Wagner James Au / New World Notes

As a good compare and contrast with Meta's questionable vision for the Metaverse, here's a long weekend read — a Financial Times Q&A with Epic Games' Tim Sweeney. Who might disagree, but I totally think this is his nice way of saying "WTF is Meta even thinking?":

[Meta's vision is] in many ways broader than Epic’s. We see this as a central entertainment medium, and they see this as a medium that will connect everybody across distances for any purpose including work, and just hanging out chatting. And they talk a lot about open platform principles: they’re not building a Meta walled garden, they’re trying to contribute to standards and practices that lead towards an open metaverse. And I really like that vision that they’ve articulated. On the other hand, there’s all their actual existing business practices and all their actual existing businesses, where they run ads associated with your content feed and don’t revenue share that with the creators of the content that drove the engagement. And there is an ad economy that is completely controlled by them, which is not an open ad economy and has all the manifestations of an entirely closed ecosystem.

Wait, Mark said we're going to go into the Metaverse to do office work… right?

I’m not sure if that vision actually works, because it’s not very fun to sit around in 3D and just talk to people. It gets really awkward really fast. A bunch of guys can’t get together and just sit in a room for hours and have a conversation, right? You have to be shooting darts or playing billiards or shooting hoops or doing something together to break up the dull moments and keep you entertained for a long period of time. And that’s what this medium does. I think if you strip the entertainment aspect from it, you end up with a super creepy version of America Online chat rooms!

I might go a step further and suggest playing with building blocks while in the meeting, as a kind of focus-creating 3D doodler, like Sine Wave does in Breakroom. But yes, if it's not inherently fun, I doubt it will scale.

My one question (and hopefully I'll get to ask Sweeney myself sometime), is why so much concern over Apple and Google controlling the Metaverse? Here's Tim's case:

Epic [is] fighting Apple and Google currently over their smartphone practices. If these practices continue on smartphone, they’re not only going to dominate digital commerce and digital goods on smartphones, they’re ultimately going to dominate the metaverse and they’re going to dominate all physical commerce taking place in virtual and augmented reality.

They’ve said if you’re using an app to make purchases that entitle you to own digital things, then you must use their payment service. So the physical world and the virtual world merge. You’re going to go out and buy a physical product, and you’re going to be entitled to the virtual thing at the same time. You buy a pink Ferrari in the real world and you own it in the metaverse. Or, for example, the clothing or the toys you buy — pretty much anything will eventually have a digital twin. And if you looked at the terms structure, Apple and Google have created terms that will give them a stranglehold over the metaverse, unless there are major changes in the practices they’re allowed to get away with.

But there are many apps that don't pay a 30% cut to Apple , especially those for physical product sales and tangible services like an Uber ride. So what makes Tim think Apple will extend its commission to mixed reality sales on metaverse platforms, especially the massive ones which already own the customer relationship? Epic's own store already has nearly 200 million paying customers, and that's after just 3 years on the market.

And looking at it more broadly, a metaverse platform will never be a mobile-centric experience, since immersiveness works best on desktops/laptops and VR headsets. So isn't it better to treat mobile as a customer-creating loss leader and an interaction point for casual users (who tend to spend less anyway), while growing the platform's own marketplace outside Google and Apple (and Xbox and the Quest store etc.)?

So all that in mind, complaining about Apple and Google's threat to the Metaverse mainly seems like a way to complain about having to pay high commission fees that seems more elevated and visionary, Rather than… just complaining about high commission fees.

But Tim's been at this way longer than me so I'm sure I am missing something. Hopefully more soon!