Sam Dickie: Fisher Funds expert on the decline in interest in the Metaverse

A few years ago, the Metaverse was the biggest talking point in the world of technology.

Meanwhile in 2024, the virtual platform has declined in popularity and the market has moved on.

Sam Dickie from Fisher Funds explains what happened.

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Past your mind back a few years and everybody was
talking about the metaverse right the market thought it would
be the next big thing, the next big computer platform.
After we transitioned to mobile computing fifteen years ago or so,
what happened to the metaverse? Sam Dicky from Fisher Funds
has been looking into this.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hey, Sam, good at evening here.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Sam, remind me why anybody thought this was going to
be the next big thing.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yes, well that the most evangelical believers back in twenty
twenty one thought it could be the new Internet. So
instead of interacting via text and video, we would interact
in virtual reality and cruise around as kind of lanky avatars.
And if your children irritating you play Fortnite or roeblocks,
well they are really just dumbed down versions of the metaverse.

(00:43):
And you might remember another virtual world we talked about
back then, head the Sandbox, which specializes in virtual real estate,
and a virtual neighbor of Snoop Dog brought a plot
of land back then from a million bucks, and that
early height was a bit like the tea markets, Smoke
and mirrors and the price of this online where the
state it's kind of collapsed by ninety nine percent.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Oh my gosh. And so what he can't do anything?
Is that that's real money he's lost.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yes, absolutely, it's real money on a on a virtual
plot of land.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Okay, who okay, this was expected to be massive, right,
so who put money into this stuff?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
It was expected to be massive, and it's a massive
unders thrown around. So I think mortgagerstanding to report at
the time saying it could be an eight trillion dollar market.
It was the next generation kind of social media stream
in a gaming platform and virtual reality, and Facebook, remember
changed its name, so I went so far as to
change his name to Meta show how serious it was
about chasing the next Internet. It wasn't just Meta. Apple

(01:45):
invested heavily in virtual reality hardware like it's goggles, and
the gaming company's like ten Cent in China, and Microsoft
invested heavily as well.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
What's the reality, you know, compared to what they were expecting.
What are we dealing with today?

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Not much? Not much. I mean I talked about those
virtual real estate prices, but messarily as a poster child here.
So there's eighty ten dollars on a metaverse to date
and they've got less than ten billion dollars of revenue
to show for that. But they are even kind of
stepping away from that the goggles of the online world,
and they're really just focusing their attention now outside of AI,

(02:21):
of course, which we're not speaking about tonight, on its
joint venture with ray Band, where instead of kind of
picking up your phone one hundred and thirty seven times
per day, you can cruise around with a cool pier
of ray Band glasses on with the heads up virtual
reality display.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Oh yeah, that sounds cool. What happens from here, though, Sam?
Is it? Is it possible that this idea just was
before it's time and it might catch on in the
future sometime.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, they all known. We overestimate technology in the short
term and underestimate in the long term. Could be, could be,
I think, but even the most evangelical Zuckerberg is kind
of stepping away from it for now. I do think
he's online virtual worlds that the market is selling now
are unlikely to be anything more than Niche use that
haserhaps for gaming, and perhaps remember we talked about the

(03:06):
time head, Perhaps if you had a friend and Partmerston
both you could team up virtually and attended constant at
High Park sounds pretty cool, but I can't. I guess
we'll sit around at work with goggles on and working virtually.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
No when you want the real life experience, don't you.
I mean, is the lesson in this for investors to
perhaps be a little bit wary of tech nerds getting
extremely excited about things.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
I think it is. The metaverse is not in portant
per se, but it is a great lean through which
to view that the kind of aggressive spending we're seeing
right now. So remember the scale we talked about a
month ago, Microsoft needs Amazon, Google, just for companies. It's
been one hundred and forty billion on capital expensive last
year and US spend two thirty billion next year, so

(03:50):
extraordinary rise. So meta all alone. So despite the incredible
success of these companies, they're backed under losers. So think
of the Windows phoned by Microsoft, of firephone by Amazon,
or the Google Glass which was a wearable computer. So
the point of all of this is the biggest resk
for these big tech companies outside of the government trying
to split them up alligivate them, is being out innovated,

(04:13):
so being beaten at their own game. And they do
this or they get ahead of this by throwing couns
of money. Anything with an innovation pulse and that kind
of healthy paranoia is just kind of a poster doing
business for these big companies.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, fascinating. Hey, Sam, that was absolutely fascinating. I really
appreciate it. You're talking us through Sam Dickie Aficier Funds.
For more from Hither Duplessy Allen Drive.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
Listen live to news talks.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
It'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow the podcast
on iHeartRadio