Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care about the metaverse
Facebook is dumping money into a posthumanist meta-reality, right?
Mark Zuckerberg is steering Facebook into a vague VR project centered in a sci-fi vision of the future. This proposed project is part game, part simulation, and part co-working space. You will be able to own virtual property and share virtual art with your friends. It’s basically Fortnite, but in VR and for millennials.
I don’t think Facebook wants to be a virtual reality company. I think Facebook wants to be the boring social network your parents still use. So why are they investing so much into their VR division? Here’s my idea:
Facebook's metaverse isn't an entertainment or social project, it's age-tech.
Facebook is making the bet that their aging customer base will eventually be left with little-to-no mobility or social connection, and that the senior citizen of the 2030s will be techy enough to seek a virtual life in place of real interaction. This makes sense when you consider that these are Generation X, who were around for the rise of the internet and are currently the most likely to own desktop computers. It makes even more sense when you consider that Facebook is the largest social media platform among Gen-X, and that Facebook likely wishes to leverage this base even further as they age into their 50s and 60s. In essence, when tech-literate seniors can no longer travel to see their friends, Facebook wants to be there with a Facebook Group and a cheap headset.
Notably, this type of project actually isn't that far from Facebook's brand of connecting people with their family and friends over the internet. For the consumer, it's not a quantum leap to go from hosting a bowling league through Facebook to bowling directly from your home, and it’s easy to justify trying something new if it brings you closer to a group you care about. By the time Facebook delivers on their ambitions, virtual reality will likely look like another innocuous feature of a monolithic user experience, and, as always for Facebook, network effects will do the rest.
Of course, if the jump for VR isn’t difficult for Facebook’s consumers, it will continue to pose a challenge for Facebook themselves. They have first-mover advantage among their own users, but there is no fundamental reason why another large tech company with a large user base can’t develop their own virtual reality demo and get to market before them. Microsoft, for example, is deeply invested in VR and is already an industry leader in cloud gaming. To win in VR, Facebook would need to develop their own graphics and cloud capabilities to match, while at the same time investing in unrivaled user experiences that can’t be edged out by competition long-term.
Facebook’s strategy, therefore, is not to have the quickest rollout or the best graphics in virtual reality, as Epic or Microsoft would have them beat, but rather to cede the market of gamers and early adopters to other companies. By the time Facebook fully commits to a VR offering, the market will be filled by products targeted towards existing or edge-case markets, but the value proposition for the average consumer (read: old people) will be the same as it is in 2021. The appeals of Virtual Reality will be made apparent by the disparate offerings, but so will the drawbacks.
Thus, fifteen years and billions of dollars later, Mark Zuckerberg will get his iPod moment. Facebook’s mass-market VR offering won’t seem like much at the time it launches, but before long it will become clear that the project works better than any thus far. In fact, it just works, as a bland and easily accessible offering by a trillion dollar company can be expected to just work. It’s the kind of thing your grandma would play.
For now, Facebook have gone to great lengths to obscure the "vision" of the metaverse as much as possible. Zuckerberg has described the metaverse as a virtual office, a document-sharing method, a workspace for virtual art, and "the next best thing to a working teleportation device". For their part, Oculus (Facebook's first VR acquisition) has been mostly focused on gaming hardware. Thus, Facebook now claims to have one sixth of their employees1 working to develop VR offerings for markets (document-sharing, virtual art, gaming) that are already dominated by other large tech companies.
So, which is it? Is Facebook now one-sixth teleportation company, or do they just want to sell your dad a VR headset?
Sorry, a Ray-Ban(R) VR Headset. Gotta look good in the virtual conference room, right?
https://uploadvr.com/facebook-employees-2021/
The Onion had a similar thought:
https://www.theonion.com/zuckerberg-avatar-enthusiastically-greets-staff-in-vr-o-1847964187