The Next Big Multiplayer VR Game Title for Meta Quest?

To those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the No. 1 VR Title made in Asia is called Real VR Fishing. Figures are not exactly published, but this game was included in Meta’s Quest 2 launch marketing and is a featured Retail Demo. 

Guess what? The developers behind this successful VR game title are based here in Seoul. 

Although the market for VR is larger in Japan, the most popular title is from Korea. Despite limited support and attention from the big players and VCs the VR community here in Korea has still managed to produce some pretty incredible content since 2016. Sadly, other than Real VR Fishing most of these experiences are not huge commercial successes, but that could be about to change. 

This week another developer is hoping to do it again: Stoic Entertainment.   

Since 2019 I was responsible for SK Telecom’s partnership with Meta to resell Quest 2 (and Oculus Go before that) in Korea. It was a unique partnership, the first of its kind. After sealing the deal I moved to the Business Team at our Mobile Network Operation division (MNO) to execute the business with a couple of colleagues. Our job? Launch Quest 2, promote use cases, and support Ecosystem Development for VR on Quest 2. 

Over the years I used my limited time to meet as many VR developers as I could, to help them refine their ideas and to get reviewed by Meta’s publishing team. Several early-stage products I was able to move to the Oculus Start program, but there were a few bigger projects as well that I have worked on closely including titles with Nexon and Kakao. In the process I have tested hundreds of unreleased and unfinished titles as well as games available for Quest 2. In a short time, it’s safe to say few people in Korea have had as much experience reviewing games for the breakthrough standalone VR device, Quest 2. 

Among all those titles, made here in Korea and around the world, the one that has stood out the most is World War Toons: Tank Arena. 

After nearly two years, it is finally available on Quest 2 this week (if you're reading this before the official launch date you can put it on your wishlist today!). 

I was first introduced to the team by my colleague Dillon Seo, who was one of the 10 co-founders of Oculus when it was acquired by Meta. He recommended I meet them because he saw they had been able to execute technically challenging VR builds that were world-class, in spite of the financial and human resource constraints facing the typical VR game startup in Korea. Not only that, the founders, a couple that had pioneered the industry here, had a passion for building their team and creating opportunities for students who wanted to pioneer the industry with them. They were building high-quality products, while also building a pipeline of talent to grow the industry. Perfect. 

When we first met, there were probably ten reasonably good titles Stoic’s founders were considering for Quest 2. They were mostly smaller games, but all of them were really good. Among them, the early version of Tank Arena stood out for several reasons. 

For anyone who is familiar with VR games, there is one thing you probably noticed. There are not many vehicle games. Why? Driving makes you dizzy. The first thing that impressed me about this title was that I was driving a tank, moving turret and the vehicle itself in opposite directions and barely noticed. Mind you, this was an early version of the game… I expected to last at best 10 minutes before asking to take a break. I played for 30min and only stopped because I needed to make time for another meeting. 

I immediately recommended my counter-part at Meta Korea visit Stoic, and from there we engaged with Meta’s publishing team. Everyone was intrigued, and after a few months the founders had put together a complete proposal highlighting their new creative team, and several patents they’d received around reducing motion sickness in VR. Not only that, the Overwatch-like dynamics and roadmap for DLC (lots of great skins and maps coming soon) was impressive. Their new creative director was able to work with the engineering team to implement substantially better cockpit design with higher graphic detail than any other standalone VR game I had seen (approaching the quality you might see on PCVR titles) using immersive design techniques, creative genius, and by implementing a new engine provided by Meta and Epic — an engine that is technically difficult to implement and to my knowledge is not used yet by many games, and no other vehicle games. 

The team passed the pitch review shortly after that and was the first Korean team that I know of to successfully clear the QA process to launch to the Official Store for Meta Quest. 

Regardless of the hype around metaverse, the fact is the Video Game market is cooling. The CAGR is getting smaller and will be between 5-10% at best for the next few years. Streaming received a lot of press in previous years, but even Xbox (the most innovative among streaming options because of the cross-platform availability) doesn’t foresee it growing beyond 15% of revenue. 

However, within that industry VR is booming. Newzoo estimates VR Games will see a 44% CAGR through 2030. It’s an important growth segment for gaming, and since Korea is a top five market for video games, for Korean game developers and investors too. Fortunately, there are great titles emerging now from Korea and with the right capital support the companies building them can ride this new consumer wave and take the creative potential of Korea into the next generation of Video Games. 

I hope Stoic’s new game World War Toons: Tank Arena (WWTTA) will be wildly successful in the coming months, and that it will usher in a new era of investment in VR Games in Korea providing a much-needed spark to an industry that has become saturated and comfortable with incremental improvements to graphics or storytelling, rather than game-changing technology. 

It’s time for the next big thing in gaming, it’s time for VR Gaming! 

Check out the WWTTA launch trailer below! 

Sony Is Coming but with More Stutter than Swagger

Based on a recent article on Road to VR, Sony reduced its P25 Sales forecast for 2022, and the PSVR 2 delayed to 2023:

https://www.roadtovr.com/report-psvr-2-rumored-release-early-2023-missing-holiday-season/

Estimated sales through EOY will be around 30M units. Assuming an additional 15M units for 2023 we can estimate PSVR 2 capture at a high, mid, low sales volumes.

45M PS5 Sales EOY 2023 - PSVR2 Sales expectation assuming no production delays:

Low (5%) 2.25M
Mid (10%) 4.5M
High (20%) 9M

That said, given their current ability to produce consoles -- which is a strange failure on their part to predict Semicon constraints, strange since they are famously building a commercial EV -- it's unlikely Sony can produce sufficient numbers of units. A revised number accounting for production delays could significantly lower their sales potential for PSVR2 through 2023:

Low (1%) 450K
Mid (2.5%) 1.17M
High (5%) 2.25M

Either way, this places PSVR2 squarely in the top seat along with Meta's HMDs and pits the companies head-to-head for dominance in the VR market moving forward. However, considering the laggard pace of console development versus the break-neck speed of Meta's device rollout (new ware every two years), Sony's got its work cut out for it. PSVR2 will no doubt make a dent in Meta's share of the HMD market (currently 70% or thereabout), but a better question perhaps is can Sony pivot to an independent "Metaverse Console" that can match the pace of innovation? Naturally, they have the capacity to do so as demonstrated by their mobile phones division, but whether or not they can transfer that capacity to this new market remains unclear and, frankly speaking, doubtful.

Horizon Worlds on a Healthy Path

Meta’s “social VR platform” Horizon Worlds hit the news over the weekend announcing 300k (10X growth) after 90days.

This is a good accomplishment… some context for why that is. On mobile the gold standard was (is?) 1M MAU after 90days. That’s a much lower penetration considering anyone with a pair of pants has a smartphone.

For perspective, assuming 70% of activations are in the USA and Canada (the only market where Horizon Worlds is publicly available), and the rumor 10M units sold is accurate, then Worlds has around 5% penetration to the TAM. Not bad… let’s see what happens.

Here is the Verge Article reporting on this:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/17/22939297/meta-social-vr-platform-horizon-300000-users

A bigger question is how will this platform compete with RecRoom or VR Chat.

In particular, here is an article that discusses RecRoom as a benchmark. It has 1M MAU (available worldwide and on Steam) and supposedly “millions more” on non-VR platforms incl. Xbox.

Will Horizon Worlds become a cross-platform game? I think so, and - assuming it is fun and interesting- this will drive the MAU much higher as it expands the TAM to include mobile and online users.

Beat Saber Queen - 2021

Beat Saber Queen in 2021 with AfreecaTV was a major milestone in building the VR Gaming ecosystem in Korea. We started that journey at the beginning of the year, and finally pulled it off with the help of our friends and Meta, Beat Games, Onestore, and of course our production partners AfreecaTV. 

This was the first program for Beat Saber in the world. I hope we can produce this program properly in 2022, let's see how it goes! Who knows, this could be the next "Masked Singer"? (For those who don't know it's a Korean program that was licensed to a US producer.) 

Check it out below on Koon's YT channel, skip to around 20min to see me play "Reason for Living" on Expert Plus. 

You can also check out the full program AfreecaTV: 

https://vod.afreecatv.com/PLAYER/STATION/77408486?change_second=741. 

Michael's Metaverse for Dummies

(Updated November 2022)

A year ago I posted a Value Chain for the metaverse. It was a crazy year, both with work and with working through corporate politicking, so I never really clarified what this value chain means. Well, I did but you only would have heard it if you had the pleasure of talking to me directly about it. So in adding to this older post I hope to add some meat to this awesome graphic guide I created. 

First, let me start by saying today the ideas of "metaverse" and "Web3" have been conflated to mean just about anything. PE and the like are pushing a bunch of ideas that drive this market size to stratospheric scale. That's not my bandwagon, and it's really disappointing to see credible VCs launch "metaverse podcasts" just to host mostly philosophical discussions by wealthy founders with expensive websites for companies that don't really do anything. 

Innovation requires a velocity, in other words there must be a clear direction and force driving it in that direction. For me, the direction for metaverse is clear and can be summed up into one word: 

Presence. 

Without presence, there is no difference between a metaverse use case and any number of things that have come before. Just because a service has a UGC business model, looks like a version of The Sims and is hosted on a blockchain, doesn't make it part of the metaverse. 

Services like Fornite, Roblox, and Minecraft could arguably be placed on an evolution of the metaverse because "Presence 1.0" could be summarized to mean a service that includes a personal, customizable identity in the form of an Avatar. However, the metaverse has always been more immersive than that. 

A true metaverse experience should be built with presence in mind. The most immersive, presence-providing technology today is Virtual Reality. However, Augmented Reality is coming and will also makes its mark on the metaverse. One day, probably (for real, and finally!) when 6G rolls around. Other interesting use cases are emerging already as well, like remote piloting drones. 

My value chain therefore focuses on technologies that enable presence. They are, from top-to-bottom: 

1) The Use Case - Borrowing from definitions of "spatial web" and older mental models for "metaverse" they must include a Virtual World, Avatars, and NPC (which can be any kind of agent, including plants or animals. A use case could, using this definition, include a Web or Mobile use case like World of Warcraft, or even Quake for that matter. However, there must be a guideline -- for which one day some persons savvier than me shall, I pray, create protocols to allow for cross-integration like a "metaverse middleware" -- that includes the Mechanics, Aesthetics, and Dynamics of the use case. While they could be anything, again I stress that anything without presence (even Presence 1.0 aka just an open world game (or even a gameless world in theory but... boring!) wouldn't really be metaverse material. 

I would break down what I consider valid categories of metaverse use cases to be: 

Virtual Reality (VR) - bring my consciousness to a virtual environment; 

Augmented Reality (AR) - bring a virtual environment to my consciousness; 

or, Advanced Peripherals (AP) - bring my consciousness to a real world with a virtual body.   

2) Interfaces - These enable an end user to Access the metaverse. Today, devices like notebook computers and especially smart phones are ubiquitous. However, HMDs like Quest 2 are proving that the time for Virtual Reality has arrived. The adoption curve is working in favor of new Virtual Reality headgear, we will start to see them taking marketshare from consoles, notebook computers, and tablets in the coming years. Some credible sources predict that by 2027-2030 (thereabout) we'll start to see smartphone-like scale in the 1-2B device range. This will depend on the use cases that emerge for the devices in the meantime, it's a bold prediction but I wouldn't bet against it. 

The three types of interfaces that exist today and correlate to the categories I use for use cases are: 

Head Mounted Displays (VR), people wear them to experience VR;

Augmented Reality Glasses (AR), people wear them to experience AR;

and, Drones (AP); people use them in combination with an HMD to pilot in first-person.  

3) IoT - Another victim of overly-hyped PR fueled arguably by too much liquidity, IoT is actually alive and well. You just don't hear about it anymore. In fact, some would argue the most exciting thing about 5G, and why you could consider it a transitionary technology, is the LTE capacity it frees up for Narrowband IoT and CAT-M1 mobile use cases (less data, more data respectively). The meta data that is enabled for use by IoT is enabling the "meta"verse. Much of the sensory information used in VR or AR today is on the local hardware, but more will be moved to the edge and those edge data sets will be move to the metaverse as well. IoT will enable RT modifications to virtual environments and provide allow for accurate depictions of real world places virtually. 

4) Blockchain - So much hype around blockchain, what to believe? The fact remains that it is a great technology for attribution, and no other system for attribution allows for so much flexibility and resilience. We are still at the nascent phase of this technology, but the ability to interact in a hyper-realistic way while using VR, AR, or AP will require new ways to verify identity, ownership, and potentially enable entire worlds to "fork" from a primary platform on a foundational blockchain like Etherium to generate its own economy while borrowing from the rules and protocols of the main blockchain. 

5) Multi-access Edge Computing or MEC - This darling of the telecom industry has been around for probably twenty years, and it's finally seeing daylight with the advent of 5G. If you had to pick one technology that if you removed from 5G the whole telecom community would be yelling "jenga" it would be probably be MEC. This moves some of compute from the core network closer to the end user which makes for the low-latency so hailed by the industry. Today the technology is solid, but the search for a use case that is truly mobile and economical has still turned up no major victors. Most experts see presence-drive use cases for the metaverse as the likely candidate. Who pays, and how, is still anybody's guess. 

6) The Cloud i.e. Data Centers - Believe it or not, the cloud isn't mature at all. It's growing fast, and the data center race is on especially as companies eye the metaverse - again, meaning presence-driven use cases like VR, AR or AP - as a rapidly approaching reality. Virtual Reality is the fastest growing form of digital media, and as soon as AR is mature you can rest assure every telecom will dump billions into adoption of those use cases. Metaverse will boost traffic on high-throughput / low-latency networks like none other. Cloud technologies, working in coordination with MEC (which is a derivative of cloud) will move that content off the end user device making them lighter and far more portable.

7) Connectivity - I know, everyone hates the their mobile carrier. They're boring utilities that barely deserve the right to be called "Tech", right? Wrong, so so so wrong. I would encourage people unacquainted with how Youtube gets from the cloud to their smartphone to take a few hours to dive into what makes these technologies so amazing. Telecom is pretty amazing, period. Everyone thinks rocket sciences is amazing. Everyone thinks the Pyramids of Giza are amazing. Well, telecom is way more amazing in my opinion. 

Finding a way to divvy-up incomprehensibly small wave-lengths moving at unfathomable speeds then somehow send a Netflix movie over-the-air, through the ground and under the ocean -- or via outer-space -- back through the air to find it's intended target... you. Anyway, no-one would argue it's important. Maybe just take a moment to appreciate it more. 

8) A.I. - Another victim of the hypecycle, AI is advancing rapidly. The point of AI is to optimize things, not find new business models necessarily (although that happens too) but to make existing things work a lot better. Think about electricity, it didn't make the industrial revolution happen, coal did. But it made factories exponentially more efficient at making goods once we found the best way to optimize production using it. Same thing with AI. 

For the meteverse it's tempting to jump to the alluring General AI, and sure that is pretty cool and fun to imagine. But the applications of AI to the metaverse are happening all the time already, just good old fashion AI. For example, the physics in a virtual world, or rendering in real-time while predicting where the eye will be focusing in the next oh, 2 milliseconds. Generative Adversarial Networks are also really fascinating, as they could hold the key to creating data for building models for worlds we imagine rather than relying on collecting training data from real world sources. They are also the technology used for things like AI's writing essays or music, and paintings about cats and other things. 

In conclusion...   

The convergence of these technologies is what has gotten me excited about the metaverse since, well at least since before it was the latest tech trend or buzz word. This value chain of converging technologies will generate an enormous amount of creativity in the coming decade. Even by 2025, five years from when Epic founder Tim Sweeney announced he was earmarking more than $1B to build a "metaverse" -- the moment which first initiated this new buzz around an old idea -- if you take a moment to reflect on how much has changed between that future date and 2020, it will be much like looking back at 2005 from 2010. Take a guess when Netlix started streaming movies? (Answer: 2007) 

 

Michael's Metaverse for Dummies by Michael A. Lesniak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at /www.malesniak.com//2020/09/blog-post.html.