Is the virtual world a unique opportunity or a bubble destined to burst? The Metaverse is dividing market analysts, among those who think this world can grow by +1500% surpassing the market share of $1.52 trillion by 2030, and who is sceptical. Mostly after the Meta layoffswith Zuckerberg being one of the first to support this technological novelty.
Can the Metaverse Grow, Despite Meta Layoffs?
The large companies that support the future business of the Metaverse are more and more. Also Pantone gave its Color of the Year 2023 to the Metaverse, with the Viva Mangenta. But on the other hand, Meta’s Reality Labs division, which develops the company’s Metaverse, has recorded $9.4 billion of losses in the third quarter of this year.
Recently, the holding company that manages Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp announced 11,000 layoffs, 13% of the workforce. And 38% of people in America still don’t know about the Metaverse (68% of those don’t want to know about it).
Luca PomaProfessor of Reputation Management and Communication Sciences at the LUMSA University of Rome and at the University of the Republic of San Marino, explains: “Meta’s difficulties and layoffs are only minimally attributable to the division that deals with Metaverse. There are many other failed projects abandoned by the group, victim of the creative bulimia of its founder“.
According to the professor, “Zuckerberg bears direct responsibility for these layoffs that send various adventures such as Lasso and Shops into the attic. Conversely, Facebook’s traditional social platform remains heavily understaffed, completely inadequate to manage the back-office and customer service massively entrusted to often very inefficient bots. The reasons for the reputational crisis attributable to Zuckerberg are now so numerous as to undermine the very value of the giant that he himself founded”.
The possibilities of the virtual world
According to Poma, however, the metaverse’s possibilities don’t end with Meta. Mainly because he sets a model that withholds a high percentage of transactions for content creators. Instead, Sandbox, for example, leaves 95% of the profits to the user, so the Meta/Facebook proposal is uneconomical for the citizen and very profitable only for Zuckerberg himself. Facebook should spend much more to encourage people to enter its platform: it is not at all certain that the model proposed by the Menlo Park giant will ultimately be the winning one”.
The keystone could be the birth of a shared standard, which will allow creatives to create virtual worlds for everyone and profit from them. A huge possibility, if well exploited.
As he explains Matthew Aiolfifounder of the consulting firm Espresso Communication: “We are faced with something new and at least sparkling and it is too early to say whether everything will end in a bubble, as it already was for Second Life 15 years ago, or whether the Metaverse will take shape. Everything will probably play out on the definition of a shared standard: guaranteeing users not to have to deal with so many closed silos, a scenario that would greatly limit navigation, but instead allowing them to freely look out onto multiple virtual worlds that may be correlated with each other appears to be the real challenge for the affirmation of the Metaverse model on large scale. It being understood that if the Metaverse takes hold, a billionaire market would certainly open up as rarely seen in the history of the planetwith strong opportunities in terms of content and the sale of online services with high added value”.