Tech giants like Google, Facebook (now Meta), and Apple could end up collaborating on creating a Metaverse rather than going it alone, according to Rob Nicholls, associate professor of governance at the University of New South Wales.
His comments come amid reports Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is struggling to attract large numbers to its virtual reality platform, which it hopes will be the future of the company and attract the valuable youth audience opting for competing outlets like TikTok.
“It was Mark Twain who said, ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration,’” Nicholls told The Epoch Times in an email. “One of the problems with making assessments of the Metaverse is that it is just too early.”
Currently, there are signs take-up of the platform is slow with the cost of virtual reality headsets being a major barrier. A Meta Quest Pro retails at US$1,500 with the next iteration, the Meta Quest 2, costing customers US$400.
“Meta is likely to be an important player in virtual reality, but building market share takes time. It may take much more time than Facebook took to eclipse MySpace,” he added.
Foes Could Become Friends on Metaverse
Nicholls also said the risk for tech giants if they go it alone is billions could be invested into empty online ecosystems.
“Each of the GAFAM (Google (Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (Meta), Amazon, and Microsoft) businesses knows that if there is no ‘winner’ in a ‘winner takes all’ situation, then interoperability will encourage adoption. There will still be opportunities for players to be leaders in some aspects of the Metaverse,” he said.
Each platform has strengths in different areas, with Google in search, Microsoft in operating systems, and Apple in devices.
“All of the GAFAM businesses use the internet as infrastructure. However, none of them is a pure provider of that infrastructure.”
Leaked documents to the Wall Street Journal suggest Meta’s Horizon Worlds game, which is part of Metaverse, had around 200,000 users a month, below the initial target of 500,000 a month.
Prof. Barney Tan at the University of New South Wales said Zuckerberg’s Metaverse needed a lot of work to create the scale it needed to keep users online.
“Its prospects of success depend on how many complementary service providers, co-developers, and users they are able to attract into its eco-system because Meta cannot do everything on its own,” he previously told The Epoch Times in an email.
“It is certainly helpful that it is a company as big as Meta spearheading the move into the Metaverse, but at the same time, Meta does not have the best of reputation among tech firms.”
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Daniel Y. Teng is based in Sydney. He focuses on national affairs including federal politics, COVID-19 response, and Australia-China relations. Got a tip? Contact him at daniel.teng@epochtimes.com.au.
