“As we build up these platforms toward the Metaverse, if these platforms are locked down and controlled by these proprietary companies, they are going to have far more power over our lives, our private data, and our private interactions with other people than any platform in previous history,” Sweeney said in May 2017. But in its full vision, the Metaverse becomes the gateway to most digital experiences, a key component of all physical ones, and the next great labor platform. It’s also helpful to consider what the Metaverse is often, but incorrectly, likened to. But please ask that question again in 12 months. But this is an enormous computational challenge and one that fights against the underlying design/intent of the Internet. ... Genvid is helping put the “meta” in the Metaverse by creating the most advanced interactive streaming technology in the world. In the US-tech scene, Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist at VC firm Makers Fund, has become the leading voice and mind on metaverse subjects. He’s the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, an investor, and probably my favorite business essayist writing today. (25:10) Kodak’s $765M loan to produce pharmaceuticals (41:50) Listen on Apple , Spotify , or Google Podcasts. All digital content should be living, after all. The Metaverse is Coming Join Philip Rosedale of High Fidelity, Matthew Ball of Epyllion Industries, Raph Koster of Playable Worlds, Frederic Descamps of Manticore … Valve has also spent years developing and releasing VR hardware, generates billions in profits each year, and is privately owned by a team of technologists focused on open-source technologies with a disdain for closed ecosystems. Imagine if instead of being designed by nonprofits and technologists looking to share research files and messages, it was designed to sell ads or collect user data for profits. It (A) mashes up IP; (B) has a consistent identity that spans multiple closed platforms; (C) is a gateway to a myriad of experiences, some of which are purely social; (D) compensates creators for creating content, etc. Patrick and I went deep into topics including the Metaverse (its technical challenges, opportunities, and philosophy), IP and the role of business model and technical innovation in storytelling, the Unreal Engine, Cloud Gaming, Fortnite as a competitor to Spotify, and more. At the same time, Epic is bringing far more than a plausible on-ramp to its efforts to build the Metaverse. Sitting at a keyboard, locked in position for hours and focusing on a fixed screen is a recipe for a range of physical complaints, from sore necks to tingling hands. Although Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not explicitly declared his intent to develop and own the Metaverse, his obsession with it seems fairly clear. Although these disparate things alone do not add up to what we might eventually call the Metaverse, ultimately these forced forays into virtual experiences are sowing the seeds for a world more accepting of taking business and social experiences out of the physical world and into a digital one. Fortnite is too valuable a platform. The company was/is focused not on VFX engineers or game designers, but on offering intuitive, icon-based software that enables “architecture, construction, urban planning and landscaping professionals” to produce realistic, immersive digital environments based in Unreal “in seconds”. Consider Fortnite’s 2019 Marshmello concert. The most common conceptions of the Metaverse stem from science fiction. A “digital and virtual economy” – These, too, already exist. And this is smart. Here, the Metaverse is typically portrayed as a sort of digital “jacked-in” internet – a manifestation of actual reality, but one based in a virtual (often theme park-like) world, such those portrayed in Ready Player One and The Matrix. As with Facebook, the Metaverse needs to be “populated”, rather than just “populable”, and this population must then fill in this digital world with things to do and content to consume. It’s also available free to any engine, any platform, and any game. Ultimately, you’ll find many of the same items in the offices of Big Tech CEOs. Similarly, it’s unusual for IP owners to allow their characters and stories to be intermingled with other IP. Many also debate whether a true Metaverse can have a single operator (as is the case in Ready Player One). Matthew Ball: The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite. While the Metaverse may have some game-like goals, include games, and involve gamification, it is not itself a game, nor is it oriented around specific objectives. He is also a Venture Partner at Makers Fund, Senior Advisor to Telefilm Canada and contributor to The Economist. In ideal circumstances, the “Mayor” (i.e. There is also disagreement on how much interoperability is required for the Metaverse to really be “the Metaverse”, rather than just an evolution of today’s Internet. However, we can identify core attributes. there are several Marvel v DC comic book crossovers and video games). Microsoft is a good example. However, Epic Games Founder/CEO Tim Sweeney has been vocal about the fact that today’s standard 30% commissions for digital content sales (e.g. And if the Metaverse does indeed serve as a functional “successor” to the web — only this time with even greater reach, time spent, and more commercial activity — there’s likely to be even more economic upside. However, as Ball notes in his piece, the idea of it being a successor to the internet means that "the Metaverse has become the newest macro-goal for many of the world’s tech giants". A “new app store” – No one needs another way to open apps, nor would doing so “in VR” (as an example) unlock/enable the sorts of value supposed by a successor Internet. The major tech companies don’t just want to lead the Metaverse, they want to own and define it. I also spend a great deal of my time advising startups and corporations predominantly in the media and interactive space. I love that his default mode seems to be thinking about big picture and strategy. A “virtual space” – Digital content experiences like Second Life are often seen as “proto-Metaverses” because they (A) lack game-like goals or skill systems; (B) are virtual hangouts that persist; (C) offer nearly synchronous content updates; and (D) have real humans represented by digital avatars. There are billions of people on today’s Facebook, for example, but each user shares an individual connection with the Facebook server, not with any other user. Just as it was hard to envision in 1982 what the Internet of 2020 would be — and harder still to communicate it to those who had never even “logged” onto it at that time — we don’t really know how to describe the Metaverse. To this end, Epic acquired the company Twinmotion in April of last year. What’s more, this event was explicitly referenced in the opening moments of the film. But Fortnite as a social network and impossible-to-ignore cultural phenomenon, Ball says, provides Epic Games a key advantage for leading in the Metaverse race. He’s the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, an investor, and probably my favorite business essayist writing today. There may not be 100 players, but it’s still a battle royale. And if today’s Internet dystopia scares you, the Metaverse … And it won’t directly come into existence; there will be no clean “Before Metaverse” and “After Metaverse”. In addition, platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, as well as technologies such as Bitcoin, are based around the hiring of individuals/businesses/computational power to perform virtual and digital tasks. If it was a “fast-twitch” game such as Rocket League or Call of Duty, these slowdowns would have been unplayable. The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite | Matthew Ball; Metaverse is the alternate digital realities where people work, play, and socialize. Instead, they talk about school, movies, sports, news, boys, girls and more. This does happen from time to time (e.g. More broadly, a whole sub-economy on Fortnite has emerged where “players” can build (and monetize) their own content. None of this is true when it comes to the Metaverse. It is also the driver behind Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR and its newly announced Horizon virtual world/meeting space, among many, many other projects, such as AR glasses and brain-to-machine communications. Over time, each option is likely to become more capable, easier to use and integrated. In The Metaverse, Matthew Ball says the Metaverse will be an always-on, real-time world in which an unlimited number of people can participate at the same time. This includes everything from simple treasure hunts, to immersive mash-ups of the Brothers Grimm with parkour culture, to a 10-hour sci-fi story that spans multiple dimensions and timelines. What is the internet? In the US-tech scene, Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist at VC firm Makers Fund, has become the leading voice and mind on metaverse subjects. A “virtual theme park or Disneyland” – Not only will the “attractions” be infinite, they will be not be centrally “designed” or programmed like Disneyland, nor will they all be about fun or entertainment. The Internet is a mine of data and the Metaverse will have both more data and perhaps greater returns on it than today’s web. And while Epic Online Services are still in private beta, the company has suggested it will be publicly available in Q2 2020 and should support “hundreds or thousands of games in 2020”. This can be as small as digital outfits (“skins”) or dances (“emotes”). Minecraft and Roblox, for example, both boast more than 100MM monthly users (Fortnite probably has fewer) and have also been able to mash up various intellectual properties (such as Marvel and DC). Accordingly, when you access content from another user, you’re really just pulling the latest information that Facebook is giving you. The Metaverse will require an even broader, more complex, and resilient set of S&Ps. The standard process is much messier and organic, with meetings and opinions changing on an ad hoc basis. Another increasingly important part of Epic’s offering is its “Online Services” suite, which allows developers to immediately support cross-play across Sony + Microsoft + Nintendo + PC + iOS + Android and leverage Epic’s account systems/social graph (which has 1.6B player connections). And while these sorts of experience are likely to be an aspect of the Metaverse, this conception is limited in the same way movies like Tron portrayed the Internet as a literal digital “information superhighway” of bits. In addition, most (though not all) Unity-powered games are relatively simple mobile titles rather than those likely to serve as gateways to the Metaverse. Not only will the Metaverse grow the pie by too much, big transitions tend to disrupt when they’re hard to see and incumbents are slow to respond or capital constrained. Unlike today’s market leaders, Epic doesn’t charge. Although some games with highest concurrencies have existed for more than twenty years, such as Second Life or Warcraft, they essentially spoofed the experience by “sharding” and splitting users into different “worlds” and servers. Furthermore, Fortnite is rapidly becoming a medium through which other brands, IP, and stories express themselves. Magic Leap seems to believe that by owning the hardware layer, it can be the core driver of the Metaverse (Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson is the company’s Chief Futurist). That is what the Metaverse looks like beyond gaming. The concept is called the "Metaverse," just like in Cline's book. What we see are brands taking a…. This sort of thing hasn’t really happened before. Its players aren’t logging in to “play”, per se, but to be with their virtual and real-world friends. To this end, these experiences neither need to be, nor are they, exactly live. Here’s a look at Ball’s musings on what the Metaverse really is, why it matters, what it’s going to take to build, who’s trying to build it, and what that means for your business. My guest today, Matthew Ball, is a long time coming. We have seen our lives go heavily “online” in the many months since the global pandemic rocked our world and the way it traditionally works. In fact, I can’t think of another author whose work I read as quickly once a new essay drops. As I outlined in February of 2019, it is the express goal of Epic Games, maker of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite. This has included the universe of the game Borderlands, Batman’s hometown of Gotham, and the old west. A thread on my most-read essays of 2020 and my thoughts 3-11 months later. God, in other words, doesn’t create and design the world as though it were a miniature model, but enables one to grow across a mostly blank tableau etc.). Teenagers in the 1970s to 2010s would come home and spend three hours talking on the phone. In The Metaverse, Matthew Ball says the Metaverse will be an always-on, real-time world in which an unlimited number of people can participate at the same time. However, they did not do so together. In fact, most of the FAAMG companies seem to believe that glasses will be a key gateway into our digital future and are collectively investing billions into the form factor. The metaverse, broadly understood as a persistent, shared virtual realm — like an evolved, more-immersive internet — is no longer just fodder for science fiction. Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] By Patrick O'Shaughnessy. The company also notes that it doesn’t even pay these developers directly — unlike the iOS app store — they receive direct payment from users. However, it has rapidly expanded into creating all new games and experience using Fortnite’s engine, assets, and aesthetics. Metaverse will be too.). As a result, a player only really sees or interacts with a small handful of other players at any one time. These include everything from consumer-recognizable .GIFs filetypes to the websocket protocol that underlies almost every form of real-time communication between a browser and other servers on the internet. While the establishments of standards usually involve actual meetings, negotiations, and debates, the standards for the Metaverse won’t be established upfront. (If you want a simpler way to think about the Metaverse, you can imagine it as the Nightmare Before Christmas – you can walk into any experience or activity, and potentially address almost any of your needs, from a single starting point or world that’s also populated by everyone else you know. Consider, for example, “Gold Farming”. Patrick O'Shaughnessy (00:01:42): My guest today, Matthew Ball, is a long time coming. But it will be critical to the Metaverse. But even here, there’s no consensus around exactly how this would work, nor the degree of decentralization required. It’s a difficult question to answer. Individual games such as World of Warcraft have long had functioning economies where real people trade virtual goods for real money, or perform virtual tasks in exchange for real money. Eve Online, for example, can technically have more than 100,000 players “in the same game”, but they are split across different galaxies (i.e. What’s more, the importance of interoperability and live synchronous experiences means we’ll need to prune some existing standards and “standardize” around a smaller set per function. Fortnite is a game. But it’s particularly rare to see it crossed over in an experience they don’t control editorially, let alone one based around unpredictability (not even the creative team behind Fortnite knows what it will do in 2021) and with such a wide range of IP. To this end, Fortnite is one of the few places where the IP of Marvel and DC intersects. CHAPTER 2: WHY DOES THE METAVERSE MATTER? And while Microsoft clearly foresaw mobile, it misread the role of the operating system and too much of the hardware, hence the rise of iOS and Android globally (and Microsoft’s shift from the OS layer to the app/services one). All of this, too, diminishes Epic’s reliance upon Fortnite when it comes to building the Metaverse. Despite several efforts to build a smartphone OS and deploy consumer hardware, Facebook remains the one FAAMG company stuck purely at the app/service layer. & Into the Metaverse Digital Only: January 26 – 28, 2021 Join today’s leaders in games for two days of content and networking surrounding the hottest topics, from major IDFA changes to the imminent arrival of the metaverse. In the past, an acquisition of Unity was hard to justify. PS: This is obviously a very hard topic to nail down. Valve doesn’t offer server infrastructure, but its Steamworks solution gives developers match-making and account services for free — but only for the Steam Store, Valve’s core business. This is like saying is ‘World of Warcraft’, the iPhone, or Google is the Internet. Today, Fortnite works across each major entertainment platform – iOS, Android, PlayStation, Nintendo, PC, Xbox — allowing full cross-play that spans multiple identity/account systems, payment methods, social graphs, and typically closed ecosystems. Two months later, he was even more explicit: “The amount of power possessed by Google and Facebook. (16:20) Matthew Ball updates our understanding of the metaverse. What’s more, these “games” are even more reliant on user-generated content and user-led experiences — there is no underlying game-like goal such as “winning” or “surviving” in Minecraft, the “game” is creation (which isn’t to say that users haven’t created many “games” with game-like goals). Also, that is indeed my Fortnite outfit at the top. More broadly, the Metaverse stands to alter how we allocate and monetize modern resources. These articles have, for good reason, focused on Fortnite as a large contributor to what the metaverse is becoming. English dancer Matthew Ball is a Principal dancer of The Royal Ballet. Matthew Ball’s articles about video gaming and the broader media landscape are required reading for anyone interested in the industry. While it's convenient to think of a single lead company or experience ushering in the Metaverse, the process itself will really be led through a Cambrian explosion of different “things” coming together (not that there can’t be a leader or big winner). The best example of Fortnite’s potential is demonstrated by its ability to persuade many supposed competitors into cooperation (or early “interoperability”) with one another. Universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected. And for that matter, all of the prerequisites for building Facebook existed pre-Y2K, but Facebook didn't come along until 2005 – and even then, it was an accident. From 2016-2018, he served as the global Head of Strategy for Amazon Studios, and prior to that was a … He’s the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, an investor, and probably my … In this sense, the rough outlines of future solutions are often understood and, in a sense, agreed upon well in advance of the technical capacity to produce them. ... Matthew Ball of Epyllion ... Ball said, the Metaverse … As a former Amazon Studios executive and current venture capitalist, Matthew Ball is well versed on interactive media, including gaming and streaming video. Meetings are taking place in online spaces. As these large companies continue to scale, go digital, and integrate into greater technology and introduce social commerce functions, there’s more opportunity for major interconnectivity and interoperability. (One way I try to think about these three areas is via the Book of Genesis – first, “God” must create the underlying universe (“concurrency infrastructure”), then s/he must define its laws of physics and rules (“standards and protocols”), then s/he must fill it with life (“content”) that’s worthwhile, evolves, and iterates against selection pressures. Even though the company is enormously valuable, any would-be acquirer has to keep Unity fully platform-agnostic in order to preserve its market share, developer support, and influence (e.g. Accordingly, the Metaverse is likely the only initiative that can unite all of Google’s sprawling investments to date, from edge computing on Stadia, to Project Fi, Google Street View, its extensive purchases of dark fiber, wearables, virtual assistants and more. Host: Patrick O’Shaughnessy (@patrick_oshag) Books Mentioned. In The Metaverse, Matthew Ball says the Metaverse will be an always-on, real-time world in which an unlimited number of people can participate at the same time. Some believe the definition (and success) of a Metaverse requires it to be a heavily decentralized platform built mostly upon community-based standards and protocols (like the open web) and an “open source” Metaverse OS or platform (this doesn’t mean there won’t be dominant closed platforms in the Metaverse). This reveals Epic’s play with Online Services. There will still be a large role for open-source projects with non-corporate ethos — and they will attract some of the most interesting creative talent in the Metaverse — but there are only a few likely leaders in the early Metaverse. Be persistent – which is to say, it never “resets” or “pauses” or “ends”, it just continues indefinitely, Be synchronous and live – even though pre-scheduled and self-contained events will happen, just as they do in “real life”, the Metaverse will be a living experience that exists consistently for everyone and in real time, Have no real cap to concurrent participations with an individual sense of “presence” – everyone can be a part of the Metaverse and participate in a specific event/place/activity together, at the same time and with individual agency, Be a fully functioning economy – individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of “work” that produces “value” that is recognized by others, Be an experience that spans both the digital and physical worlds, private and public networks/experiences, and open and closed platforms. He openly implores Google and Apple, which generate several thousand times the revenue of Epic’s fledgling store, to match Epic’s rates. Although the full vision for the Metaverse remains hard to define, seemingly fantastical, and decades away, the pieces have started to feel very real. It also operates the most used operating system on earth (Android), as well as the most open of the major consumer computing platforms. 23 Dec 20. Technology frequently produces surprises that nobody predicts. ... (wrote a proto-Metaverse piece a year earlier). This is why it’s so important to Sweeney for his company to lead early efforts to establish the Metaverse — he fears who might instead. At a foundational level, the technology simply does not yet exist for there to be hundreds, let alone millions of people participating in a shared, synchronous experience. This itself isn’t that unique — Microsoft spent $400MM acquiring PlayFab and millions more to support Xbox Live, while Amazon has bought both GameSparks and GameLift in order to sell services to game developers that need lots of servers and tools for their online games to work. Not long after in-game trade economies emerged, many “players” – often employed by a larger company and typically in lower-income countries — would spend a workday collecting digital resources for sale inside or outside the game. For example, The Metaverse is not…. Ball is in the process of establishing a metaverse conference. We are already transacting at scale for purely digital items for purely digital activities via purely digital marketplaces. And it operates at the scale of Fortnite’s player network, allowing any title to leverage the world’s largest player graph to kickstart their userbases. Matthew Ball & Jacob Navok 5/18/20 Matthew Ball & Jacob Navok 5/18/20. 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