Mark Zuckerbergs dream of building the metaverse with the rebranding of Facebook to Meta may be off to a rocky start already. Meta hosted a series of virtual concerts on its Horizon Venues app, where people can watch concerts, sports, and more together. According to reports, the event failed to draw much attention.
The virtual concerts featured performances from Grammy award-winning artists including rapper Young Thug on Boxing day, and DJ and producer David Guetta, and EDM duo The Chainsmokers on new years eve. However, Futurism, a science and technology new platform, reports that the concerts were a flop as far as viewers count were concerned.
According to Futurism, despite being free, the performance by Young Thug got just a little over 100,000 viewers while David Guitars got close to a million viewers. The performance of the Chainsmokers seems to have been removed according to the report. Even worse, the report notes that the concert failed to generate much attention from the media and social media users and also had technical issues.
Meta is forging on with its metaverse dreams despite stiff competition
Despite the relatively mellow VR concert turnout, the move is a bold one from Meta which can be considered to be in the early days of its development. At the moment, its virtual reality platforms still claim to be under development and hence prone to bugs which it encourages users to point out.
Meanwhile, the newly established and refocused company has been making moves to make its suite of virtual reality and augmented reality offering a seamless experience for users. It has announced that it will fuse three main social VR apps – Horizon Worlds, Horizon Venues, and Horizon Workrooms.
Zukerberg firmly believes that the future of social media is firmly in the metaverse where users can interact with themselves in simulated worlds as avatars. Many technology enthusiasts also share this belief. However, not every observer is excited by the prospect of Meta, a centralized organization holding significant power in this future for social media.
In fact, for most cryptocurrency proponents, the best way to go about developing the metaverse is for it to be grounded in decentralized technology and blockchain. Several cryptocurrency projects are already developing their metaverse projects on the blockchain. According to data from CoinMarketCap, metaverse tokens have gained a combined market cap of over $35 billion.
The biggest of these platforms including Decentraland (MANA), Axie Infinity (AXS), and The Sandbox (SAND) offer NFT gaming and play-to-earn models that have attracted a lot of users. Decentraland (MANA) has a market cap of over $5 billion and has seen plots of virtual land sell for over $2 million.
However, Zukerbergs Meta is not the only company looking to make a significant share of the metaverse. Nvidia also has its eyes set on bringing its own metaverse to market.