Shake the first anniversary of the acquisition of pico now how
At this time from last year, Shake the group announced the acquisition of VR headset maker Pico exactly one full year past. With a big boost from Jitterbug, PICO, which just announced a brand upgrade, has continued to grow in sales, and was No. 1 in China and No. 2 in the world in market share in the first half of this year. Since April 9 this year, PICO went live with three concerts.
The virtual idol group A-SOUL, launched by Jitterbug in late 2020 in conjunction with Lehua, a well-known domestic brokerage firm, has encountered some controversy but has close to 20 million fans across the network.On June 17, A-SOUL made its debut live broadcast on PICO, the first time that Jitterbug's own avatars shook hands with users in the Jitterbug meta-universe.
As for virtual socialization and game engines, in June this year, ShakeEn acquired wave particles, a secondary virtual socialization platform; in August, it also participated in the investment of Unity China, a game engine developer. Overall, this section is still in the early stages of development and should not be criticized too harshly.
A few hot VR devices, a content ecosystem yet to be enriched, a virtual idol group, plus virtual socialization that has yet to hit the ground - these are all that Jitterbit has to show for its one-year foray into the meta-universe.
Jittery has been testing the waters along different paths over the past year, but has yet to figure out the contours of the meta-universe. It has achieved something in each of its branches, but it has yet to knit them all together in the same meta-universe. If we put aside the concept of meta-universe, the progress it has made so far can be categorized under the concepts of smart devices, online social networking and even online games.
This is also a common problem for companies like Baidu, Tencent, Ali, and Meta when they get involved in the metaverse. They either start from hardware, or from platform or software, but to this day they are still in the stage of "blind men feeling the elephant"; the outside world can not perceive the mystery of the meta-universe, and the companies are also skeptical of what they are doing in the meta-universe is not considered. The meta-universe dominated by Internet companies still has a long way to go before it really becomes a "universe".
The year of 2021 is the first year of meta-universe. in March, "the first stock of meta-universe", the American game development community Roblox was listed in the United States; in October, social media giant Facebook announced that it had changed its name to Meta, and formally entered the meta-universe. on August 29th, Jitterbug acquired PICO, which was regarded as a signal for its entry into the meta-universe. a signal of its entry into the meta-universe.
Unlike Meta, which changed its name in a high profile, Jitterbug has not publicized the concept of meta-universe in public, and there is a prohibition on mentioning meta-universe within PICO. However, this has not prevented outsiders from associating Jitterbug with the Metaverse.
On this track, Jitterbug's money, manpower, and traffic are rapidly pouring in, and PICO has changed its low profile before it was acquired and pressed the fast-forward button.PICO began to appear in Jitterbug's open-screen ads, popular variety shows, and Netflix live broadcasts, and its offline sales outlets have entered the core shopping districts of first-tier cities. Under the powerful traffic offensive, PICO's VR headset product sales began to double.
With the growth in sales, Jitterbug began to recruit and deploy troops around PICO. At present, the PICO team has grown to a scale of 1,000 people, the head of watermelon video Ren Lifeng, Jitterbug Variety head Song Binghua, Jitterbug Entertainment Director Wu Zuomin and so on, have also been transferred to the VR product department, which can be seen Jitterbug's internal importance to PICO.
In addition, Jitterbug acquired the secondary virtual social platform Wave Particle in June this year, the team was merged into the PICO social center, the founder of Wave Particle, the former head of Xiaomi VR, Ma Jieshi is responsible for PICO social business.
The virtual idol business that Jitterbug and Lehua Entertainment have partnered on is also linked to the VR business. on June 17, virtual idol group A-SOUL made its live debut on PICO, with more people signing up than Wang Feng's VR concert.
Jitterbug is not the only giant that has captured the windfall that is the meta-universe.
Baidu meta-universe product Xiyang was launched at the end of 2021, and almost at the same time, Tencent also began to explore the meta-universe, with QQ and QQMusic launching two functions with meta-universe elements, Super QQ Show and MusicZone, and hundreds of meta-universe trademarks were also registered. In addition, Tencent was originally one of the potential buyers of PICO, but was later cut off by Jitterbug.
For the time being, Jitterbug is doing meta-universe, mainly as a VR device, and the latter's most common use scenario is still gaming.
Shake sound in this field on the light year, Mu pupil technology and other hand cards, with the strength of Tencent arm wrestling. Its method of play is "from hard to soft", first laying the hardware entrance, and then step by step to improve the software ecology.
In contrast, Tencent chose to go from soft to hard, first in the popularity of the degree of cell phone APP has been quite high on a good service, such as the future of the hardware landing and then turn into. In June of this year, Tencent was revealed to have formally set up an extended reality (XR) department, earlier, rumors were circulating that Tencent had acquired the news of Black Shark Technology.
Social and gaming, is Tencent's hinterland, but also jitterbugs have always wanted to break through the field, the collision of the two giants, perhaps the future of the meta-universe track is one of the biggest points of view.
Over the past year, Jitterbit meta-universe in hardware, software, as well as the internal social system have invested and made progress, but this "universe" is still fragmented, a few boards to fight separately. Although there is some internal linkage, but compared to the "universe", it is more like a fragmented scene.
In terms of the choice of development path, Jitterbug is similar to Meta. But even Meta, which is an all-in-universe, lacks successful experience in how to take the key step from VR hardware to software ecosystem, and the VR device is still more like a home gaming machine than a next-generation Internet portal device that can carry users' daily lives.
According to IDC, the world's AR/VR headset shipments will exceed 10 million in 2021, thanks in large part to Meta, whose VR headset Quest2 accounted for 78 percent of the global market last year, and PICO, with a 4.1 percent share of shipments, has a dominant position in the Asian market. The Quest2 has ten million units and PICO has one million units.
Last year, the consumer VR headset new user scale has been equivalent to the total population of Sweden, from the user scale, meta-universe vision seems to be within reach. But the reality is that the experiences offered by Jitterbug or other companies in the meta-universe fall far short of what people expect from the concept of the "universe".
There's an element of VR hardware that's still lacking. From the perspective of the diffusion of innovation, the scale of the new thing reaches a critical mass of 10-25%, the diffusion will be accelerated and difficult to reverse. In the domestic smartphone market, this critical value is 12%, the domestic VR market is still very far from this node.
On the other hand, Meta, Jitterbug and others have yet to find more landing scenarios for VR hardware.
Socialization is Meta's strong point, Meta has already made an attempt to move socialization into VR, the results are not satisfactory. In August this year, Meta's VR social platform HorizonWorld (hereinafter referred to as Horizon) on-line, Zuckerberg also showed his selfie in which to celebrate, but attracted netizens trolling. Netizens believe that Horizon rough character and scene modeling, even compared to the open world game a decade ago.
Shaking sound had launched the "party island" APP last year, but on July 25 this year, the party island in the major app store shelves. PICO has recently recruited for the social business, "for the user to create a new connection," the mission is also in the implicit point of view. The trend of socialization, but at present in the meta-universe of socialization, PICO has not been a big action.
The greater problem is that even if the Internet company in the VR equipment to realize the social function, from the people imagine the meta-universe is still far away.
Currently, Meta has invested tens of billions of dollars in the meta-universe, and Byte has invested tens of billions of yuan in a series of acquisitions such as PICO. With such a huge capital investment and marketing campaign, users' expectations have been infinitely raised, and the sci-fi movie "Top Gun" happens to depict a wonderful blueprint.
In "Top Gamer," users can build their own identities in the virtual world, which is both parallel and interoperable with the real world, and even currencies can be exchanged.
Take out any one of these elements alone and you can find a similar mapping in reality: the real world already has relatively portable VR devices, sandbox games like My World, blockchain and tradable virtual currencies. That's one reason why the concept of meta-universes is exploding, and humanity has already made considerable progress on the technologies underlying them.
But one game developer said that trying to achieve a "Top Gun"-like experience on a VR device would be prohibitively expensive given the current state of the technology. Many users are also disappointed to find that, after the initial novelty of the past, VR headset essentially and their hands of other electronic devices do not differ much, VR can do most of the things, such as watching movies, concerts, cell phones, computers are also able to do, just in the sense of immersion there is a certain gap.
Zuckerberg has said that building a basic platform for the meta-universe will be a long road, and he expects Horizon to remain beta for the next few years.
Tencent senior vice president Ma Xiaoyi also made predictions about the meta-universe vision in a speech this year, and he was pessimistic about changes in the meta-universe in the short term of 2-3 years, with the node of qualitative change likely to come in a decade. Although many related technologies now have breakthroughs, but are dedicated to the direction of the fumbling, from the meta-universe itself the concept of the best thought of, there is still a considerable technical and commercial distance.
Despite all the problems, there are still a lot of faithful believers and Zuckerberg, as optimistic about the long-term vision of VR, they believe that, in time, everyone will enter the meta-universe, and VR is the door to the meta-universe.
The believers are also pinning their hopes on Apple. Recently, renowned analyst Ming_ Kuo said Apple plans to ship about 1.5 million AR/VR headsets in 2023. Guo believes that Apple's entry into the market is what makes the VR market explode. Whether it is hardware R & D experience, software ecology, or user base, PICO, and even Meta obviously can not be compared with Apple, the two manufacturers of huge investment may help Apple to complete the work of educating users.
On the other hand, the content ecosystem behind a device is basically positively correlated with the user base, and user growth seems certain to lead to a thriving content ecosystem. Supporters of the meta-universe concept believe that after the content ecosystem gradually flourishes, VR will become a just-needed product like cell phones. Their logic is: web1.0 corresponds to PCs, web2.0 corresponds to smartphones, the virtual world always needs a screen to connect with the real world, and web3.0 is supposed to correspond to VR.
But Li Chen (a pseudonym), head of a web3.0 project, said, "This is a kind of linear thinking, which doesn't necessarily hold true. "
Li Chen believes that before the emergence of the Internet, the PC already has a certain market, and before the emergence of the mobile Internet, the cell phone has long been a just product. And smartphones have grown to the size they are today because the phone itself is a big enough market.
"The biggest problem with VR lies precisely in the fact that it is not just a necessity." Li Chen believes that, at least for now, people don't really need a bulky, expensive and range-pulling crotch device to simulate reality.
The aforementioned game developer, on the other hand, believes that the landing scenarios of VR in the short term may include scenarios such as VR tourism, VR gaming and VR video. "These scenes experience enhancement is more obvious, and the input cost is one-time, can be reused."
As for the landing of VR office, social and other scenes, the person is not optimistic. "Why spend so much cost on something that can be solved with ZOOM?"
In fact, in addition to Meta, the giant for VR and meta-universe investment, belongs to the "loud thunder, small rain". Compared to the volume of Jitterbug, the $9 billion to buy PICO is not that big, and Jitterbug's investment in healthcare is almost equal to the investment in Meta Universe.
Of course, behind the investment in hardware, Jitterbug also has its own "small mind". As of now, PICO sales are still on the rise, which means billions, if not tens of billions, of dollars in annual revenue for Jitterbug.
In essence, Jitterbug, Tencent and other giants in the meta-universe hardware layout, is "would rather pay wrongly, can not miss" mentality, if the vision of the "top player" in the eventual realization of the first-mover advantage in this field will be "a million dollars". If not realized, VR may also become a profitable business.
What's more, according to IDC, headset shipments are expected to grow 46.9 percent year-on-year in 2022, and maintain double-digit growth through 2026. "From an optimistic estimate, the ceiling of VR may be equivalent to the current game console," the former game developer believes, "even if the meta-universe does not work out, if this track can really appear the next PlayStation or Switch, no giant will be willing to miss. "
PICO released several wallpapers along with its brand upgrade, including one with the surface of the moon in the background, Armstrong's footprints in the lower right corner, and PICO's circular logo in the upper left.
The wallpaper's symbolism is very beautiful; the year of the takeover was only a small step in a long march for both PICO, and Jitterbug; the world's leading XR platform, or meta-universe vision, are the goal of the moon.
But in reality, due to high investment and unclear business prospects, no human has ever been to the moon after the Apollo program. The meta-universe program of the Internet giant also has the same vision and challenges as the Apollo moon landing.