Last time, we introduced Facebook’s ambition on developing their own metaverse, but some people just think Facebook won’t succeed as it was in mobile internet era if they don’t change their perspective on interconnectedness and openness of the next network. Teenagers don’t share what they do or talk with their friends in social media anymore. They would rather spend time on Fortnite or Roblox and they prefer to have real time “shared experience” with their friends instead of only sharing their past experience with their friends. So today, let’s have a look at two promising gaming platform operator — Epic Game & Roblox and see what they can do in metaverse era.
Epic Game
Epic Game, well-known for its lawsuit against Apple in part to eliminate the 30% Apple tax, now just has 80 million MAU (monthly active users) playing their own-developing game — Fortnite and has raised more than 1.7 billion dollars.
Epic Game CEO, Tim Sweeny, has been an advocator of metaverse for a long time and firmly believe the existing internet world (he called “walled garden”) created by Silicon Valley tech giants (FANNG) will be destroyed and will be replaced with opener, more interconnected network. He also believes the existing social media won’t be embraced by next generation people. Next generation prefer “participating” instead of “sharing” and they prefer “open” instead of “closed” when it comes to socializing. And Fortnite happens to fulfill the next generation social need. Let’s just quickly understand Fortnite a bit.
What is Fortnite? Different ways of socializing
Fortnite was developed by Epic Game and there are three main game mode including Fortnite: Save the world, Fortnite: Battle Royale and Fortnite Creative:
1. Fortnite: save the world is a player-versus-environment game and players should cooperate with each other to complete the tasks based on the pre-planned plot by game developer.
2. Fortnite: Battle Royale is a player-versus-player survival game and it allows at most 100 players to compete with each other in the same time. Game will be ended till there’s only one survivor left.
3. Fortnite Creative is a sandbox game (like Minecraft) which allows players to have more flexibility and freedom to discover any possibilities, such as creating their own games, building their own city and so on.
Fortnite: Save the world was first released in 2017 with 20 million users. With the release of Fortnite: Battle Royale and Fortnite Creative in 2018, Fortnite users increased to 120 million with 78 million MAUs. In 2021, the number grows to 350 million. There are more and more players participating in in Fortnite and they not only play shooting game with users but also hang out with their friends and talk with their friends in Fortnite. They’d like to create real-time shared experience together.
Due to the change of the way of socializing, brands and celebrities also try to adjust the way they do marketing and promoting. (1) Ferrari was dropped into Fortnite which become a test drive. (2) Traditional celebrities in the music world like DJ Marshmello, Travis Scott and Ariana Grande have held groundbreaking concerts in Fortnite. (3) You can see DC & Marvel characters appear in the same time in Fortnite which is unlikely to see in the rest of world.
Therefore, we could imagine there will be a brand-new way for brands to communicate and interact with their target audience and there will be more and more products and brands appeared in virtual world like Fortnite in different format. The new way of marketing is designed to be an interactive experience instead of annoying pop-up advertisement.
Two-sided market & Network Effect
Just like I mentioned before, platform operators always not only provide the best services (creating Fortnite for players) to attract as many users as possible but also create a developer-friendly environment to better serve creators. Here, there are two group of people — user and developer and they have mutual impact on each other. Let’s just deep dive into these important concepts.
First, we need to know is Network effect. Network effect is when more people adopt a new product, more value would be created in terms of total utility of the new product. For example, if there is only one person using Facebook, Facebook’s value is nearly zero. But if there are 1,000 people using Facebook which mean it’s much easier and more convenient for you to find friends and communicate with them on Facebook, so more value is created.
Second is two-sided market. It means there are two group of people closely having positive correlation with each other. One group of people increase then cause another group of people increase. For example, when Facebook’s user increase which cause the developers are more willing to create applications on Facebook.
Therefore, Epic Game would like to make every effort to bring more users in Fortnite. The more users they bring in, the more value they create. The more value they create, more people are willing to participate in Fortnite and in the same time it will attract more developers to create applications on it.
Room for improvement on Epic Game Metaverse
As we can see, Fortnite definitely has the potential to become a Metaverse. People play game, attend events and socialize in Fortnite. However, there is room for improvement. I’ll do the health check on Epic Game Metaverse based on previous characteristics of metaverse.
1. Metaverse is not supposed to be controlled by one corporation and should be migrated from closed economies like Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox to the shared world. People should be able to go from one world to another seamlessly.
2. When it comes to the interoperability, now it is not enough in Fortnite. The environment is not immersed enough and not in presence enough.
3. Fortnite only can accommodate 100 players in a game in the same time, Epic Game need to scale it up to allow millions of people to stay in it by adopting a brand-new programming model.
Just write too much on Epic Game, so let me introduce Roblox in the next article. Highly recommend Matthew Ball’s article on Metaverse and Epic game. Very informative and insightful!
Reference:
Venturebeat
Washington Post
Business of Apps
Wikipedia
Matthew Ball
