Thinking of the Metaverse as a Business Opportunity
Thinking of the metaverse from a business opportunity may shed the best light on what the metaverse really is. And to think of it as a
business opportunity, a person needs first and foremost to think of the business most desiring to be in the business – Facebook.
Facebook announced a name change to Meta on 28 October 2021, laying out the company’s
vision for creating a “metaverse” that links social interactions online with physical experiences.
Facebook had been planning the shift to Meta since the prior summer, when it announced the
formation of a new team to build its metaverse. Vishal Shah, Facebook’s head of metaverse products, outlined the company’s goal as being to “provide as many creators with a way to build a business in the metaverse as possible.” Shah also indicated that said digital and physical products, as well as experiences and services, will be available for trading in the metaverse – most probably through blockchain and NFT tools. The social network’s ad services would support access and development.5
Why such a shift? Facebook has been seeing declining growth, particularly among young users who – according to whistleblower Frances Huagen – are a key target for advertisers who provide 97% of Meta’s revenue.6 Facebook has seen the metaverse as offering up such an opportunity to capture such an audience and has been building the foundations for entry. It has been investing in artificial intelligence for the past ten years. And, more recently, Facebook has staked its future on the VR platform Horizon World, which enjoyed 10x growth since it was rolled out to users in the US and Canada last December.
According to a Meta spokesperson, the total number of users is up to 300,000 when you include those in Horizon Venues, a separate app for hosting live events, like concerts, sports, and comedy. At the time of the interview, Meta
said 10,000 worlds have been created in Horizon Worlds and that there are more than 20,000 members in a private Facebook group for creators.”7
Attempting to be a first mover and subsequently the most dominant player in what is estimated by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to be a $8 trillion market,8 Meta plans “to spend $10 billion this year in constructing this digital world”9 and “hire 10,000 people in Europe to help build it.”10
Meta is not alone. Microsoft purchased Activision Blizzard for almost 70 billion dollars. The reason? According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “When we think about our vision for what a metaverse can be, we believe there won’t be a single, centralized metaverse and there shouldn’t be. We need to support many metaverse platforms … in gaming, we see the metaverse as a collection of communities and individual identities anchored in strong content franchises, accessible on every device.”11 Other top tier players include: NVIDIA, Epic Games, Apple, Decentraland, Roblox Corporation, Unity Software, Snapchat, and Amazon. A lot of these
Attempting to be a first mover and subsequently the most dominant player in what is estimated by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to be a $8 trillion market, Meta plans to spend $10 billion this year in constructing this digital world and hire 10,000 people in Europe to help build it.
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