Major Retail Players Are Walking Back Their Metaverse Strategies (modernretail.co) 53
For some of the largest retail companies and brands, the metaverse is losing its luster. From a report: Walmart has reportedly shut down its Universe of Play metaverse experience on Roblox just six months after its launch, according to consumer advocacy group Tina.org. Walmart, for its part, said it discontinued the experience "as planned." Walt Disney has axed the next-generation storytelling and consumer-experiences unit that was mapping out the company's metaverse strategies late last month. This string of news came after social media giant Meta reported that its metaverse division generated a loss of $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter.
These reports have raised questions on the metaverse's ability to yield returns on the investments companies have made in it. Retailers and brands have mainly been using the metaverse to build brand experiences and marketing, but many have yet to report on its conversion rate. In an economic environment where retailers and brands have been attempting to cut costs, experts said that retailers would likely pare down unprofitable areas of their businesses. "One of the biggest challenges was really figuring out the right [key performance indicators] and also just figuring out if there weren't even implications for many brands when it came to their physical product," said Melissa Minkow, director of retail strategy at digital consultancy firm CI&T. "It was just such a big, broad, abstract landscape that it seemed there was kind of a lack of direction."
In recent years, brands saw the metaverse as a means of elevating their virtual experiences, and reaching Gen Z in particular. Walmart launched Universe of Play in September and had mainly marketed it as an immersive virtual toy destination. For Disney, the division in charge of its metaverse strategy was focused on crafting interactive storytelling methods using technologically advanced channels. Retailers of varying sizes were attempting to look for ways to incorporate the metaverse in their strategies. While brands were optimistic about the metaverse, consumers didn't seem to match their sentiment. Minkow, who authored a recent CI&T report, found that 81% of respondents haven't made a purchase in the metaverse and 45% said that they don't ever see themselves shopping in it. Meta initially set a 500,000 monthly active user target for its metaverse offering, Horizon Worlds, by the end of last year but then changed its goal to 280,000, indicating how the company underestimated people's engagement level with the platform.
These reports have raised questions on the metaverse's ability to yield returns on the investments companies have made in it. Retailers and brands have mainly been using the metaverse to build brand experiences and marketing, but many have yet to report on its conversion rate. In an economic environment where retailers and brands have been attempting to cut costs, experts said that retailers would likely pare down unprofitable areas of their businesses. "One of the biggest challenges was really figuring out the right [key performance indicators] and also just figuring out if there weren't even implications for many brands when it came to their physical product," said Melissa Minkow, director of retail strategy at digital consultancy firm CI&T. "It was just such a big, broad, abstract landscape that it seemed there was kind of a lack of direction."
In recent years, brands saw the metaverse as a means of elevating their virtual experiences, and reaching Gen Z in particular. Walmart launched Universe of Play in September and had mainly marketed it as an immersive virtual toy destination. For Disney, the division in charge of its metaverse strategy was focused on crafting interactive storytelling methods using technologically advanced channels. Retailers of varying sizes were attempting to look for ways to incorporate the metaverse in their strategies. While brands were optimistic about the metaverse, consumers didn't seem to match their sentiment. Minkow, who authored a recent CI&T report, found that 81% of respondents haven't made a purchase in the metaverse and 45% said that they don't ever see themselves shopping in it. Meta initially set a 500,000 monthly active user target for its metaverse offering, Horizon Worlds, by the end of last year but then changed its goal to 280,000, indicating how the company underestimated people's engagement level with the platform.
To the surprise of exactly no one (Score:5, Insightful)
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To make the metaverse a compelling environment that I would want to spend any significant amount of time in, even for something as mundane as shopping, it would need the following things, in no particular order of importance:
1) Lightweight headsets that can be put on or removed as easily as a pair of glasses.
2) Good resolution and responsiveness with latency comparable to a typical monitor - this is absolutely critical to improve immersiveness. It may be necessary to have new kinds of displays that can sim
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I can pick up my phone sitting on the couch at home and buy a thing in seconds.
The Facebook robot arsehole's fantasy world is never happening.
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I can pick up my phone sitting on the couch at home and buy a thing in seconds.
Try buying furniture from Ikea and seeing that it fits in your living room.
Augmented Reality makes a lot of sense for buying physical items through the internet.
What you doing need is a noisy social network with a crappy videogame attached to the online store. THAT is what doesn't add anything to the purchasing experience.
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Try buying furniture from Ikea and seeing that it fits in your living room.
I own a tape measure.
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Try buying furniture from Ikea and seeing that it fits in your living room.
I own a tape measure.
Does it measure matching colours and overall style adequacy?
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The "metaverse" is just another silly fad. A stupid gimmick that nobody gives half a fuck about. It is the modern equivalent of the hula-hoop. Fun for 5 minutes and then boring and pointless.
Hold on there, pal. The hula-hoop lasted a lot longer than the the metaverse. My parents could buy them as kids, and you can still buy them today. They were a niche, but they're a niche that were always fun, and still can be. Even at almost fifty years old we still mess with ours from time to time, and when we aren't using them, they're great for dog training. And anything that can be used for dog training will have nearly infinite more longevity than "metaverse" anything.
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It never even reached the stage of a "fad". Zuck practically paid people to use it, and even then traffic was low. Fads are bubbles that pop. This was just a spittle droplet from Daffy Zuck.
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Daffy Zuck.
Excuse me sir! Please show some respect. The correct term is Facebook Robot Arsehole. (Feel free to use the American spelling.)
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It never even reached the stage of a "fad".
Exactly right. It can't do that until it gets either cheap, or so amazing that people will spend a lot on it. Unless Apple is about to pull some genuinely next generation tech out of nowhere, it's going to continue to be not even a fad.
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The "metaverse" is just another silly fad. A stupid gimmick that nobody gives half a fuck about.
Yep, and I for one am glad that "Meta" have bet their future on it. :-)
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Unlike the metaverse, however, nobody needed to sink half a country's yearly GDP into the hula-hoop before finding out that it's a fad.
It Was A Dumb Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet all these companies jumped in. Didn't take them long to figure it out though.
O well, I am sure someone got rich.
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O well, I am sure someone got rich.
I don't see how.
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> Meta reported that its metaverse division generated a loss of $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter.
This is not a stock price "loss" so Meta's loss is someone else's gain.
Metaverse Strategies (Score:2)
"Metaverse Strategies" :)
That word combination is runny right away.
There's nothing like "Metaverse Strategies"
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Imagine how many "VP of Metaverse" position with 7-digit salaries were created!
I really don't see this going anywhere. VR is a cool niche but the metaverse as a concept just doesn't make much sense. The Web does what it wants to do and is infinitely more convenient. Basically Zuck wanted to do something like Decentraland which already exists and is dumb as hell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
If you actually interact with your friend in a virtual environment, there's something like VRChat that already wor
For them, it's losing its luster (Score:4, Insightful)
For everyone else, it never had any.
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For everyone else, it never had any.
I never quite understood the corporate embrace of the Metaverse. We've had years of evidence that VR simply isn't going to take off (for a multitude of reasons). What did they think had changed?
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These are the same people who believed what the Zucker told them about the value of targeted advertising on Facebook....
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It's done by a company that was pretty successful as one of the first "social media" companies that took off, leaving similar companies that had a similar product in the dust. Now they have a new product and corporations want to get in on the ground floor so they can take off with it, if it takes off. Yes, VR has been tried before and didn't do so well, but now technology is better and maybe this time...
You have to understand that you're dealing with managers, not people who have a clue of the technology.
An
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For everyone else, it never had any.
I never quite understood the corporate embrace of the Metaverse. We've had years of evidence that VR simply isn't going to take off (for a multitude of reasons). What did they think had changed?
We need another term for what we have today. It's not virtual reality, which will absolutely be a hit.
It's wearing-stereoscopic-goggles-which-rotate-your-pseduo-3D-view-when-you-move-your-head. What's a short version for that?
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Wearable nausea.
You might want to run that past marketing to give it a better name before selling it.
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I never quite understood the corporate embrace of the Metaverse. We've had years of evidence that VR simply isn't going to take off (for a multitude of reasons). What did they think had changed?
Probably just FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out. Faceboo... er, Meta was obviously pouring a lot of money and effort into this. Surely something will come from it, they thought. And really, it's not too hard to make a few "plans" for when it takes off, I guess. Oops...
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Zuk is the PIed Piper for execs. Idiots who know nothing need someone to follow.
How can a company spend that much on . . . nothing (Score:2)
its metaverse division generated a loss of $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter.
I understand payroll and management expenses, even a mainframe, or server farm, to run it on...but really, $4.3B?
How?
I can understand if this is an accounting gimmick of putting all of the organization's losses in one programme, but generating that much loss? That takes effort.
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Oh no, Second Life Megastore not hot anymore? (Score:2)
Meta is Facebook.
What's old is new again (Score:1)
Is this going to end up being one of those cyclical things that happens every xx years?
Because this whole metaverse hype feels exactly like the whole VRML hype from the mid to late 90s.
"Everyone's going to be doing it." "It's the next big thing." "It's going to change the world." It's the exact same rehash of hyped up talking points from 25+ years ago.
I don't understand why there's this huge repetitive push for VR when nobody wanted it then, and still no one wants it now.
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Oh, man, VRML. Haven't seen that in a while. That and the whole 3D GUI concept. I think there was even a Linux window manager built that sort-of / kind-of tried to 3D-ify the explorer equivalent. Sometimes I miss the optimism of that age. Now the 'optimism' all comes from the big execs, and all us peons keep going, "Uh, no, tried that before. It SUUUUUUUUCKED." And sadly, we end up proven right more often than not.
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It's the same reason countries keep re-trying war, or fascism, every 25+ years.
25 years is long enough for people to forget(*) most of the reasons why it was a complete disaster the last time around, and start thinking that there's no reason why it couldn't work this time...
(*) or just as likely, enough people have died/retired that the institutional memory has dissipated through simple turnover
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It seems like VR has some killer applications... but mostly in gaming / sims / entertainment. Augmented reality is eventually going to go big once displays drop down to a few hundred bucks and look like normal glasses / sunglasses - it just seems sort of inevitable to me, I guess, because it's going to be insanely handy to have computer-augmented vision... that is, if society can get over the concept of everyone wearing a device that's constantly taking a video of what they're looking at. "Glassholes" dem
Re: What's old is new again (Score:2)
There is no point in trying to use VR to look at something that someone is trying to sell you. It will be shopped to buggery.
Morons! (Score:2)
They will all be bought out for pennies on the dollar once handsome charismatic genius Mark Zuckerberg puts all his money into Metaverse and finally makes it the success that we all are yearning to build our whole lives around and within.
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See: SeaQuest Season 2 Episode 6.
Congrats (Score:2)
the utility of wetsuits (Score:1)
In other exciting news, Mark Z has invested in a rubber SCUBA suit to protect himself when he gets flushed down the toilet after the collapse.
"the company underestimated people's engagement" (Score:3)
Translation: It sounded great while high on shrooms at Burning Man, but it was just a poor idea and we burned through many billions chasing after it even after it was obviously not going to be worth chasing.
The REAL and recurring problem... (Score:2)
...Is not that VR tech or content is not good enough (it's not, but that's not the REAL problem)
The REAL problem is that nearly all people, while designing, have an inability to generalize their own likes and dislikes into those of others.
Example: after learning in the 1990s that you never, EVER pop up boxes in the way of a user's activity if you want that activity to succeed and convert on the web. Today, we live in a hell of popups appearing on nearly every mobile page. Some designer, PO, or product manag
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No. Because they cannot. They don't enjoy it. At all. But that doesn't mean much. They don't get anything else they're selling either. The times when nerds created the stuff they liked and sold it to other people who liked it is long gone. What you have today is a bunch of markedroids doing market research about a topic they don't even remotely understand, hence asking the wrong question to the wrong people and then analyzing meaningless answers to arrive at false conclusions.
The reason they get away with t
Get content right first, 3D second (Score:3)
I keep saying this and I'll say it again. Perfect the art of "flat" worlds of the Second-Life kind first. It's cheaper to implement, change, and experiment with. Create standards for sharing worlds and/or characters to increase options and experiments. Once it takes off, *then* work on the VR 3D thing.
It lacked synergy! (Score:2)
And there wasn't any Julia Roberts.
"One of the inside jokes in 1992's Hollywood satire The Player was that Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis were the stars needed to make a hit movie. At the end of Robert Altman's film-within-a-film, Willis saves Roberts's life at the last moment.
Read More: https://www.nickiswift.com/305... [nickiswift.com]"
An Advertiser's Wet Dream (Score:2)
Surpise!! (Score:2)
Is this surprising? I'm not surprised. Is anyone surprised over this?
Unsurprising (Score:1)
I mean, Second Life has been quietly doing this since 2003 and hasn't ever exploded (and is the most successful attempt I know of). Playstation tried it briefly with Playstation Home in 2008. There's an argument to be made that Microsoft Bob in 1995 was a single-player virtual world. This is an old bad idea that people keep suddenly thinking is revolutionary.
Here's the thing, if a virtual world like this recreates walking around and talking to people, well, we can already do that in real life, and are cho
Constant pursuit to increase sales .... (Score:2)
The common theme of these failures is the motivation to create new avenues to encourage people to shop and purchase things.
Look at Amazon's losses with its Alexa division, for example. They foolishly sold the hardware at a small loss (or at best, a very tiny profit margin), with the idea the Echo Dots and Shows and all of that were really just vehicles to improve sales. Then, (shocker!), people didn't place a significantly higher number of orders for products or services with their voice assistants.
I think
Lemmings (Score:2)
The Lemmings lose religion? Reality intrudes into VR?
The Metaverse wont go away (Score:2)
Virtual worlds will always be here and there is still great opportunity to make money in it. But when you let the large corporations take it all over and just drive it on trying to make money, then it will fail. The internet, Darpanet, was not setup to make money when it started.