If the Metaverse is indeed the successor to the internet, it seems odd to say its "predecessors" came from the video game industry. After all, the internet and the video game industry have had very different trajectories thus far.
The Internet originated in government research laboratories and universities. Later, it gradually expanded to enterprises, then SMEs, and finally consumers. The entertainment industry is arguably one of the last internet-swarming segments of the global economy, and the "streaming wars" didn't really begin until 2019 -- less than 25 years after streaming video made its debut.
The mobile internet is not led by the government, but it has followed much the same trajectory. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the mobile Internet was just emerging, the organizations that used the mobile Internet and developed software for it were mainly governments and enterprises. From the end of the 1990s to the beginning of the 21st century, the mobile Internet gradually became popular among small and medium-sized enterprises. It was not until after 2008, with the launch of 3G, that the mobile Internet entered the mass market. It took the next 10 years for consumer-focused apps to proliferate.
If we analyze this history more closely, it becomes clear why gaming, a $180 billion leisure industry, seems poised to transform the $95 trillion world economy. The key is to consider the role of constraints in all technological developments.
When the Internet first came out, bandwidth was limited, latency was severe, and computers were severely underwhelmed with memory and processing power. This means that users can only send very small files, and even then, the process still takes a lot of time. Almost all consumer use cases such as photo sharing, video streaming, and mass communication are impossible. But the main business need - sending messages and basic documents (unformatted Excel sheets, stock purchase orders), is exactly what the internet needs to support. Given the size of the service economy and the centrality of management functions in a commodity economy, even small productivity gains are of extraordinary value. The development process of mobile phones is similar to the development process of the Internet. Early phones didn't support playing games or sending photos, let alone streaming video or video calling. Email pushes are far more useful than pager notifications or live phone calls.
Real-time rendering of 3D virtual worlds and simulations is so complex that they were clearly more limited than almost every other type of software and program in the early decades of personal computers and the Internet. As a result, graphics-based simulations are almost never used by governments and large, medium and small businesses. After all, a simulated fire situation in a virtual world is of little value to a firefighter if it doesn't match reality, just as a bullet whose trajectory cannot be deflected by gravity is to a sniper , and an architectural firm cannot design buildings based on the overly broad idea of "sun-absorbing crystals." But video games, and all other games, don't need real fire, gravity, or thermodynamics, they need to be fun. Even 8-bit monochrome games can be fun. This design orientation gives game companies the ultimate advantage: the ability to create a place where people actually want to spend their time.
The Internet wave has passed, and the metaverse era has come
1. Thinking of the Metaverse as the "next generation Internet" helps explain how disruptive it might be.
2. We hope that the establishment of the metaverse and the establishment of the Internet will adhere to roughly similar principles.
3. The Metaverse will require the development of new standards, the creation of new infrastructure, and possibly an overhaul of the long-standing TCP/IP protocol, including the adoption of new devices and hardware, and possibly even breaking up of tech giants, independent developers, and Balance of rights among end users.
4. Video game developers are at the forefront of this metaverse. Game developers, publishers, and platforms have spent decades finding ways to counter or circumvent the internet’s network architecture, and thus have unique and often overlooked expertise in the transition to the metaverse. This design orientation gives game companies the ultimate advantage: the ability to create a place where people actually want to spend their time.