MANY THRIVING METAVERSES

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In October 2021, Facebook (FB) announced what was arguably the largest corporate change in its 20-year history. Mark Zuckerberg and his executive team had decided to go all in on “the metaverse.” So much so that the company decided to change its name to Meta (META) and rebrand entirely.

Here’s what the company’s announcement stated…

The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together – and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world.

Meta’s timing to focus on “the” metaverse – one it hadn’t created yet – was costly. Meta’s share price collapsed 73% from the time of the announcement through November 2022. The stock then languished there for several months into the new year. It meant that there was no immediate way to monetize this massive multibillion-dollar investment it was making. And the worst part? It diverted its entire corporate focus to its metaverse initiatives at precisely the same time the world of artificial intelligence was absolutely booming with breakthroughs.

It went all in too early on a technology that was not ready to be monetized… and it paid the price. That November (2022), Meta cut its workforce by 11,000 (13%) to reel in costs. By March 2023, it announced more job cuts – another 10,000 positions – and that it would be shifting its focus away from the metaverse and heavily into large language models and generative AI.

Many Thriving Metaverses

What drove Zuckerberg to make the move to Meta? There were already several prominent metaverses thriving with activity, growing exponentially and wildly profitable… and Zuckerberg wanted to be one of them.

Fortnite, a massive multiplayer online social game, is a perfect example. Fortnite has grown into a metaverse with more than 500 million registered players and about 220 million monthly active players.

The Fortnite metaverse has already generated more than $26 billion in revenue through March 2024 and is one of the most popular games in history.

Fortnite has its own currency, V-bucks, and its own developer ecosystem that allows creators to build new games and metaverses within the Fortnite ecosystem. Fortnite is owned by private tech company Epic Games which was last valued at $31.5 billion in 2022.

Equally as impressive as Fortnite, if not more so, is publicly traded Roblox (RBLX) which now has 380 million monthly active users. While Roblox graphics may not be as flashy as Fortnite’s, it is impressive in the scale of its universe with 79.5 million daily active players. And where Roblox excels over Fortnite is in its remarkably vibrant developer community that builds different games and new worlds within the Roblox metaverse. Roblox has about 2.5 million developers working with its metaverse. Those community developers made more than $410 million in the first half of this year alone. The Roblox metaverse is a fully functioning online world with branding, advertising, e-commerce, gaming, and its own currency of course – Robux.

Last week was an exciting week for the company as it had its annual developers conference which gave us a view on the future of metaverse technology… I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that the future of the Metaverse is all about artificial intelligence and generative AI.

Roblox gives its users and developers the ability to apply generative AI in designing a character for the game using simple text prompts. But this is just scratching the surface of what Roblox will be enabling. The company is leaning into multimodal AI that will enable not just image generation, but animation, work in 3D, software programming, and eventually video generation.

Roblox’s AI-powered metaverse strategy is already working extremely well. The company is now valued at $27 billion and will generate about $4.2 billion in revenue this year and more than $500 million in free cash flow. Compare that to Meta’s Reality Labs division which generated only $1.9 billion in revenue last year at a massive multibillion-dollar loss.

Meta would have been better off acquiring Roblox and its AI-powered metaverse from the start instead of spending at least $46.5 billion starting from scratch. Either way, the employment of generative AI is going to be a boom for gaming and metaverse development that will empower not only companies to accelerate development… but also developers and creators to take part in filling these metaverses with interactions, transactions, commerce, and social interactions. 

Is it any wonder that this generation that was taught evolution is true and there is no God would spend their time creating their own world in the metaverse? As there is no meaning or purpose to life on Earth and this world is a mess anyway, we will create our own world where we are in control. Either that or the rising suicide rates for teens indicate they decide to end their lives.

The Bible, God’s Word is a book of prophecy and thankfully God has revealed in detail what will happen in the world before Jesus returns to restore righteousness. What we see happening in the world, particularly with the younger generation is exactly what is prophesied. Also, the nation God established for His purposes, Israel, is the centre of the world’s attention with antisemitism rampant, once again exactly as the Bible prophecies would occur before Jesus second coming to Earth.

MORE ON THE METAVERSE AND CHURCH

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On this podcast Christian Post reporter Leonardo Blair poses a fascinating question: Will the Metaverse end the megachurch? His answer is yes!

Blair joins Billy Hallowell on this podcast to discuss this issue. He explains what the metaverse is more broadly, how the churches are using it – and his prediction of what might happen to metaverse complexes amid the increasing turn to the use of technology by churches. They maintain that there are benefits for the metaverse as well as negatives.

https://player.edifi.app/embed/index.html#/episodes/What-Is-the-Metaverse-and-Is-It-Poised-to-Obliterate-Megachurches/4838533

METAVERSE PART OF THE META-MORPHOSIS

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Meta-Morphosis: The dramatic change you aren’t seeing. This change is happening slowly every day, piece by piece. To us, living today, it’s almost invisible. We aren’t noticing it. But you can be sure that it’s a metamorphosis — a complete change into something totally different.

Virtual reality

It started with computers, then the internet, laptops, mobile phones, smartphones, Myspace, Facebook, virtual reality, augmented reality, cloud storage, cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, Sandbox, Decentraland…

It’s accelerating faster and faster.

We are transforming our reality from tangible, to virtually tangible. A world that is virtual, connected, and fully immersive in the cloud. And our lives will never be the same again…

You’ve likely heard the term metaverse — but you might not know exactly what it means. Well, that’s OK, because neither does anyone else! Everyone has their own idea of how it will evolve.

At the core of the metaverse is a blending of our physical world with the online world. The NFT tokens website describes it this way. “The Metaverse” is an all-encompassing term used to describe “a universe where we spend our lives inside that thing eternally”.

Or in the words of Mark Zuckerberg:

The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. 

‘In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up.’

Meta is much bigger than a name change. This signals a major pivot of the Facebook business. It also tells us what may well be the next big tech revolution: The Metaverse.’

It won’t be a specific place because it will be all around us. It will change the way we shop, work, socialise, and seek entertainment.

It’s gained a lot of attention since Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing to Meta Platforms on 28 October 2021. This prompted a whole lot of people to start searching the word ‘metaverse’ as the Google Trend Charts demonstrate.

From a Christian and end-times perspective, metaverse (virtual reality) is the culmination of how Satan is using technology to take young people, in particular, away from God and His values. A further demonstration if you needed one that we are living in the prophesied “last days” before Jesus returns, first to rapture His Saints, second to pour out His wrath upon an unrepentant world, and finally to return with the glorified Saints to rule and reign with a rod of iron on this earth for one thousand years. As the following Isaiah prophecy shows, God the Father and Jesus have unfinished business to fulfill with Jerusalem and His nation Israel.

“For Zion’s sake, I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake, I will not be quiet, until her righteousness goes forth as brightness and her salvation as a burning torch. The nations shall see your righteousness, and all the kings your glory, and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give. You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.” Isaiah 62:1-4

“Behold, the Lord has proclaimed to the end of the earth: Say to the daughter of Zion, “Behold, your salvation comes; behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him.” And they shall be called The Holy People, The Redeemed of the Lord, and you shall be called Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.” Isaiah 62:11-12

METAVERSE – THE NEXT GENERATION OF CONNECTIVITY

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In a single day, Facebook was renamed, but Meta is much more than a name. Zuckerberg may create the metaverse but the Antichrist will use it. Why is the metaverse going to be more addictive than social media and why will it lead to the Mark of the Beast and the Image of the Beast? Watch this Last Days Breaking News episode with Nelson Walters to discover the hidden dangers of this new technology.

 Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, “has long imagined a virtual world where people work, play and interact.” Virtual offices can be entered and you can interact with a computer. Zuckerberg, with billions of dollars and a massive Facebook audience, is investing in a future unlike any present version of social media or video gaming. A recent Wall Street Journal article said, “The metaverse represents a digital reality where people playing through avatars would be able to attend concerts with friends or try on clothes in stores, just as they would offline out in the real world.”

A person would access this online world as an avatar, a digital version of oneself. You could attend a concert with another “avatar friend,” go shopping and try on clothes and then go to work as well. All of this is done in an immersive experience using ocular technology already developed. I will leave it to your imagination as to what other activities one could engage in within this digitally contrived world and what impact it will have on our children.