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

Editor's note:

Popular products such as treadmills, handheld game consoles (switch, etc.), VR helmets and drones topped the list in a recent "electronic ash eating" campaign launched by Sina Technology.

Next, we will take an inventory of the "ash-eating" products in people's minds. Some of them have a "gray physique", some can "turn waste into treasure", and some are still waiting for "industry recovery"....

Behind every item, there has been a wave of consumption, and the head enterprises have also made a lot of money. With the decline of the industry, their former glory has long been gone, blockbuster products have been reduced to e-waste, and everything seems to have returned to the original point. Can gradually usher in the inflection point of the whole industry.

How long has it been since you opened your VR helmet / head? A month? Half a year? Or longer?

In a recent poll launched by Sina Technology, VR helmets became the third largest ash-eating product. As for the reasons for eating ash, a number of users have said, "do not like, the demand for use is not high, more than half a year do not use!" .

But on Xianyu, at present, a large number of second-hand VR heads have also gone to the market, the price is only about 1000 yuan, the vast majority of which are "unopened, 95% new, 99% new" products.

In the smartphone era, the thousand-yuan phone was once regarded as an important symbol of the large-scale popularity of smartphones, but for the VR industry, when the thousand-yuan VR began to spread all over the second-hand trading markets such as Xianyu, it seems to have become a "negative example" for the popularization and development of the whole industry.

Half-price VR head show, flocking to Xianyu in Tmall Mall, JD.com and other mainstream e-commerce platforms, the current prices of the vast majority of VR helmets are more than 2000 yuan, only a small number of non-mainstream brands, low-end version VR head show, the price will be slightly lower than 2000 yuan. However, on Xianyu, thousands of yuan VR head show, has become the mainstream. Especially take the Pico neo 3 as an example, this new headshow, which was released on May 11 last year, has now filled the Xianyu market, and the price is mostly around 1000 yuan, while some have fallen below 1000 yuan.

Caizhi found that when you search for "VR all-in-one" on Xianyu, more than 90% of the display bits in the latest search pages have been occupied by Pico brands, the vast majority of which are Pico neo 3 brands, and most of them are marked with the words "brand new", "99 new" and "hardly played".

In the communication with Caiji, a number of sellers gave surprisingly consistent answers when explaining the reasons for resale. "I only used it once or twice after activation, but I haven't used much since."there is not much demand, so I intend to give it to those who need it more." The use is not high enough, and the lack of interest in playing for a long time after experience has become the main reason why VR gets gray and eventually flows to the second-hand market.

Users who haven't touched their head display devices for half a year said, "the products on the market are not very comfortable, and those who boast that they are comfortable also have a strong sense of existence. in addition, there is a lack of games or content that can produce long-term stickiness, and even LOL is out of the hole in large numbers, not to mention the big screen mobile games in the AR all-in-one, which are equivalent to the level of ten years ago."

Another said, "there is still too little game or audio and video content that VR helmets can experience, and some relatively high-quality games, often in English, are not only inconvenient to climb over the wall, but also have a high barrier to reading comprehension, so they finally give up."

The resale of a large number of VR helmets on Xianyu is no accident, and the voting results confirm everything. For the vast majority of consumers, the current VR can not attract them to actively immerse themselves in it in their spare time.

Exposure to the meta-universe, with a hot VR head show 2021, with the Roblox listing ushered in revenue growth and stock price rise, the outside world showed a high level of attention to meta-universe. Subsequently, Meta announced the name change, domestic byte jump, Tencent and other enterprises have revealed the layout of meta-universe-related business, a series of stimulus signals, so that the domestic meta-universe-related industries are thriving.

According to incomplete statistics, from September to November 2021 alone, 26 financing projects were obtained in domestic fields related to meta-universe, of which 13 financing exceeded 100 million yuan, with an overall cumulative amount of more than 6.4 billion yuan. By contrast, the amount of VR / AR industry financing in 2020 is only 2.1 billion yuan, a total of 54. In the third quarter of 2022, according to the data checked by enterprises, the total investment and financing of meta-universe in China reached 22.84 billion yuan, with a total of 339 investment events. Among them, the hardware sector represented by VR Touxian et al had a total of 270 investment and financing events, accounting for 79.6% of the total investment and financing events.

However, the strong interest of capital in VR cosmic hardware does not mean that the market is willing to pay for these products. Among them, the former Facebook, which was renamed Meta in a high profile, received a lesson from the blood of the market.

On September 29 this year, it was reported that Meta announced for the first time plans to cut jobs and reorganize its team to cut the budget. It was the company's first big budget cut since it was founded in 2004, just a year after Zuckerberg announced in October 2021 that he was going all out to meta-universe.

According to the results released by Meta after Oct. 26 EDT, in the third quarter, the revenue of the reality laboratory of the Meta meta-universe division reached $285 million, down 48.9% from the same period last year, and a loss of $3.672 billion. After losing $2.96 billion in the first quarter and $2.802 billion in the second quarter, the unit has lost $9.4 billion this year, compared with a loss of more than $10 billion in 2021.

As for the reason for the loss, David Wehner, Meta's chief financial officer, said it was due to a decline in sales of the Quest 2. It is reported that the retention rate of Quest headers has declined in each of the past three years, and more than half of Quest headers will no longer use the product after six months of purchase.

How to continuously attract users' attention and continue to use VR headers is an international problem.

Another Counterpoint Research report shows that as of the second quarter of 2022, the global market share of Meta AR / VR equipment has reached 66%, with a clear market advantage. Pico is not far behind with a market share of 11 per cent. However, despite the broad market prospects, compared with mature consumer electronics such as PS, Xbox and even PC computers, VR Touxian is still "negligible". As of the second quarter of this year, the global VR Touxian shipped only 2.33 million units in the quarter.

"when the shipment volume of VR is not raised, it will further lead to a limited number of developers who are willing to devote more resources and energy to VR software, game content construction and so on. In the long run, the development of the VR industry is doomed to be slow." AWE Asia president Gavin said. According to its estimate, it was only when the number of foreign head display devices exceeded 10 million that they began to attract commercial developers to voluntarily join in the construction of VR content ecology, and the development of the domestic VR industry needs to sell at least 10 million units in order to gradually usher in the inflection point of the whole industry.

Conclusion: one head per capita, we still need to wait for several cold winters, the lack of VR content capacity and the imperfect industrial ecology, which is doomed to the development of VR industry, which can not be achieved overnight.

According to Ren Lifeng, vice president of Pico, the annual production of traditional long video in China, for example, can reach 50,000 hours, but the annual production of high-quality VR video is less than 20 hours. "the content capacity of the VR industry has not been widely stimulated."

According to IDC data, global shipments of VR headset displays exceeded 10 million units for the first time in 2021, reaching 10.95 million units. Q1 in 2022, the global VR head shipments are 3.563 million units, of which China's VR head shipments are only 257000 units. From tens of millions of units to show the shipping target, the current supply capacity of the domestic VR industry to be considered.

From the domestic hands of a VR head show, we still need to wait for several cold winters.

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