The metaverse, a challenge for the 2030s rather than the current decade?

In just a few days, we have discovered in Emmanuel Macron's presidential program the project to make "an investment to build European metavers", that "young people don't believe in metavers", or that HSBC was going to follow in JP Morgan's footsteps by acquiring a parcel in the Sandbox metaverse... By announcing the launch of Horizon Worlds at the end of October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg has (re)placed virtual universes at the center of all attention. But making it a service used on a daily basis by Mr. Smith is a different kettle of fish.

The metaverse makes no exception. With each innovation, the question of time to market and the rate of adoption by the general public arises: invest too early in a technology that is not yet mature, and thus generate frustration in the public - for an image benefit (modernity) made uncertain by this fact; or be too cautious and appear as laggards.

Second World: the risk of being (too) far ahead

Launched in 1997, the Second World illustrates the risk of a premature commitment in three ways: need to install a CD ROM because the first high-speed connection offers only appeared in 1999 and the speed was therefore limited to 56 kbps, thus breaking with the promise of dematerialization; random duration of the connection - the other specificity of low-speed Internet - incompatible with the notion of a persistent universe (which continues to evolve when one leaves it); a limited sense of immersion because virtual reality goggles were barely beyond the prototype stage (it was not until 2011 that Oculus was created, and 2016 before the first Playstation VR was marketed).

These major obstacles will make the Second World close its doors in 2001, and Cryo did not survive it. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2002.

Only 10 million Oculus Quest 2 to connect to Horizon?

Twenty years later, it is still a tangible obstacle - the level of equipment, in other words the addressable population - that could slow down Horizon Worlds and its competitors (The Sandbox, Decentraland, Roblox...). ): according to the head of Qualcomm, which supplies the chips that equip the Oculus Quest 2, the equipment favored by Facebook (which owns it) for its metaverse, the number of units sold worldwide did not exceed 10 million by the end of 2021, while Facebook has, as an illustration, nearly 3 billion monthly users...

When the adoption of the Internet was driven by universal protocols, the compartmentalization of the different virtual universes, in other words their lack of interoperability, could weigh just as heavily. In its time, the music industry was able to measure the cost of this: because they required the user to know to which label the artist he wanted to acquire a track or an album was attached, the pay-per-download sites deployed by the latter at the end of the 1990s had multiplied failures. It wasn't until iTunes, with its ability to bring together all the catalogs, that digital music began its rise to power.

"One stop shopping" is no guarantee of success.

To find their place, new services must meet the condition of simplicity. They must demonstrate their value in terms of use, service, or entertainment. By dint of being global (game, work, entertainment...), the promise becomes blurred and, for the time being, "one wonders what interest Heineken has in marketing a virtual beer" such as Silver, proposed by the brewer in Decentraland, wonders the website La Réclame, for example.

In the audiovisual field, for example, catch-up television, which appeared some fifteen years ago and which now seems to be widely accepted, still only represents less than 6% of the audience in France (5.7% according to the comparison since the beginning of 2022, of "live" scores and consolidated results at +28 days). And the progression has been only 1.3 points in five years.

If we add that the "meta-directory" intended to present the "brand operations in the metaverse" put online in the last few days by the Mindoza agency (HighCo group) has only listed 80 of them to date, we consider with caution the Gartner group's predictions according to which a quarter of the French population will spend an hour a day in the metaverse by 2026.