Do we really want the Metaverse?

Since its beginning, the blockchain space has been thriving on “narratives”. Author Nathaniel Whittemore has done a “narrative watch” on several occasions to keep an eye on the new narratives that keep burgeoning in the space and test their relevancy. Over the past 10 years, Blockchain products have developed a lot around can based narratives: “Now you can own your own assets”, “Now you can own land in the Metaverse”, “Now you can pay your coffee in bitcoin”. When some of these narratives happen to intersect with an actual need from people then there is space for growth, but most of the time these can narratives are not meeting any demand from users and fall into the forgotten products cemetery. When ChatGPT or Dall-E were released recently, there was no need to push a can based narrative: people immediately understood the product and felt a compelling interest in it, so much so that the user base grew to millions of users in a matter of days. It’s not so much that people can use it, it’s all about do they want to use it or not. Through this blogpost, I want to focus on a particular example of a web3 narrative that is, in my opinion, bound to disappear due to its incapacity to generate this compelling feeling: the Metaverse.

It’s always delicate to predict the future, to tell whether something will succeed or fail. After all, how many times have we read that Bitcoin would die, or that internet was just a fad? But I feel like I need to be bold (or stupid) and make some predictions about the Metaverse and its ties to the web3 industry.

The origin story of the word “Metaverse” is now fairly known and has been shared by many people already. For the sake of exhaustivity though, let me give you a brief overview of its origin and meaning; coined by Author Neal Stephenson in the 1992 science fiction novel “Snow Crash”, the Metaverse can be defined as follow:

The Metaverse is a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal, and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets. In colloquial usage, a Metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection.

That’s the wikipedia definition, and I kinda like it because it encompasses different aspects of the Metaverse: “single”, “universal”, “immersive”. One of the question people might have since we’re talking about a 1992 novel is, “why are we hearing so much about the Metaverse now, 30 years later?“. Well there are a few reasons to that, but mainly, it’s only now that the necessary pieces of the Metaverse are coming to maturity and we can start assembling the puzzle. Immersive technologies such as VR and AR are relatively new (in their modern and actually functional form). With all the necessary technologies in place, people started to see the vision, to catch a glimpse of what the Metaverse could be. The 2021 year saw a particular boost due to 2 factors: The NFT boom, and the Facebook/Meta rebranding. Here’s what Google has to say about the search occurrences:

There are 3 moments that are interesting to point out:

Ready Player One

The blockbuster movie literally dedicated to the Metaverse and directed by Steven Spielberg was released In March of 2018. I remember at the time it definitely put the word “Metaverse” on the map, but if you look at the google search occurrences, it was barely a bleep compared to the two events which sparked the term “Metaverse” to really take off.

NFT

In early 2021, as the crypto bull market was taking off, NFTs started to gain traction. I remember vividly, one of the first sign of that was prominent people in the crypto space going after “Crypto Punk” NFTs as a way to virtue signal that they’ve been in the space forever (Good, here’s a candy).

As people started to wonder what these NFTs were good for, a dominant narrative started to emerge: These NFTs would help you create your digital identity in the Metaverse. Which, as a gamer, is something I can relate to. I remember when I was heavily playing World of Warcraft, I would have liked that the legendary drops I earned in game were actually NFTs! One interesting takeaway looking at the Metaverse google trend result is that NFTs, although being very niche, put the Metaverse on the map 10 to 20 times more than a Steven Spielberg directed movie centered around the Metaverse. To me, it’s telling of how strong some web3 actors have been pushing the Metaverse narrative during this previous bull market and NFT boom.

Meta

Facebook rebranding to Meta is eventually what brought the term Metaverse to the mainstream. With a narrative focused around immersive technologies such as VR and AR, Facebook has chosen to go all in on this vertical, and to promote a future where the Metaverse holds the main role in the way people interact and consume entertainment online.

I feel like I need to share a short anecdote here, as this will be relevant to this piece. In 2013 I was working for a video game company in Tokyo, and we got our hands on an Oculus Rift devkit v1. I was the one who set it up and got to try it out first, and I got completely mind blown by this new product. I had tried virtual reality headset in amusement parks in the past, but this was nothing similar. I was SO excited by what this technology could bring. 2 years later I bought the first portable VR headset, the Gear VR, and got on a mission to have all my friends try it out so they could see the future too. 1 year after, I quit my job to join a VR company and work there for about a year. I was a believer. But little by little, I started to notice my excitement fading. I wouldn’t pick up my Gear VR so often, and I wouldn’t play any game/experience more than 2 or 3 times. 10 years later, I have a bittersweet analysis of VR, and you’ll see that it is very relevant to this article. I wanted VR to work, I wanted to spend a lot of time in VR, but it didn’t happen. If there’s one guy who would have done it, it should have been me, really. But it never happened. Why? Looking back, I have a few hypothesis:

-The headsets are heavy, cumbersome & make you sweat. Although thanks to the several iterations of the hardware, it’s less true than 10 or even 5 years ago, it’s still true to this day.

-The experiences you have access to have a low replay value. A huge majority of the content available in VR is limited to “experiences”. As such, they are very mind blowing the first time, but they have a very limited replay value. The problem is, they’re expensive to create, and so it creates an ecosystem that needs new content constantly, but this new content is expensive to create, and people only use it once before they move on to something else. Not really optimal! Same goes for gaming. Because of the first issue I mentioned, you cannot have people stay hours with their VR headset on. Nobody wants to do that. So how do you reproduce gameplay experiences with high replay value, without asking people to stay with their VR headset on for hours? Kinda counter-intuitive, right?

-Following on the previous argument, one thing you get to realize when playing games in VR is that it’s sport! Playing a game like GTA, Fortnite or Call of Duty, which are games with high replay value, are basically effortless on console. Most people playing these games can play them for hours, because they’re comfortably sitting on a couch, eating snacks and drinking when thirsty. Now imagine playing the same games, but in VR: holding a gun, wielding a sword, jumping…Believe me, those activities can become pretty tiring, pretty fast! Even worse, the next time you’ll consider playing these games, you’ll think twice about putting your VR headset on. That’s a big negative impact parameter to take into account.

-You’re cut from the world. VR means immersion, but immersion means you’re inside another (virtual) world, and so you’re not in a shared environment with people around you. If you’re playing games on a TV set, or on your mobile, you’re at the sweet spot where you can switch in & out of the game really easily. You can look around and see what’s happening, or talk with other people in the room. This is not something you can do when you’re in an immersive setting, and this is not something people are willing to do for a too long time. Natural anxiety of not being aware of one’s surrounding or social stigma of looking like someone excluded from the real world are elements that will persist.

So why am I am going through these negative aspects of VR? My point was to highlight a dichotomy between my initial enthusiasm and the reality of things. This experience to me embodied Shopenhauer’s famous quote “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills". The other side of this quote is that man cannot also will what he doesn’t will. Let me explain: I tried VR, but I wasn’t able to will VR in a sustainable fashion, despite my desire to will this reality into existence. And so what does it say about this blogpost? It stresses the difference between can based narratives and what people really want. A lot of people thought they wanted VR before trying it, because the can based narrative was extremely strong: You can immerse yourself in a virtual world, you can communicate with other people using an avatar, you can reach a level of “presence” never seen before etc… Those are things we thought we wanted. And to be fair, I still feel like we do want them. But apparently, we are not spontaneously willing them enough. Put another way, the trade offs mentioned earlier are too strong right now and heavily burden the development of this market and of the Metaverse.

I’m curious to know who/what company pushed the Metaverse narrative in the web3 spaxce. My guess is, companies like The Sandbox, Decentraland or Cryptovoxel are some of the companies who’ve pushed this narrative the most, followed by PFP NFT projects who needed to justify roadmaps & use cases by saying that these PFP would become your “digital identity in the Metaverse”. It’s understandable. They are companies building virtual worlds, most of the time as a gaming experience first and foremost, and they have an interest in coining a term that could describe what they’re doing and that possesses some kind of mystic. The reason why the Metaverse picked up during the NFT boom, in my opinion, is that with open worlds and play-to-earn type of games, people saw the opportunity of being able to enjoy their favorite game, and own a piece of it. Knowing the size of the gaming industry, that’s a seducing promise!

There are a couple problems with that narrative though:

-Although I understand why they picked “Metaverse“ as a buzzword, and they had reasons to do so, I think it’s a bad idea. Strictly speaking, what these platform are building is either a 3D open worlds a la Minecraft, or fantasy storytelling experiences for the most developed PFP projects. They are not Metaverse, and it’s a big stretch to try to call them so.

-Ownership through blockchain and NFT is a powerful narrative, but it’s not a decisive one when it comes to the stickiness factor of these experiences. Games or open world experiences are successful because they are compelling, fun, and users usually want to play them often. Being able to own a piece of it is an interesting addition, and not a small one, but it’s not a decisive one. It’s not enough. Gaming experience comes first, not ownership, and something we tend to see often in this burgeoning Metaverse space is people merely copy/pasting already existing non-web3 experiences, adding a NFT layer, and hoping users will flock to them just because of this ownership factor. The problem is that this is not what we see happening.

-”Metaverse” is a catchall term that not 2 people have the same definition, the same vision of. Tying the success of web3 technologies to something so flimsy is, imho, going down the wrong path. Soon, if not already, it’s going to be very easy for people to attack the Metaverse narrative because of its lack of users, or its lack of compelling experiences, and it would be a shame that the whole web3 space be dragged down alongside , and to me that’s a real threat. It would be easy for commenters to say things like “See, your Metaverse thing that web3 was supposed to be built for? Nobody wants it. it’s the proof the web3 space is useless”, when actually blockchain have a very solid narrative of decentralization, ownership and governance that are essentials for healthy digital societies.

If anything, the internet is the Metaverse. Or at least, it’s a Metaverse to become. With an internet evolving to an infrastructure based on blockchains, digital identity, portability, cross-integration become things which are more & more realistic and exciting for things to come. This can become the seed for the Metaverse, as originally described. Certainly not for so-called Metaverses, opportunistically rebranded as such for marketing purposes.

It’s a very easy thing, especially when you’re an entrepreneur, to mistake a new tech development for something users are waiting for, and necessarily want. There are countless examples of forgotten products & services that people thought they wanted, but actually didn’t use at all: Segway, Google Glass, 3D TV, SACD. The post-mortem for these failures is also often hard to execute. Indeed, it’s rarely obvious whether a product failed because the hardware was poorly designed, poorly marketed or too high priced etc…Most of the time, it could be all at the same time.

For example, going back to our VR headsets example, the overwhelming narrative to explain the lack of adoption so far is that “the hardware is not there yet”, ie we still need several iteration of the product before we reach the perfect version that will fly off the shelves. I myself have been relaying this narrative for years, after trying the first versions of the Oculus VR headset. But over the last few years, I’ve started to second guess myself: what if the fundamental flaws which plague this industry can never be overcome? No matter how bad I thought I wanted to live in a world where we use VR for many things, where VR experiences and games are compelling, and I’d choose putting my headset on Vs reading something, hanging out with friends IRL or watching a movie, the reality is that this world didn’t come to existence. Yet? It’s hard to predict. A lot of VCs seem to still believe in this narrative as we see continuous investment in that space, but recently the market punished Meta for lack of results after their strategy shift. So maybe the tides are turning?

I picked this exemple because it’s relevant to this blogpost for 2 reasons.

First, the success of VR/AR is directly tied to the construction of the Metaverse as we imagine it. So its failure to take off at a mass market scale is also a sign that the Metaverse narrative might not be the right one.

Second, it’s a perfect example of something people thought they wanted, but when made available, mass adoption went cruelly missing. One could argue that it’s a very long process, a tough nut to crack, and that for this technology to mature it’s normal to take more than 10 years.

So yes, maybe I’ll be proven wrong in the next 5 to 10 years, when technology progresses so much that we’re presented with VR/AR products enabling mass market adoption. But maybe not. I was recently watching digests of CES 2023 regarding VR, and it feels like the same thing I was watching 5 years ago: either products that’ll never be financially profitable and limited to arcade locations (remember the walking pods for VR?), or technologically more advanced headsets, with better image quality, lighter hardwares, longer batteries, etc…But not a game changer. So for now I would say I’m still relatively cautious regarding the Metaverse capacity to take off when I look at it through that lens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8uNHjiuQwk

One of two things: Either you consider VR/AR as an essential piece of the Metaverse, and in that case I’m really pessimistic about the Metaverse narrative for web3, or you don’t, but then the Metaverse is just a smoke and mirror buzzword to rebrand what the internet actually is. I think crypto or web3, no matter how you prefer to call it, present much stronger narratives already, ones that don’t require to go down the fuzzy Metaverse path. Things like decentralization, ownership, governance, transparency are elements which are strong enough in and of themselves. We don’t need to tie up the success of the blockchain industry to another buzzword which would most likely drag it down in its downfall. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not rooting for the Metaverse to never exist and not be popular. It’s just that I think we need to questions our own beliefs when it comes to narratives. We need to reassess whether or not the narrative we’re pushing is something we think people wanted, but actually are not ready to adopt massively, or if it’s just a matter of time, and we’re almost there. As far as the Metaverse is concerned, I’m getting more pessimistic by the day.