Under the fire of ChatGPT, the Metaverse, which was once prosperous for a while, is a little lonely. The epidemic has given rise to the demand for human virtual interaction. With the improvement of chip computing power, the popularization of 5G technology, the maturity of cloud computing, blockchain and other technologies, the development of metaverse has become more and more feasible. Capital with a keen sense of smell moved upon hearing the news and expanded aggressively in this field.
However, life gradually returned to before the epidemic, and the relevant layout of the Metaverse was also rethought and examined, and slowly returned to rationality and restraint. Not long ago, Meta and Pico successively started layoffs, which made people think about the future of the Metaverse.
cold air
In October last year, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Horizon Worlds, a virtual social platform for Metaverse, had less than 200,000 users. In November of the same year, Zuckerberg officially announced that Meta laid off 11,000 people, accounting for about 13% of Meta’s total employees. This is the largest layoff among the Silicon Valley giants, and it is extremely rare in the world.
At the beginning of this month, Meta released its financial report for 2022. According to the data, the annual loss of Metaverse business reached 13.717 billion US dollars, and the loss increased by 29.50% and 34.57% respectively year-on-year. Meta said this was due to lower sales of the virtual headset Quest. The day before the earnings report, Meta announced the closure of the UGC game platform “Crayta” and the VR action game “Echo VR”.
Coincidentally, on November 4, 2022, Shen Li, the head of Tencent’s XR business, reported his resignation. Since then, the information about the succession of the new head of Tencent’s XR business has been unknown. Tencent XR business also reported the suspension of operations in January this year. You know, Tencent once invested 520 million US dollars, about 3.5 billion yuan, in Roblox Corporation, which is known as the “first stock in the metaverse”. Not only that, Tencent also chose to take a stake in the domestic VR game company Wemo Era, and spent a lot of effort on the Metaverse business.
And Microsoft, which has always had a relatively right to speak in the metaverse field, will focus on layoffs in the virtual reality (VR) department at the beginning of this year. In addition, including the HoloLens and mixed reality (MR) departments, the core architecture has been greatly reduced. In terms of specific business, Microsoft’s VR-based social space AltspaceVR will be officially offline on March 10; MRTK (Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit, a cross-platform framework for virtual reality space) Converted to an open-source model for lower-cost operations.
At the end of January, according to media reports, Ma Yingwu, the head of Kuaishou Metaverse, resigned, and the business of Metaverse was suspended. It is reported that Kuaishou’s metaverse project panoramic video business has also been suspended. It is understood that since Ma Yingwu joined Kuaishou in 2020, he has incubated Kuaishou’s panoramic video project and Kuaishou Metaverse space project, and has been focusing on exploring Metaverse content and consumption directions.
Recently, according to relevant reports, the Pico team under Byte has about 2,000 people, and the optimization ratio this time is about 15%, and about 300 people are affected. Regarding the rumors of layoffs, Pico responded that it was a normal organizational adjustment, and it was only a partial unit adjustment, which would not affect the overall business development.
On the hardware side, Sony had also slashed PS VR2 shipments to about 1 million units, as rumors had previously been slashed due to disappointing pre-orders. Sony had previously aimed to have 2 million units ready by the launch season, using its second-generation headset to drive user growth and adoption of VR.
In any case, this kind of collective antipyretic behavior is tantamount to a bone scraping to cure poison. In order to ensure business profitability and stock price stability, giants choose to suspend or give up innovative businesses with a long return on investment period, which is a rational choice for management .
how to tell the story
The layoffs and business cuts of the major manufacturers do not directly reflect that the Metaverse has been completely desolate and lost its future. In recent years, the initial expansion of AR and VR technology application scenarios in Metaverse has opened up a good situation. With the update of hardware devices and the iteration of the underlying technology, some simple application scenarios such as game modeling are no longer a problem, and the exploration of social and entertainment scenarios is in the ascendant.
At the Beyond conference last year, Technotech used the metaverse technology and interacted with exhibitors from all over the world through virtual images, and completed a unique technology event. At the same time, various AR/VR devices also enhance the immersive entertainment experience, which can meet the immersive effect in some cases.
Market research firm IDC predicts that both VR and AR hardware shipments in the Chinese market will achieve positive growth in 2022. In addition to IDC, domestic and foreign market research institutions such as Omdia, CCS Insight, and TrendForce have also given positive forecasts on the development of VR/AR hardware: VR/AR hardware shipments will achieve substantial growth in the next 3 to 5 years. If Apple enters the game in the future, the hardware market may also show new ideas.
With the further maturity of technology, the dominant position of social networking and entertainment in the metaverse will decline, and a new pattern of intercommunication with the real world will enter. At that time, new applications of the metaverse will appear, and there may even be occupations specially suitable for the metaverse. Makes virtual and reality gradually integrated.
However, before evolving to a higher form, the metaverse itself is not important. We need to focus on chips, communication technologies (such as 6G), AI and cloud computing capabilities. Metaverse requires extremely strong computing power and image processing capabilities, as well as a large amount of computing and network resources. Enterprises that focus on these fields will benefit in the long run.
Needless to say, the importance of the hardware side. Although AR/VR devices are already in full bloom, in the fields of eyeball recognition, natural language recognition, multi-dimensional sensing devices, etc., it still takes a long time to accumulate, and it will not be achieved overnight.
Finally, there is the cliche content creation platform. At present, game engine platforms and industrial 3D design companies are all highly anticipated. In this track, the development of AR/VR technology is very important, but a large number of game resources can well realize the scale effect and help creators realize cash, so channel capacity building should not be neglected.
Summarize
Since the metaverse entered the mainstream, this is a unique period of cooling off. With the continuous downward transmission of cold air, the entire industry will usher in a long period of strengthening internal strength. Even though most companies have left the market sadly, those who can stand the test and continue to grow iteratively may be the guides for the future direction of the Metaverse.
