Gaming tech company Improbable is building the infrastructure underpinning Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs’ metaverse platform Otherside.
Improbable’s CEO Herman Narula appears to have been won over by the rhetoric of Web3, stating that despite being “completely skeptical” of crypto and digital assets, he currently sees it as “the only means to effectively monetize and share value in a metaverse”.
Speaking at Web Summit, Narula stated that, “A metaverse is a network of connected experiences that many cannot live alone.” Rather, he said, they “need to enable other experiences to exist in the space. And sharing value between those experience is really challenging.”
Citing the example of a moving a digital T-shirt between a concert and a sporting event, Narula asked, “How do you track ownership? How do you track which company, which entitlement, which contractual element of currency or payment needs to be resolved?”
Web3 offers the only viable short-term solution to being able to manage the economy of the metaverse.”He said.
Battling big tech’s metaverse ambitions
Finally, he said, he sees the “last, critical piece of the puzzle in building a practical metaverse” in understanding how to allow disparate groups to partner to create value.
“We are used to a really outdated, broken model of building web-scale businesses,” he said. “That oppressive model of a single company owning the user, dominating the space and dictating what occurs on within a metaverse or on any web platform.”
It’s not only immoral, he said. It’s bad for business: “If you’re the most successful content creator on a closed platform, such ad Roblox, or Fortnite, or YouTube, you will never build an IPO-capable business,” Narula clarified.
No matter how much money the creator makes, “the platform risk of your company being fully dependent on the whims of other businesses minimizes the long-term value you can create in your stock”.
This, he stated, features a “fundamental stumbling block” to creating a metaverse inhabited by a diverse range of businesses.
Narula couldn’t resist a barb at metaverse rival Meta, that rooted in the legacy world of Big Tech.
Meta, he added, “has given the impression that this is what VR is about; eerie-looking legless avatars moving via office spaces”. It’s a ‘very enjoyable way to spend an incredible time,'” he said.
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