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Mateverse: Lower Your Expectations on Its Investments

Source: Science and Technology Daily | 2022-05-13 10:11:44 | Author: YU Haoyuan

By YU Haoyuan

A woman stands in front of a Meta sign in the San Francisco Bay Area. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

Since Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook's morphing into Meta and its metaverse concept, the somewhat obscure new evolution of social connection has become very popular. Despite not being fully understood, many people are still willing to hop onto the investing bandwagon, believing it could be a lucrative opportunity to get rich quickly.

The metaverse could be the future of the Internet as alluded to by some Internet gurus, who have great expectations. Already, many game producers are busy competing in their research and development in preparation of entering the metaverse. Just in April, tens of millions of dollars was ploughed into the metaverse market. For example, in early April, Sony and Lego Group announced a two billion USD investment in funding for Epic's metaverse efforts. In late April, former CEO of Foundation 9 Entertainment, Jon Goldman, also joined the competition to invest 50 million USD in VR games and the metaverse. These indications augur well for a bright metaverse future.

However, because it is in its infancy, there are practical business concerns about how to lower high risks in investing in the metaverse.

Up to now, no one in this industry has invented anything new. According to Forbes, the present situation of the metaverse is more like something that has existed in the gaming industry for decades. Much of what metaverse promises, people have already seen in games. People can talk to, be entertained, and interact with virtual objects just by playing games.

What's even more disturbing is that the metaverse may just be a Mark Zuckerberg's bet on the future for his business. Zuckerberg pointed out that the metaverse technology could be realized later in this decade, "This is laying the groundwork for a very successful 2030s, when this is more established as the primary computing platform," he said,which caused a great deal of debate online.

David Z Morris of Deskcoin has taken a dim view of the future of the metaverse. He considered the statement by Zuckerberg as an absolutely harebrained notion for the CEO of a massive corporation to say about its so-called marquee project. For serious investors, "This is a complete gamble and maybe not real at all and we had no substantive reason to rebrand around it. Ignore it."

Those who think the metaverse could work, should also pay attention to avoiding financial swindling and bubble bursting situations. International media and observers have already voiced their concerns in this regard.

"In reality, the metaverse seems to be a one-size-fits-all solution, partly as a result of poorly undefined connotation and denotation. This situation also leaves much room for hype, speculation, financial fraud, illegal transactions and other activities," Wu Tong, a well-known scholar of the digital economy, told Science and Technology Daily.

However, despite these concerns, this seems like a phase that every emerging industry will see in its preliminary development. Many industries won't reach maturity until they experience several rounds of bubble accumulating and bursting.

As a suggestion to level up metaverse future development and reduce concerns from the public, Wu made a suggestion. "Having ones' hands tied in the early stages of the metaverse is indeed not conducive to industrial development. My personal advice is to make a dynamically updated 'negative list' for the development of the metaverse industry, specifying what cannot be done and what can be done beyond that."

Editor: 余昊原

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