On the first anniversary of Douyin’s acquisition of pico, has it now entered the metaverse? Previously, Douyin acquired pico in a mighty way and wanted to enter the metaverse. Many people don’t know about this, and they don’t know now. How is the situation? Let’s take a look with the editor. I hope this article can help you.
What’s happening now on the first anniversary of Douyin’s acquisition of Pico?
It’s been exactly one year since Douyin Group announced its acquisition of VR headset manufacturer Pico last year. With the strong support of Douyin, PICO, which just announced its brand upgrade, continues to grow in sales. In the first half of this year, its market share ranked first in China and second in the world. Since April 9 this year, PICO has held three concerts online.
A-SOUL, a virtual idol group jointly launched by Douyin and Lehua, a well-known domestic brokerage company, at the end of 2020, has encountered some controversy, but has nearly 20 million fans online. On June 17, A-SOUL had its first live broadcast on PICO, and Douyin’s own virtual person shook hands with users for the first time in the Douyin metaverse.
As for virtual social networking and game engines, in June this year, Douyin acquired the two-dimensional virtual social platform Wave Particles; in August, it participated in the investment of game engine developer Unity China. Overall, this section is still in the early stages of development and should not be too demanding.
Several hot-selling VR devices, a content ecosystem that needs to be enriched, a virtual idol group, and virtual social networking that has not yet been implemented-these are all the results of Douyin one year after entering the metaverse.
In the past year, Douyin has tested the waters along different paths, but has not yet figured out the outline of the metaverse. It has achieved some results in various branches, but it has not kneaded them into the same metaverse. If we put aside the concept of the metaverse, the progress it has made so far can be classified into conceptual categories such as smart devices, online social networking, and even online games.
This is also a common problem faced by companies such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and Meta when they get involved in the Metaverse. They either started with hardware, or started with platforms or software, but they are still in the "blind man feeling the elephant" stage today; the outside world cannot perceive the mystery of the metaverse, and companies have no idea whether what they are doing counts as the metaverse. Suspect. The metaverse dominated by Internet companies is still a long way from truly becoming a "universe".
2021 is the first year of the Metaverse. In March, the American game development community Roblox, "the first stock in the Metaverse", was listed in the United States; in October, the social media giant Facebook announced that it would change its name to Meta and officially enter the Metaverse. On August 29, Douyin acquired PICO, which was regarded by the outside world as a signal to enter the metaverse.
Unlike Meta, which changed its name in a high-profile manner, Douyin has not promoted the concept of the Metaverse in public, and PICO also has internal regulations prohibiting mention of the Metaverse. However, this does not prevent the outside world from connecting Douyin with the Metaverse.
On this track, Douyin’s funds, manpower, and traffic quickly poured in. PICO changed its low profile before being acquired and pressed the fast forward button. PICO began to appear in Douyin open-screen advertisements, popular variety shows, and Internet celebrity live broadcast rooms, and offline sales outlets entered the core business districts of first-tier cities. Under the strong traffic offensive, PICO's VR headset product sales began to double.
As sales grew, Douyin began to recruit and deploy troops around PICO. At present, the PICO team has grown to a thousand people. Ren Lifeng, the head of Xigua Video, Song Binghua, the head of Douyin variety shows, and Wu Zuomin, the director of Douyin Entertainment, have also successively transferred to the VR product department, which shows that Douyin internally attaches great importance to PICO.
In addition, Douyin acquired the two-dimensional virtual social platform Wave Particles in June this year, and the team was merged into the PICO Social Center. Ma Jiesi, founder of Wave Particles and former Xiaomi VR head, is responsible for PICO’s social business.
The virtual idol business cooperated by Douyin and Lehua Entertainment has also been linked to the VR business. On June 17, virtual idol group A-SOUL held its first live broadcast on PICO, and the number of applicants exceeded Wang Feng’s VR concert.
Douyin is not the only giant that has captured the popularity of the Yuanverse.
At the end of 2021, Baidu’s Metaverse product Xirang was launched. Almost at the same time, Tencent also began to explore the Metaverse. QQ and QQ Music launched two functions with Metaverse elements, Super QQ Show and MusicZone. They also registered There are hundreds of Yuanverse trademarks. In addition, Tencent was originally one of the potential buyers of PICO, but was later blocked by Douyin.
At present, Douyin’s metaverse is mainly for VR equipment, and the most common usage scenario of the latter is games.
Douyin has Zhaoxiguangnian, Mutong Technology and other players in this field, and has the strength to compete with Tencent. Its approach is "from hard to soft", first laying out the hardware entrance, and then improving the software ecosystem step by step.
In contrast, Tencent chose to move from soft to hard, first setting up services on mobile APPs that are already quite popular, and then switching to them after the hardware is launched in the future. In June this year, it was revealed that Tencent had officially established an extended reality (XR) department. Earlier, there were rumors that Tencent had acquired Black Shark Technology.
Social networking and games are Tencent’s hinterland, and they are also areas that Douyin has always wanted to break through. The collision of the two giants may be one of the biggest highlights of the future Metaverse track.
In the past year, Douyin Yuanverse has invested and made progress in hardware, software, and internal social systems, but this "universe" is still fragmented, with several sectors fighting on their own. Although there is some internal linkage, compared to the "universe", it is more like separate scenes.
In terms of development path selection, Douyin is similar to Meta. But even Meta in the Allin metaverse lacks successful experience in how to take the critical step from VR hardware to software ecosystem. The current experience of VR devices is still more like a home game console, rather than a next-generation Internet access device that can carry users’ daily lives.
According to IDC data, global AR/VR headset shipments exceeded 10 million in 2021, largely due to Meta: its VR headset product Quest2 occupied 78% of the global market share last year. PICO shipments accounted for 4.1%, taking a dominant position in the Asian market. Quest2 has tens of millions of copies in stock, and PICO has millions in stock.
Last year, the number of new users of consumer VR headsets was equivalent to the total population of Sweden. Judging from the scale of users, the vision of the Metaverse seems to be within reach. But the reality is that the current experience provided by Douyin or other companies’ Metaverse is far from meeting people’s expectations for the concept of “universe”.
There is still not enough VR hardware. From the perspective of innovation diffusion, when the scale of new things reaches the critical value of 10-25, diffusion will accelerate and be difficult to reverse. In the domestic smartphone market, this critical value is 12, and the domestic VR market is still very far away from this node.
On the other hand, Meta, Douyin, etc. have not yet found more implementation scenarios for VR hardware.
Social interaction is Meta’s strength. Meta has already tried to bring social interaction into VR, but the results were unsatisfactory. In August this year, Meta's VR social platform HorizonWorld (hereinafter referred to as Horizon) was launched. Zuckerberg also posted a selfie of himself in it to celebrate, but it attracted complaints from netizens. Netizens believe that Horizon’s rough character and scene modeling is not even comparable to open world games from ten years ago.
Douyin launched the “Party Island” APP last year, but on July 25 this year, Party Island was removed from major app stores. PICO has recently recruited people for its social business, and its mission of “creating new connections for users” is also implicit in the social trend. However, at present, PICO has not made any big moves in social media in the metaverse.
The bigger problem is that even if Internet companies implement social functions and other functions on VR devices, they are still far away from the metaverse that people imagine.
Currently, Meta’s investment in the Metaverse has reached the level of tens of billions of dollars, and Byte has also invested tens of billions of yuan in a series of investments such as the acquisition of PICO.
With such huge capital investment and marketing campaign, users' expectations have been infinitely raised, and the science fiction movie "Ready Player One" just painted a wonderful blueprint.
In "Ready Player One", users can construct their own identity in the virtual world. The virtual world and the real world are parallel and interoperable, and even currencies can be exchanged with each other.
If you single out any of these elements, you can find similar mappings in reality: there are already relatively portable VR devices in the real world, there are sandbox games like "Minecraft", and there are Blockchain and tradable virtual currencies. This is also one of the reasons for the explosion of the concept of the metaverse. Human beings have made considerable progress in various basic technologies of the metaverse.
However, a game developer said that if you want to achieve an experience similar to "Ready Player One" on a VR device, the price will be very high based on the current technical level. Many users are also disappointed to find that after the initial novelty wears off, VR headsets are essentially not much different from other electronic devices in their hands. Most of the things VR can do, such as watching movies, concerts, mobile phones, and computers It is also capable, but there is a certain gap in immersion.
Zuckerberg has said that building a basic platform for the Metaverse will be a long road, and he expects that Horizon will still be a beta version in the next few years.
Tencent Senior Vice President Ma Xiaoyi also made an estimate of the Metaverse’s vision in a speech this year. He was pessimistic about the changes in the Metaverse within the short term of 2-3 years, and the time for qualitative change The node may be ten years from now. Although there have been breakthroughs in many related technologies, they are all dedicated explorations, and there is still a considerable technical and commercial distance from the concept envisioned by the Metaverse itself.
Despite all the problems, there are still many loyal believers who, like Zuckerberg, remain optimistic about the long-term vision of VR. They believe that in time, everyone will enter the metaverse, and VR It is the door to the metaverse.
Believers also pin their hopes on Apple. Recently, well-known analyst Ming-Guo said that Apple plans to ship approximately 1.5 million AR/VR headsets in 2023. Guo believes that Apple’s entry is the explosive period for the VR market. Whether it is hardware R&D experience, software ecosystem, or user base, PICO and even Meta are obviously not comparable to Apple. The huge investment of the two manufacturers may have helped Apple complete the work of educating users.
On the other hand, the content ecology behind a device is basically positively correlated with the user base, and user growth seems to be bound to bring prosperity to the content ecology. Supporters of the metaverse concept believe that after the content ecosystem gradually prospers, VR will become a product as in demand as mobile 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 should correspond to VR.
But Li Chen (pseudonym), the leader of a certain web3.0 project, said, “This is a kind of linear thinking and may not necessarily be established.”
Li Chen believes that on the Internet, Before the emergence of PCs, there was already a certain market for PCs, and before the emergence of mobile Internet, mobile phones had already become a necessity. The reason why smartphones can develop to today's scale is because mobile phones themselves are a large enough market.
“The biggest problem with VR is precisely that it is not strictly necessary.” Li Chen believes that, at least for now, people do not really need a bulky, expensive device with a long battery life to simulate reality.
The aforementioned game developers believe that the implementation scenarios of VR in the short term may include VR tourism, VR games, VR videos and other scenarios. "The experience of these scenes has been significantly improved, and the investment cost is one-time and can be reused."
As for the implementation of VR office, social and other scenes, the person is not optimistic. "Why does it cost so much to solve things that can be solved with ZOOM?"
In fact, with the exception of Meta, the giants' investment in VR and the metaverse is "big thunder but little rain". Compared with the size of Douyin, the 9 billion invested in PICO is not large. Douyin’s investment in the medical and health field is almost the same as its investment in the Metaverse.
Of course, Douyin also has its own "little thoughts" behind its investment in hardware. From the current point of view, PICO's sales are still on the rise. For Douyin, this means billions or even tens of billions in revenue every year.
Essentially, the layout of the Metaverse hardware by giants such as Douyin and Tencent is based on the mentality of "I would rather pay for it than miss it". If the vision in "Ready Player One" is finally realized, in this The first-mover advantage in the field will be "profitable". If it fails to be realized, VR may also become a profitable business.
According to IDC data, headset shipments are expected to grow by 46.9% year-on-year in 2022, and will maintain double-digit growth rates until 2026. “From an optimistic estimate, the ceiling of VR may be equivalent to the current game console,” the aforementioned game developer believes. “Even if the metaverse fails, if the next PlayStation or Switch can really appear on this track, no giant will be willing to miss it. ”
While upgrading the brand, PICO released several wallpapers. One of the backgrounds is the lunar surface, with Armstrong’s footprints in the lower right corner and PICO’s circular logo in the upper left corner.
The meaning of the wallpaper is very beautiful. The year after the acquisition is just a small step in a long journey for both PICO and Douyin; the world's leading XR platform, or the metaverse Visions are as far-reaching goals as landing on the moon.
But in reality, due to reasons such as excessive investment and unclear business prospects, no human has ever landed on the moon since the Apollo program. The Metaverse plan of major Internet companies also has the same aspirations and challenges as the Apollo moon landing.