Yu Jianning, executive director of the China Mobile Universe Industry Commission, believes that since the popularity of the concept of meta-universe, the market has been looking forward to landing, hoping that a representative application will allow users to enter the meta-universe in an all-round way. even in a short period of time, it will produce huge industrial value. But in fact, it is still the "foundation period" for the development of meta-universe, and it is unlikely to see very successful meta-cosmic products in the next year or two. And the market feedback on the new trend will have a period of labor pains.

For the problems faced by Meta, Yu Jianning said that first of all, the expectations of the market and users for meta-universe and the actual technological development are not at the same level. As mentioned earlier, the high expectations of the market for meta-universe make users give high expectations to the Meta of high-profile layout of meta-universe.

Secondly, the content ecology of Meta meta-universe is not yet mature, although after the gradual popularity of VR devices, a large number of VR games have emerged on various platforms, which quickly fill the gap in the content side. But on the whole, this content is not long-term attractive to users who have been immersed in Web2.0 for a long time, and it is more of a tentative exploration.

The third is the management of the ethical rules of the meta-universe. At present, the ideal meta-universe is a world with high degree of freedom, high openness and high tolerance. However, as a surreal collection of all kinds of social relations, there are no clear norms of moral norms and ethical rules in meta-universe. How to adjust the ethical rules of building a meta-universe needs to be explored by all parties.

An industry insider said that meta-universe is a concept and has now been split into realizable pieces, such as blockchain money and Finance, web3, Virtual Human and Virtual Social, AR / VR and so on.

According to the "2022 Yuan Universe Industry Talent Development report" released by Zhaopin, the demand for VR / AR talents accounts for half of the meta-universe segment, followed by meta-universe social networking, first-tier cities account for half of the country's talent demand, and new first-tier cities are growing fast. In addition, from January to July 2022, the number of jobs related to meta-universe increased by 16.6% compared with the same period last year. Meta-universe talent recruitment is highly concentrated in the information technology industry, gradually infiltrating into education, media, manufacturing and other fields.

However, there are still many concerns about meta-universe. According to the survey data, only 30.2% of the respondents knew more about the metacosmos industry, while 26.0% of the respondents said they had no understanding at all. It is worth noting that 5.5% of the respondents believe that it is short-term concept hype, and 8.1% of the respondents think that there is a tendency to circle money, which indicates that the development of meta-universe is also accompanied by skeptical voices.

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