I was reading this article this article about the Metaverse when it hit me where all the mistakes were being made.
It’s all about experiences
Roblox is making this huge splash and is being sold as toys and cultural items at an amazing rate. My Walmart has movie toys, but they're obviously for adults and come with higher pricing. The Roblox toys are mostly sold out. The same can be said about Minecraft. The local book store sells more Minecraft books and Roblox books than stuff about cartoons or movies.
The games create an experience, and the fans love that. Facebook can't create that, so they've created a false version of the idea, and are paying for nice articles about their ideas.
The word Experience is being used carefully, because it's expected to become the next big thing. There is a book on it and everything. The problem is, the experience economy has been slowed or not moving the way the really big names want. Meta wants to create the Experience, but has no clue how that works. It's a buzzword and not an understanding. It's the Kinect vs the Wii all over again. The Kinect was a great piece of kit and I loved it, but the entire game design and promotion was a false idea on why the Wii worked so well.
We've already seen the Metaverse on PS3 and it was a similar result. Yet, every few years some big name wants to make it again. I suspect they read too many people read Snow Crash which influenced so many books, anime, movies, and game designers.
Did they end up buying Zynga, the creators of Farmville?
I checked, it was bought by take2 this year for $12.7 Billion.
You have a good point, but I don't think Facebook is actually thinking this through.
It's weird because they never usually have problems buying up other companies just to own the IP, namely Oculus itself. You'd think they would have acquired some software to go along with that. Rec Room is another example that would be perfect for them. It's a VR game with a much smaller userbase than Roblox, but it would give them a good footing to start from.
They could do that, but I get the feeling this could be all smoke and mirrors to keep investors.
Facebook didn't want games, it seems they wanted to create some kind of an office use case, where workers could be tracked right down to 'where they were' and 'what they were doing' from anywhere. So they bought a game peripheral and used games to fund the idea of creating some kind of a new office productivity tool with it.
If that's true, they deserved the response.