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

The story of the meta-universe doesn't seem to make sense.

At present, the share price of Roblox, which is blowing up the meta-universe craze, has fallen by more than half, and the leading brother Meta is also mired in a quagmire because of meta-universe losses.

In China, from byte "party island" to Tencent "magic core", the following giants have regarded the former water-testing business as abandoned-from "avalanche" to "blood avalanche". In 2022, meta-universe has become enchanted in the Internet context.

The heat of the meta-universe is no longer what it used to be, and people wake up in their dreams. Since the second half of this year, a large number of start-ups trying to thrive on meta-universe are fleeing and falling down, and only a few remaining "believers" are still struggling to support them.

The giant "fever" is different from many tuyere bursts from the so-called "first year". Since the concept of meta-universe broke out, although it has attracted players from various fields to join the game one after another, there have been few tangible achievements.

This is largely due to the great uncertainty behind the concept of meta-universe, which, after all, is only born in science fiction and condenses the product of popular imagination, which is completely different from the tuyere supported by entities or based on commercial logic in the past.

Based on this, players' attitude towards meta-universe is not as ambiguous as it used to be, especially for the wind-chasing Internet giants, byte meta-universe social App "party island" has been shut down, Tencent Digital Tibetan platform Magic Core has been abolished, and TME digital collection business has also been suspended-- the frequency at which the giants touch meta-universe is declining with the naked eye.

The logic behind this is that there is no soil for a large-scale outbreak of meta-universe-related products, and the so-called meta-universe products of the giants are rather experimental attempts under the logic of "don't miss the tuyere."

Take NFT / digital collection as an example, as far as big companies are concerned, they are always exposed to the dangerous smell of financial speculation, which will touch the regulatory red line if they are not careful, and the giants who have been repeatedly "beaten" are naturally daunted and cautious. For brands, NFT / digital collection is nothing more than the entrance of brand marketing and member management, and the entry is more concerned with the value of the marketing level than above the main business.

By contrast, XR devices may be one of the few definitive opportunities in meta-universe today, and this is the logical support for Facebook's renaming of Meta. After all, choosing hardware as the landing scene can not only graft meta-universe, but also avoid being "kidnapped" by meta-universe-even if meta-universe is eventually falsified, it can also rely on XR hardware to lead to the post-smartphone era.

Instead, the results showed that Meta, which focuses on Reality Labs, which includes virtual reality, augmented reality and social platforms, has lost nearly $20 billion-at least at this stage, All in has suffered a dismal defeat.

As a disciple of Meta, he spent nearly 10 billion yuan on Pico, but still failed to pry open the domestic blue ocean market. Global VR head shipments reached 1.38 million units in the third quarter of 2022, down 42 per cent from a year earlier, according to Wellsenn XR.

The situation of "head" in meta-universe is not optimistic.

Without looking at it, the XR track, which has attracted a lot of attention, is no longer the high growth of the past. The logic behind it is that there is always a lack of a killer app in the XR field at this stage, and even though players are trying to fill the content ecology with fancy content, they are not rigid and can only serve users' demands for "taste fresh".

On the other hand, for the game-based XR scene, if you want to get rid of the impression of "toys" and retain users, it is bound to pay huge development costs, which is undoubtedly a dangerous attempt when the C-end market is not yet available-- not only thankless, but also possible to do wedding clothes for others.

Perhaps it is a glimpse of the cooling of the market, or it may be that Tencent, which is waiting for a mature opportunity to enter the XR industry, seems to have turned to a wait-and-see attitude towards hardware, and the acquisition of black shark technology has come to an end-- the giants who like to chase the tuyere seem to be coincidentally "reducing the fever."

While the fugitive giant of meta universe has reduced its fever, a number of start-ups betting on meta universe are also on the run.

In its heyday, the atmosphere of investment and financing in meta-universe was so hot that even Maotai, who had nothing to do with meta-universe, was telling the story of "drunken dollar universe", not to mention players whose business could have caught up with meta-universe.

The head of a start-up focused on data visualization told Photon Planet that the meta-universe had gone from an illusory concept to a real landing. At about the same time, in a meta-cosmic ray course, the presenter inserted technologies such as no code, low code, digital twinning, private computing, cloud origin, and so on, in the meta-cosmic architecture column, which seemed to cover the mainstream discourse of the science and technology media in recent years.

Take National Star Aerospace as an example, as a "AI satellite Internet technology company", it decisively chose to enter the bureau at the time of the outbreak of meta-universe, grafting its own satellite business with the tags of space and the universe, launching a series of NTF / digital collections such as "Hello, the capital of science fiction" and "interstellar panda", and even launched the "interstellar ticket" game, selling several Tibetan "airdrops" and priority purchase qualifications.

At that time, the domestic digital Tibetan market had not yet cooled down, so that the joint digital collection jointly launched with Hisense Vidda was snapped up only 12 minutes after it was launched. And many other models of digital collection also have a good performance, several waves of digital collection issued, the national star aerospace revenue as high as tens of millions, it can be said to make a lot of money.

And tasted the sweetness of the National Star Aerospace, seems to recognize the meta-universe "destiny", will play this game bigger and bigger. According to industry insiders, after the big sale in Tibet, National Star Aerospace immediately turned the original C-end enterprise group into a meta-universe enterprise group, and successively recruited more than 20 developers, gradually extending the tentacles from the digital collection to the meta-universe scene.

But no matter how crazy the pace of players' layout of meta-universe is, as long as there is no rigid demand support, it will lead to the indifference of users. Whether baidu Xiyang or the National Star Aerospace's "satellite spirituality engine" lacks a "star scene", only the outline, and even the outline itself is not clear, there is a natural lack of motivation to work overtime out of the virtual community, but the number of daily active users is only single digits, and the so-called meta-cosmic grand plan finally came to nothing.

This has become the norm in the meta-universe industry. The difference is that National Star Aerospace has satellites as its own business, as well as capital blood transfusion, and can still survive. But at present, the capital market no longer believes in meta-universe, and the only hope of making money is dusk. Many companies that go to meta-universe at the beginning of their business cannot get investment and lack the ability to make blood, so they are forced to flee.

This is not a matter of track selection, according to industry insiders, many companies themselves know that there is no prospect, that is, they pretend to be confused and see if they can cheat the investment.

An employee of the former Yuanyuan Universe startup company said that if he had pursued stability, he could have joined the development department of a medium-sized factory. At the beginning, he chose meta-universe mainly because of the salary higher than that of the industry. "from the beginning, I thought that meta-universe was worthless, and I often fell into self-doubt in my work. Fortunately, the salary was OK. I just wanted to live in the moment, but I didn't expect it to cool so fast."

In other words, meta-universe entrepreneurship itself is a big gamble in which both founders and employees are involved. Unfortunately, in less than two years, the meta-universe industry seems to have finished the story of its rise and fall.

From the perspective of the path of scientific and technological development, although meta-universe depicts a "feasible future", it is still a long way from the ideal form of "avalanche" and "number one player". Therefore, the internal cause of meta-universe fanaticism is not the nature of science and technology, but speculation.

In September 2021, Zhongqingbao announced that it would launch the meta-universe game "Wine Master". Since then, its share price has soared, rising by 252.7% for the whole of 2021. In the heyday of Digital Tibet, the platform only cost tens of thousands of yuan. hiring a painter to slightly modify the established template and launch a series of digital collections can create tens of millions of dollars.

Objectively speaking, from the so-called "meta-universe experts" selling lessons to Zhongqingbao driving up its share price by relying on the meta-universe game "wine master", to the soaring price of digital collections, meta-universe has indeed created a group of rich people.

As the story of creating wealth continues to unfold, the meta-universe is regarded as an exponential opportunity by a group of "believers", and the "consensus" of the "believers" has become part of their belief.

For this reason, when Sun Yuchen, a currency tycoon, announced that he would buy a bitcoin every day, many domestic NFT players followed suit and shared the NFT-- they bought that day on WeChat groups and moments. The former tried to save the market, while the latter strengthened the consensus. The two come down in the same logical line.

On the other hand, the so-called meta-universe "believers" are essentially the same as gamblers. As we all know, the most terrible thing about gambling is not losing, but "winning", and so is the same logic in the universe-National Star Aerospace more or less shows a sense of "above" from the number of issues to the development of the virtual world.

It is worth mentioning that according to media reports, an employee of the National Star Aerospace Group was removed from the company group an hour later and was forced to "graduate" because he asked "when to be paid" in the company group and questioned the performance results.

Although National Star Aerospace responded that the dismissal of the employee was due to excessive comments, the so-called "adverse impact" may have punctured the fragile consensus-undermining the company's internal confidence in meta-universe, given the plight of its metasonic business. As everyone knows, the failure of the C-end scenario of the meta-universe has nothing to do with confidence, but has long been determined by technology and the market.

In fact, meta-universe is not a meaningless shell. From the long-term perspective of hardware succession, XR hardware is very likely to become the successor of smartphones, and the game industry, which has the closest relationship with meta-universe, is also moving towards a new level of "industrialization."

However, whether it is to enter the hardware, or large-scale development of the so-called 3A or even 4A games, almost all potential landing scenarios have a very high threshold, leaving very few tickets to the market. As a result, meta-universe is likely to be a game monopolized by giants, and there is almost no chance for startups to counterattack by tuyere.

In the context of science and technology, it is always customary to use "when the tide recedes, we will know who is swimming naked" to express the momentum and unique path of emerging technologies. According to the current trend, a small number of giants such as Apple, Tencent, Microsoft and other giants still have a chance to dock. But those players who try to thrive on meta-universe may not wait for the tide to recede.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: photon Planet (ID:TMTweb), author: Wen Jiehao, Editor: Wu Xianzhi

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.