Meta has recently partnered with Realy, who’s tasked with building out the company’s metaverse projects. The image above is their proposed business model. (The Twitter thread of its announcement is full of obvious bots “supporting” the project, funny enough.)
Many folks in the crypto space right now are worried about Mark Zuckerburg (and other Web 2 companies) doing a hostile takeover of the metaverse, using Facebook’s massive reach and resources. How likely is it for this to happen? Well, it depends. Some things to consider:
At the end of the day, the metaverse that people will flock to will simply be the one that looks the most fun. A lot of companies -- both Web2 and Web3 -- are going to find out the hard way that throwing $$ at the problem for this sort of thing isn’t going to be enough. They’re going to have to figure out how to respect, foster, and develop the creative communities by giving emerging talent the support and tools needed for long-term success. Web3 creates an interesting situation where creatives -- long treated as second-class citizens -- might actually have real leverage over how things are done in the digital landscapes.
Also known as “artist development”, this has been missing entirely from the content landscape for a while (Web 2 was clueless while Hollywood has allowed apathy and corruption to destroy their own infrastructure) so it’s still anyone’s game as to who takes the cake. Most NFT projects right now are overhyped and probably won’t last -- and most BigCo projects are completely missing the point of Web3 altogether so they’ll probably be wasting a lot of money in the near future on marketing. (But at least it’ll be good “exposure” for them -- the tables have turned!)
Again, the platforms that will succeed are the ones that people simply think are cool, and that’s going to be determined by creatives, not the middle-men. We just need to build our way there, one step at a time. My guess? It’ll probably be some group of people we’ve never heard of before who comes out of nowhere and takes us all by surprise. WAGMI!