- With a better understanding of the Metaverse,
it should be no surprise that gaming companies
are at the forefront.
And that's because of how they've been trained for decades,
not just in design, but in ethos, in philosophy, in feel.
There's lots of things we do because we have to,
because we can't help ourselves.
But we don't play games we don't enjoy.
So many believe that gaming companies
moving to the forefront of our economy
as opposed to enterprise, SaaS,
or tech and productivity companies is positive
because it means that we have people who are designing
so that we feel good, not designing so that we do something.
Almost all technologies are defined by constraints,
either those which affect them or those which they relieve.
And so, what's fascinating about the Metaverse
is the ways in which it seems to be originating
from a relatively small segment of the economy:
consumer leisure.
And at that, a niche one, video gaming.
How is it that consumer products were typically last
to enter the internet era,
yet could be first to the Metaverse?
And the answer is that the constraints that affected
all prior waves, meant that you couldn't do much
entertainment with them.
If you couldn't send an image,
but you could send a document,
then of course it's going to be for business,
it's not going to be for consumers.
That happened with the early internet, with early computers,
and then with smartphones.
But in gaming, the historical constraint
was 'Simulation fidelity.'
And what that meant is that the utility
of a real-time-rendered simulation, 3D or 2D,
wasn't good enough.
A healthcare professional couldn't use it.
The military couldn't use it.
The government rarely used it.
But it did work for "Pong." It worked for "Space Invaders."
It worked for "Legend of Zelda."
And so the accumulated consequence
is that for close to 70 years,
all of the expertise that is now relevant for the Metaverse
has been built and incubated in the gaming sphere.
That's not just design principles, obviously they're best
at building a virtual world, but it's also more nuanced.
They have constructed complex marketplace economies,
and most importantly,
all of the hardest technological problems for the Metaverse-
the challenges of networking globally-
the constraints of having
affordable but super powerful hardware
to actually produce a real-time-rendered simulation-
the world's best expertise comes from the gaming sector.
Today, when we think about the closest experiences
to the Metaverse, we typically identify platforms
such as "Minecraft," "Roblox," or "Fortnite."
The scale of these services is really astonishing.
Roblox has, on the average day, about 55 million users.
By the way, about 65% of them are over the age of 13.
We also have Minecraft, which is about 80% that size.
And Fortnite has about 70 to 80 million
estimated monthly users, and even more engagement time.
All together, there's roughly 800 million people
on the average day, who are spending hours
in these virtual social worlds.
One of the most fascinating things
about the development of the Metaverse
in contrast to the "gaming industry,"
is that we can distinguish them by their focus.
They focus not on game-like objectives-
win, kill, shoot, defeat, score-
but non-game-like objectives.
Instead, the goal is:
identify, express, socialize, build, explore.
And that's one of the ways in which many of us have belief
that this is a scalable experience,
because it meets a human want,
and it demonstrably brings many people together.
And we saw this, especially during the pandemic.
That COVID positively affected the gaming industry,
it's growth rate and adoption, is self-evident.
It destigmatized what many previously considered
to be antisocial, and certainly not aspirational behavior.
There were many schools in the United States
which celebrated a graduation, a birthday,
inside of "Animal Crossing."
There were talk shows hosted in these environments.
Others just saw the ways in which this was actually
a viable educational forum,
or at minimum, one for socializing.
Not everyone was convinced, but many parents saw this
and they now understood its benefits-
not just that it wasn't pernicious.
That's more profound than any short-term acceleration.
There's a famous line from the former Department
of Commerce chair in the United States, where he said,
"Today's supercomputer is tomorrow's PlayStation."
Supercomputers were not designed for everyone,
but in video gaming, the constraints have been relaxed
so that those technologies and that expertise
is applicable everywhere.
John Hopkins University is now performing
live-patient spinal surgery
using game engine-rendering technology.
The U.S. and British militaries are using unreal engine
for simulation training for active combat.
We have reached the point in which the constraints
to simulation fidelity and functionality have relaxed enough
that the expertise in gaming can be applied elsewhere,
such as the Metaverse.
And this is one of the reasons why
we see not just the world's largest technology companies
rushing into category, but we see plausible arguments
that the leaders of tomorrow are today's gaming companies.
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