Meta Smartly Ties Roblox Integration To Its Metaverse Strategy in Latest Earnings Call

Above: Tunneler, an amazing first-person Roblox game

I was prepared to be snarky in response to Meta's latest earnings call, but if you read the actual transcript [.pdf here], it's notably less eye roll-ish about its metaverse strategy than previously:

The metaverse content and software vision continues coming together as well. We recently announced that Roblox is coming to Quest with an open beta on App Lab. For Horizon, the team is focused on retention right now and we're making good progress on that. We've made big improvements on avatars* as well, and that’s going to be a bridge between our mobile apps and our VR and mixed reality experiences. We'll have a lot more to share on both our metaverse and AI work at our Connect conference, which we'll be hosting in Hacker Square at our headquarters on September 27th. It's going to be a good one, so tune in!

We will, Zuck! Directly tying Roblox to Meta's metaverse vision is one of the few (only?) smart things I've seen the company do recently. The rest of the statement remains a questionable grab bag for reasons you could put in a whole book*, but connecting an actually successful metaverse platform to Meta's Quest is the best (last?) hope to give the device relevance. At the same time, Zuck and Roblox's CEO should also expect a government subpoena after the move.

*On the topic of "improvement on avatars", I wrote this in Making a Metaverse That Matters:

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Meta’s confusion over avatars is best illustrated by the strangely avatarized version of Mark Zuckerberg himself — the one from 2022, with huge, childlike eyes worthy of a Margaret Keane painting.

The backlash and ridicule that followed was so fierce, it even seemed to hurt Meta’s stock price. While market fluctuations are impelled by many factors, the simple fact is that Meta’s share price was 181, on the evening of August 15th, 2022, when the big-eyed announcement was made. By August 19 — with no other obvious factor at play, beyond the social virality of Mark Zuckerberg’s bizarre avatar — Meta’s share price had fallen to 167.

Scrambling in response to such a storm of Internet snark, Zuckerberg hastily posted a new update to his Facebook wall, depicting a much more detailed and realistic version of his avatar, which looked even more like Zuckerberg IRL.

This follow-up confirmed that Meta really did seem to believe that ideally, metaverse platform avatars should resemble their real world users as much as possible.

For newcomers to metaverse platforms, this is a common assumption, enforced by mainstream press coverage, which tends to cover virtual world events involving real life celebrities — for instance, Travis Scott in Fortnite, or Lil Nas X in Roblox. (More on them in Chapter 10.) For occasions like a mixed reality concert, it does make sense for the avatar to resemble their real life owner.

But this is actually the exception. Overwhelmingly, metaverse platform users do not prefer avatars based on their real life appearance — even when the internal tools to customize them that way exist.

So I'm looking less for "improvement", than "complete re-imagining on a corporate DNA level"!