The long-awaited metaverse in the tech world has quietly emerged in a mobile game by NetEase.

Source: East Money

All signs indicate that the development of Metaverse is entering a new stage.

In the past few years, the concept of Metaverse has been very popular, and giants have invested a lot of funds and good wishes. However, the other side of the reality of the industry is that it has been stalled in a conceptual state for years. Facebook’s Metaverse has been hit by layoffs, and miHoYo, which once announced with great fanfare that it would build a virtual community of 1 billion people in the second dimension by 2030, has also significantly reduced the frequency of actively discussing Metaverse in the past two years.

In recent days, the country has issued a special document on the “Metaverse Industry Innovation and Development Three-Year Action Plan (2023-2025)”, pointing out the promotion of breakthroughs in Metaverse technology, industry, applications, and governance; at the industry level, internet giants like Intel have mentioned multiple times this year that with the approaching wave of Web 3.0 transformation in 2030, Metaverse will definitely become the next trend in the digital economy.

After the initial concept of the Metaverse cooled down, people realized that there is still a long way to go to build an “Oasis” like in the movie “Ready Player One”, mainly relying on technological breakthroughs; and as for another decisive factor of the Metaverse - content, we have already seen some prototypes of the “Oasis” in the form of game-based Metaverse, and it can truly be realized.

NetEase’s ‘Egg Party’ allows 100 million people to achieve a metaverse-style life.

According to the definition, the Metaverse is a highly immersive ‘digital virtual social form’ in the era of Web3.0. Headsets, first-person perspective, and virtual interactive enhancement are currently the main directions of various Metaverse efforts. However, when we break down the core of the Metaverse as a ‘virtual society’, perhaps its core value at the content level will ultimately return to the ‘social’ level.

From this perspective, the “metaverse” of electronic games may be more worth referring to than the attempts of tech giants.

For example, Netease’s mobile game ‘Nishuihan’ uses popular AI technology to create a large number of NPCs that can interact intelligently with players, allowing players to form a seamless virtual world with other players and NPCs through their smartphones, with shared interests, emotions, and economic consumption.

In other words, what Metaverse is committed to building is a digital ‘social form’, which requires rich enough content to carry users’ interests and demands, and to enable them to generate social and emotional connections with each other in the experience, and then form large and small ‘social clusters’.

This diverse “digital life” is more vividly presented in the game “Egg Party” launched by NetEase last year. Through massive consumable content and community interaction system, “Egg Party” has created a metaverse living space with hundreds of millions of monthly active users, allowing users to find content that matches their interests in this virtual space, establish emotional connections, and even gain economic benefits from it.

“Watermelon” is a highly influential content creator in the online video community. She solves the increasingly common parenting challenges faced by many young parents through “Egg Party.” Not only does she accompany her child to conquer levels in “Egg Party,” but she also quickly sets up a simple egg game world in the living room using household items such as dining tables, chairs, sofas, and cardboard boxes, where she and her son enact elements of jumping, racing, and rolling from the game in real life. Even for busy office workers under heavy work pressure, they don’t have to worry about a lack of common language with their children.

Since its inception, Metaverse has embodied humanity’s vision of virtual interaction and socialization, aiming to overcome physical space barriers and establish vibrant social connections that bring together people of different ages, backgrounds, and even strangers, creating emotional connections similar to those in the real world.

“Egg Party” has launched a series of “social practices” centered around content. Through estate cooperation construction, shop operation, etc., users can collaborate with their family, close friends, and loved ones to create personalized home cabins exclusive to each other, or experience real social life in the virtual world through diverse content and exploration. For example, during this year’s National Day holiday, in the “pedestrian street gameplay,” when a player hires other players as shop assistants and becomes a regular customer of this shop, the connections and bonds between them are established, blending social emotions of real life with the virtual society.

The digital scene constructed by “Egg Party” allows users to establish social connections in immersive interactive experiences, realize emotional value, realize the public’s fantasy of “digital life”, and also enable the game to rise in data. In August of this year, “Egg Party” announced the achievement of 100 million monthly active users. From the performance of “Egg Party”, the content value of Metaverse provides a life experience comparable to the real world, which is far more important than “technology”.

The transformation of players’ identities behind 100 million maps

A healthy society and collective form, where everyone is an active contributor and participant, and also a beneficiary of positive satisfaction. Referring to the development logic of the real society, the long-term operation of Metaverse products also relies on the genuine recognition and participation contribution of each user to this ‘digital virtual society’. In other words, in the game form of Metaverse, players are no longer just experiencers and consumers, but truly add more possibilities to this virtual world through their own creativity.

The “Egg Boy Party” team is very familiar with mobilizing UGC creation, and according to its producers, several members of the team have been in charge of the “Beaver Project” project. Launched in 2019, this original community of light games includes a PC editor, and it was also the inspiration for Egg Boy Party.

In order to help players better create works, the editor function of ‘Egg Party’ is continuously iterated on a weekly basis, and AI technology is introduced to improve efficiency. Anyone who opens the game can ‘edit’ the virtual space in ‘Egg Party’, such as restoring the appearance of Dunhuang from a thousand years ago, and realizing various imagined scenes, completing spatial interaction in a meta-universe style from creation. Previously, it was difficult for a mobile game to provide such a free and convenient creative space.

This low-threshold way of creation not only enables the game to accumulate over 100 million works in a short period of time, but also subtly transforms the identity of players as they enjoy their desire to create, and thus achieves a two-way empowerment between the game and the players.

For example, during the National Day non-legacy planning, ‘Egg Party’ collaborated with high-quality creators to travel across the country, engaging in inspirational dialogues with inheritors of intangible cultural heritage, and producing cultural content such as the Miao silver intangible heritage forging technique ‘Carving Dust, Blowing Shadows, Ultimate Craftsmanship’, inspiring users’ positive emotions towards traditional Chinese art and culture, and generating a wide resonance.

In addition to official collaboration, more users are promoting the UGC ecosystem of Egg Party by creating content to achieve self-realization and compatibility. Puxi Cola is an art major, and the maps he creates always feature his signature aesthetic style. The inspiration for his works comes from his dreams and the landscapes he yearns for. When other players visit these maps, they resonate with his various hidden thoughts.

These diverse content creations create resonance points of emotions and spiritual values for users in the virtual world, greatly enriching game content and making players willing to stay and become ‘permanent residents’ of Egg Island.

The metaverse of “Eggman Party” will be linked to real life.

The digital world formed by the positive emotional connection between high-quality, high-volume experiential content and users provides a reference template for the ultimate landing of the metaverse. Beyond the virtual world, how to integrate with real life, serve real life, and game predecessors have slowly carved out a path.

In fact, among the large number of virtual players in ‘Egg Party’, some creators have chosen to devote themselves full-time and have achieved their goals and recognition in terms of income and work value. A player with the ID ‘Comfort Game Store’ found their career direction in ‘Egg Party’ after a considerable period of unemployment, producing creative and heartfelt game content for players and achieving their desired income. The streamer with the ID ‘Mujiu Ah Mujiu’ also gained the expected popularity in ‘Egg Party’ after years of obscurity, achieving the dual goals of income and recognition of work value.

In the current ‘Egg Party’, there are dads who take care of their children while creating maps to earn milk powder money, as well as young stall owners with flexible side jobs and independent income. ‘Egg Party’ can fully connect users’ interests, socializing, and career ideals, and has quietly become a platform for many people to find their self-worth and achieve their career ideals.

Based on this, let us further glimpse into the future of the Metaverse, the true Metaverse, which is not just a presentation of a new generation of technological forms, but also an outlet for the interests, emotions, and ideals of tens of millions of users in real life. From this perspective, the Metaverse is still the undisputed trend, as it can become a ‘digital virtual society’ where countless users can immerse themselves, allowing everyone to find their own interests, values, sense of participation, positive emotional gains, and even new job opportunities and sources of income…

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