Accordingly, the Metaverse is likely the only initiative that can unite all of Google’s sprawling investments to date, from edge computing on Stadia, to Project Fi, Google Street View, its extensive purchases of dark fiber, wearables, virtual assistants and more. Film, COVID Matthew Ball 3/29/20 Film, COVID Matthew Ball 3/29/20. This engine is used by more than half of mobile games and is even more widely deployed in real-world rendering/simulation use cases (e.g. So while the Metaverse is not quite here, if we are considering incremental innovations to how you can create a game, how realistic the physics are, the simulations, the economy, all of those innovations are happening right now, Ball said. If the 88%/12% store wars were a coin toss, here’s it goes: Heads, other stores don’t respond, so Epic Games Store wins and all developers win. We believe that a new era of media and marketing is rapidly emerging, one empowered by technology and driven by creative storytelling. Gaming has gotten to such an advanced level when it comes to simulation and visualization that it is paving the way for the Metaverse. It will expand to spatial computing, AR wearables, and other devices that will enable a level of creativity and interconnectivity that we’ve never seen before. Individuals currently have multiple identity profiles online, between Google, Apple, Facebook, and more. If you “declared” your intent to start a Metaverse, these parties would never embrace interoperability or entrust their IP. This was in part because few in private business understood the commercial potential of a World Wide Web, but it was also true that these groups were essentially the only entities with the computational talent, resources, and ambitions to build it. To this end, the Metaverse has become the newest macro-goal for many of the world’s tech giants. However, the most well-worn is likely to be a copy of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which first described and essentially coined the terms “Metaverse” and “Avatar”. This can be as small as digital outfits (“skins”) or dances (“emotes”). Host: Patrick O’Shaughnessy (@patrick_oshag) Books Mentioned. However, its inevitable influence over standards, playtime, and content creation are so large that it’s difficult to imagine it won’t be acquired by and integrated into a major technology player with a wider range of assets and advantages. To this end, Epic charges only 12% (which includes the 5% Unreal licensing fee, too, making it only 7% for many customers). Venture capitalist and former Amazon executive Matthew Ball wrote this year “just as it was hard to envision in 1982 what the Internet of 2020 would be, we don’t really know how to describe the metaverse”. -Matthew Ball Imagine 12 million concurrent users charged $1 each to attend. 3 episodes totalling 3 hours, 45 minutes. Patrick and I went deep into topics including the Metaverse (its technical challenges, opportunities, and philosophy), IP and the role of business model and technical innovation in storytelling, the Unreal Engine, Cloud Gaming, Fortnite as a competitor to Spotify, and more. Fortnite is a game. What is the internet? Venture Capitalist and elite media analyst Matthew Ball posits that the future is already here. Another idea relates to the fundamental communications architecture of the Metaverse. Pioneers in virtual worlds met up at GamesBeat 2020 to talk about the promise of the Metaverse and what it will take to get there. The Metaverse isn’t about scaling what we have, it’s about connecting everything we have together. Today, Fortnite works across each major entertainment platform – iOS, Android, PlayStation, Nintendo, PC, Xbox — allowing full cross-play that spans multiple identity/account systems, payment methods, social graphs, and typically closed ecosystems. The major tech companies don’t just want to lead the Metaverse, they want to own and define it. From 2016-2018, Matthew served as the global Head of Strategy for Amazon Studios, and prior to that was a Director at The Chernin Group's Otter Media, a digital media investment company founded by long-time Newscorp COO and 20th Century Fox CEO Peter Chernin. Still, it’s often impossible to predict how they’ll fall into place, which features matter more or less, what sort of governance models or competitive dynamics will drive them, or what new experiences will be produced. Link “There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.” Ben Evans on how the Covid-19 shock might accelerate disruptive transitions in various industries. non-engine or advertising) services have not been widely adopted. While science fiction may have us inclined to assume that one dominant company will usher us all into the Metaverse, that's not likely, as it is not the way we operate today. Columbia Venture Community is pleased to invite you to a virtual panel on the Metaverse, the next stage of the internet (and a key investment focus of Big Tech and beyond), with Matthew Ball and Jacob Navok. There may not be 100 players, but it’s still a battle royale. As it grows, you build around this town, occasionally but judiciously tearing down and replacing “old” sections, sometimes only if/when a problem (insufficient supply of power) or disaster hits (a fire). And if the Metaverse does indeed serve as a functional “successor” to the web — only this time with even greater reach, time spent, and more commercial activity — there’s likely to be even more economic upside. Any thoughts, comments, disagreements, additions, ideas - please email me at mb at matthewball dot vc and I will make updates. However, as Ball notes in his piece, the idea of it being a successor to the internet means that "the Metaverse has become the newest macro-goal for many of the world’s tech giants". And then last but not least, Matthew Ball. This will be enormously difficult and take decades. And it won’t directly come into existence; there will be no clean “Before Metaverse” and “After Metaverse”. A “game” – Fortnite has many elements of the Metaverse. Over time, the sophistication of Epic’s gaming engine has grown so significant it now powers a variety of traditional media experiences. The expressions that will come out of the capabilities we are headed toward are unknown and exciting. Matthew Ball He is also a Venture Partner at Makers Fund. This does happen from time to time (e.g. “Town squares” emerge organically around existing infrastructure and behaviors, to fulfill existing civilian and commercial needs. In some cases, these “LTMs” transform part of Fortnite’s map into a mini-virtual world that, when entered, changes the aesthetics, items and playstyle of the game to resemble another. (25:10) Kodak’s $765M loan to produce pharmaceuticals (41:50) Listen on Apple , Spotify , or Google Podcasts. Two months later, he was even more explicit: “The amount of power possessed by Google and Facebook. Other companies, such as Genvid (a portfolio company), are building SDKs that allow anyone to build server-rendered experiences that millions can participate in together using livestreams with light client-side interactivity. These articles have, for good reason, focused on Fortnite as a large contributor to what the metaverse is becoming. To this end, the Metaverse offers Microsoft the opportunity to reclaim the OS/hardware leadership it ceded during the handoff from PC to mobile. Ball is in the process of establishing a metaverse conference. Some believe the definition (and success) of a Metaverse requires it to be a heavily decentralized platform built mostly upon community-based standards and protocols (like the open web) and an “open source” Metaverse OS or platform (this doesn’t mean there won’t be dominant closed platforms in the Metaverse). And you’ll recognize each one. The Internet today is a product of a relatively messy process in which the open (mostly academic) internet developed in parallel with closed (mostly consumer-oriented) services that often looked to “rebuild” or “reset” open standards and protocols. “Virtual reality” – VR is a way to experience a virtual world or space. The Metaverse isn’t about scaling what we have, it’s about connecting everything we have together. A thread on my most-read essays of 2020 and my thoughts 3-11 months later. It also operates one of the largest digital ad networks (a nice side effect of powering 10B daily minutes of mobile entertainment). In addition, the company is not just the market leader in indexing both the digital and physical world (nearly 10,000 employees contribute to its mapping initiatives), but it is also the most successful digital software and services company outside of China. Will we know the future when we see it? He’s the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, an investor, and probably my favorite business essayist writing today. Excellent analysis by Matthew Ball on the potential shape, components and players of a possible Metaverse. If brands fund good content and people watch it, or sponsor the funding of content by creators, brands stand the best chance of benefiting from inbound marketing and brand lift. This is described in more detail later in the piece, but while today’s Internet is structured around individual servers “talking” to one another on an as-needed basis, some believe the Metaverse needs be “wired” and “operated” around persistent many-to-many connections. Furthermore, Fortnite is rapidly becoming a medium through which other brands, IP, and stories express themselves. The value destroyed by such a decision and the premium required to buy Unity is likely to make such a move prohibitive. Notably, rumors persist that Sweeney had fought for even lower fees but settled with his board at 12% – a sum he himself admits doesn’t always cover operating costs. Metaverse will be too.). In 1945 Vannevar Bush described what he-called the “Memex”, a single device that would store all books, records and communications, and mechanically link them together by association. My guest today, Matthew Ball, is a long time coming. The best example of Fortnite’s potential is demonstrated by its ability to persuade many supposed competitors into cooperation (or early “interoperability”) with one another. Still, the Metaverse requires everyone be able to create and contribute ‘content’ and ‘experiences,’ not just well-staffed corporations and technically skilled individuals trying to make games or movies. In addition, these companies are incredibly resistant to cross-integrating their systems or sharing their data. And the more valuable and interoperable the Metaverse is, the harder it will be to establish industry-wide consensus around topics such as data security, data persistence, forward compatible code evolution, and transactions. The Internet as we experience it today works because of standards and protocols for visual presentation, file loading, communications, graphics, data, and so forth. At the same time, the Metaverse also allows Facebook to extend its reach up and down the stack. And while Microsoft clearly foresaw mobile, it misread the role of the operating system and too much of the hardware, hence the rise of iOS and Android globally (and Microsoft’s shift from the OS layer to the app/services one). These include everything from consumer-recognizable .GIFs filetypes to the websocket protocol that underlies almost every form of real-time communication between a browser and other servers on the internet. To this end, Epic acquired the company Twinmotion in April of last year. But Fortnite has become so popular and so unique that most counterparties have no choice but to participate – in fact, they’re probably desperate to integrate into the “game” – just as P&G can’t say “eh, Facebook isn’t for us”. And it operates at the scale of Fortnite’s player network, allowing any title to leverage the world’s largest player graph to kickstart their userbases. However, it’s not yet clear what role Unity will have in driving the Metaverse. However, such examples have rapidly expanded since. Patrick and I went deep into topics including the Metaverse (its technical challenges, opportunities, and philosophy), IP and the role of business model and technical innovation in storytelling, the Unreal Engine, Cloud Gaming, Fortnite as a competitor to Spotify, and more. Despite several efforts to build a smartphone OS and deploy consumer hardware, Facebook remains the one FAAMG company stuck purely at the app/service layer. The Internet came from public research universities and US government programs. Today, for example, there are a multitude of image file formats: .GIF, .JPEG, .PNG, .BMP, .TIFF, .WEBP, etc. None of this is true today (which doesn’t mean market share won’t shift, or that some companies, such as Epic, won’t surge to the forefront). Guest on Recode Media and Invest Like the Best. ... Matthew Ball of Epyllion ... 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