This Week in the Metaverse (W14.2023)
Weekly news roundup + Spotlighting a previous episode on Into The Metaverse podcast: A conversation with Timmu Toke (Ready Player Me) on Why Avatars Will be a Big Deal in the Metaverse.
Hey, Yon here! Welcome to Into The Metaverse. My mission is to help you understand what is the metaverse, how it will impact our lives, and what opportunities it unlocks. If you are a marketer, entrepreneur, investor or simply a curious professional, Into The Metaverse is for you. Subscribe to get access to every letter and podcast show that I publish.
Here’s what I’ve got for you this week:
Weekly News Roundup
Roblox and Fortnite: Daily Users & Age Groups
Spotlighting a previous episode on Into The Metaverse podcast: A conversation with Timmu Toke (Ready Player Me) on Why Avatars Will be a Big Deal in the Metaverse.
Let’s dig in!
(1) Weekly News Roundup
How Epic is "doubling down" on its vision for the metaverse → gamesindustry.biz set down for an interview with Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney and EVP Saxs Persson about expanding Fortnite's creations beyond shooters and building an ecosystem based on fairness. And in an interview with VentureBeat, Epic Games shares how it sees the new convergence of games and Hollywood
Meta’s new AI tool could capture real-world objects for the metaverse and its ad business → The Segment Anything model can ‘clip’ objects from images it’s never seen before. The research could have big implications on Meta’s metaverse as well as its core ads business. Read more details in Meta’s paper on the topic. “In the AR/VR domain, SAM (Segment Anything Model) could enable selecting an object based on a user’s gaze and then ‘lifting’ it into 3D,” Meta says in blog post, and Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth told Nikkei that “in the future you might be able to just describe the world you want to create and have the large language model generate that world for you, and so it makes thing like content creation much more accessible to more people.”
Savvy Games Group, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investments Fund, announced that it agreed to purchase Scopely, a privately held mobile game publisher, for $4.9 billion. That makes it one of the largest acquisitions in the industry to date and puts it between Activision Blizzard’s $5.9 billion purchase of King Digital in 2015 and 2022’s acquisition of Bungie for $3.6 billion by Sony. Read more commentary about this acquisition from my friends
and Matthew Kanterman.Will interoperable avatars be essential for the open metaverse? → my fellow entrepreneur and former guest on Into The Metaverse, Timmu Toke (check the episode), who in an interview with VentureBeat explains that at Ready Player Me they believe that either there’s going to a closed metaverse, where the metaverse is going to be owned by one company or there will be an open metaverse, powered by open platforms, which means that the metaverse is more like the internet, where you can navigate between different pages and worlds and have a consistent experience across many of them. At Ready Player Me they think that an open metaverse is the more plausible plan but for that to happen there need to be services and portals and standards to link together different virtual worlds, so it will become more of a network, not owned by one company.
The AI State of the Union → great writeup by
.Microsoft’s rolling out Edge’s AI image generator to everyone → It says the Image Creator tool is ‘now available on desktop for Edge users around the world.
The Sandbox expands with educational partnerships as it looks for growth amid fizzling hype → by its own account, The Sandbox has 23,500 landowners, 4.6 million accounts and more than 400 partners globally with floor price of the platform’s Land NFTs are down 84% to about 0.62 ether (US$1,130) from a peak of 3.9 ether in February 2022, according to CoinGecko. While the platform’s numbers seem impressive, what really counts for important growth metric is the daily active user base and the time they spend on the platform. That KPI remains in question.
‘Piñata Smashlings’ Animated Kids Series in the Works → Toy maker Toikido and Nelvana will turn the upcoming Roblox video game into a character-driven TV show. Proud that Supersocial is be building the centerpiece of the franchise with Toikido - a world-class game-world on Roblox!
Gucci is designing phygital goods for Bored Ape’s virtual world
Metaverse Fashion Week on Decentraland had big brands but few people → according to The Verge, the Fashion Week featured virtual clothes and exhibits from some major names in fashion, but it was lonely, difficult to navigate, and pretty boring.
Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple (GQ) → “As Apple CEO, he has defied his skeptics and refashioned the world’s most creative company on his own exacting terms. Now, in a frank conversation, he offers new insight into his leadership—explaining why he sees himself as an outsider, how he asserts Apple’s values, and what he does to keep from staring at his iPhone all day.”
The Game Developers Conference Fortified ARK’s Outlook On The Future Of Gaming
Mario Is Moving Away From Mobile Games, Reveals Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto (Variety)
Metaverse could drive up profits — but most businesses may not be ready to invest yet (CNBC)
In A.I. Race, Microsoft and Google Choose Speed Over Caution (NYT)
This week on April 3rd was 50 years to the day since the first cell phone call → the day that started a communications and information revolution
Our World Shaken, Not Stirred: Synthetic entertainment, hybrid social experiences, syncing ourselves with apps, and more.
Building a Great Customer Experience in the Metaverse
(2) Roblox and Fortnite: Daily Users & Age Groups. Data shows a different picture than what you may have thought
(3) Spotlighting a previous episode on Into The Metaverse podcast: A conversation with Timmu Toke (Ready Player Me) on Why Avatars Will be a Big Deal in the Metaverse
Timmu Toke is the co-founder and CEO of Ready Player Me. We cover in detail the role that 3D avatars play in enabling new forms of expression, exploration and socialization in the next era of the Internet, and what are some of the use cases that are already showing promise today.
Listen to the episode on: Spotify / Apple / Google / Anchor.
Watch:
Yon is the founder of CEO of Supersocial, a company that designs, builds, promotes, operates and grow cutting-edge virtual worlds on Roblox and beyond. Thank you for subscribing to Into The Metaverse. We grow when readers who appreciate our work spread the word.