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Will Facebook’s Metaverse Come to Life? Comments Off on Will Facebook’s Metaverse Come to Life? 687

From Gen Z Corner, The Block Talk’s interns tackle topics from the perspective of young consumers.

Facebook, which rebranded to Meta in 2021, took a leap toward building their metaverse last December by making their world-building app called Horizon Worlds available for everyone in the U.S.  

Horizon Worlds is Meta’s take on popular games such as Minecraft and Roblox where users can create and share their curated worlds in different game modes. 

Facebook’s version boasts 300,000 registered users and currently has over 1,000 reviews on the official Oculus Quest store with roughly a 3/5-star rating. The app is just one in Meta’s vision of the metaverse which includes Horizon Home, a virtual home VR experience and Spark AR, a powerful artificial reality software. This is all in scope of Meta’s commitment to make the metaverse a “hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world.” 

But the economics of the situation aren’t all rosy. Last month Game Developer reported that Meta has lost 3 billion on its Reality Labs division on just this year’s first quarter while only managing 534 million in revenue. 

And there are still reservations on whether or not the metaverse is entirely needed, or whether the mental health implications of socializing in virtual worlds are worth the investment. Researchers have long considered the psychological implications of escaping from physical reality, which may include depressive symptoms

Regardless of where we stand on metaverse ethics, the proverbial cat is already out of the bag. According to a February 2021 survey by Statista, the typical U.S. adult currently spends roughly 8 hours a day using the internet in some capacity and an appetite for virtual reality is already established.  

In 2017, VR Chat was released on Steam, the biggest digital game distributor. At the time of this writing, it has about 20,000 users and had an all-time peak of 42,500 concurrent players according to steam charts. It also retains a 90% overall positive user rating. It touts limitless creative possibilities, user-created content, personalized worlds, customizable avatars and more. VR Chat is but one of the many promising VR experiences out now, but it still is a far cry from one of the biggest metaverses out there, Roblox 

Launched in 2006, Roblox has  43.2 million daily active users which by April of last year increased its users by 202 million. In another report by Statista, Roblox generated 1.9 billion dollars in 2021. Seeing these kind of numbers is an indicator that success of the metaverse is simply an inevitable matter of time. 

In 2016, Roblox implemented VR. It’s predicted that the VR market size will grow to 87 billion dollars by 2030. Meanwhile, experts are predicting a 54 percent increase of VR devices demand.  

Whether or not Facebook will own the metaverse is yet to be seen but the fact is that the metaverse is already here. The questions now aren’t about if the metaverse will be adopted. The questions are how and when.  

$FLIX Wants to Democratize the Film Industry Comments Off on $FLIX Wants to Democratize the Film Industry 702

The entertainment space has experienced incredible disruption over the last 15 years. The rise of social media, and subsequently the social media influencer, allowed individuals and brands to amass their own audiences. This gave advertisers new channel opportunities and created a need for high quality video content in a new medium.

Then, Netflix introduced streaming in 2007, which meant more nontraditional avenues for content and audience development.

Ultimately, the competition for audiences spurred on a streaming war that recently culminated in content saturation that even Netflix is grappling to overcome. 

All of this has had the impact of increasing the demand for well-produced content and creating new avenues for creators to be seen. The result is a new playing field in the entertainment ecosystem, with room for new entrants and a rapid increase in content produced by and for minority and niche populations.

Now, a new platform called $FLIX wants to take the democratization of content to a new level by utilizing the blockchain.

Created by Ben Rosenblatt and Micho Rutare, $FLIX is a token designed to finance films. A percentage of every token purchased aggregates in a so-called “film wallet” in order to finance a production. 

They believe successful projects will spark interest in the token, which will in turn increase the volume of token sales to perpetually fill the film wallet. As the token garners traction, the founders say they will buy back tokens to “burn” them, creating additional scarcity for token holders. 

Rather than an ICO or other type of closed pre-sale, the token was a fair launch, meaning that everyone had the same access to the initial sale.

“It was very important to us that this be a community-owned token, and that the community could get in on the ground floor,” says Rutare.

The token had a successful launch, garnering a market cap of nearly $3 million at its peak. 

“Oftentimes, new tokens that launch fairly suffer from bots who buy a ton of the supply which ultimately deters other buyers from entering,” Rosenblatt said. “We managed to avoid this.”

According to Rosenblatt, $150,000 of the sale is already in the film development wallet, which is enough to execute on the platform’s two primary goals: making content and building a community. Since launch, they’ve made some strides toward realizing those goals.

“We have engaged a Sundance Institute creative executive to spearhead script development, and we are also talking to major Hollywood screenwriters about producing their scripts,”explained Rutare.

In the near-term, they plan to open a discord server to engage their community of token holders.

According to Rutare, the team is composed of traditional, but anonymous, crypto personalities. They include three developers across two continents, five moderators around the globe, and the three founders of the project, Rutare, Rosenblatt and 0xSilverbone. 

In addition to the development team, the group will engage entertainment-industry experts that will sign on to support the funded projects.

“Now that the initial hype from launch has died down, [the platform] will rely on execution from here on out to build on that hype,” says Rosenblatt. “With our collective experience, we believe we are more than up to the task.”

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