“Metaverse is not a business opportunity for game companies, but for everyone else”

There may be a crypto winter, as long and deep as you like, but Metaverse, Web3 and crypto assets are still being preached from top to bottom at the Web Summit in Lisbon. Herman Narula, co-founder and CEO of British tech unicorn Improbable, even gave his own space on the big stage to reveal the “truth” about the Metaverse: how it’s really supposed to work and what really matters.

Briefly about Improbable: The British startup, now ten years old, became known for being able to simulate large virtual worlds with lots of movement in them. For example, several years ago the city of Manchester, in the north of England, was recreated 1:1, and the movements of 100,000 people, including traffic, were simulated. Only that one wondered then why? With the relatively new Metaverse theme, Narula finally found a purpose for the software.

“Facebook is too focused on virtual reality,” Narula said at the Web Summit. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg wants his users to enter Horizon Worlds through VR glasses to entertain themselves or work in a virtual environment. But in Improbable, who is also the technology partner of “The Otherside” (the “Metaverse” of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Reported Trending Topics), you see it differently. Not a single big player like Meta should build the Metaverse, but a network of companies. Preferably a network that uses the internal M2 platform.

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interactions per second

Because, according to Narula, it is technologically superior. The comparison he makes with others is based on the unit of measure “Operations Per Second” (OPS). So how many interactions per second does the virtual environment create when thousands or tens of thousands of users are interacting at the same time? The multiplayer game Fortnite is currently 10,000 OPS, but Improbable’s M² (MSquared) platform is said to be capable of 300 million OPS.

But who should use this software platform now? “The Metaverse is not a business opportunity for game companies, but for everyone else,” says Narula. And check it out: brands, celebrities, big sports clubs, content creators – basically everyone who has a big reach or is striving for it, but wants to drive traffic away from YouTube and co. into their own universe. “That’s the real opportunity,” says the CEO of Improbable, that’s where you can really monetize the “audience” without having to share the revenue with Big Tech.

And, as you might have guessed, crypto naturally comes into play in this monetization. “Crypto is the only way to monetize Web3,” said Narula. Values ​​can only be shared in virtual environments and ownership is clearly defined using the blockchain. “The economy of the metaverse is run by crypto.” How do you imagine this metaverse then? should be a “Network” where Improbable only owns a small part and where other companies can invest.

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