Maxim Perumal argues Meta is buying relevance in VR by acquiring studios and controlling content, when it should build a creator-driven ecosystem like Minecraft. He says Meta's top-down approach concentrates risk: a Zuckerberg misstep could destabilize the whole platform. Grassroots communities, though slower, beat brute-force acquisition.
And that third and last principle is Minecraft 2.0. That's how I call it in my head. And it's basically this idea that one very powerful thing about Minecraft was that there was a lot more Power outside of Mojang, the company making Minecraft, than inside. Inside the company, they're just creating this thing called Minecraft. But outside of it, you have millions of kids building servers, building mods, building texture packs, making videos on YouTube, making billions of views on YouTube. This is the most successful marketing campaign ever. And Mojang didn't do anything about it. It's all happening outside of the company. So you're leveraging the people essentially to build a lot of the things that are valuable about your product. And that might sound obvious, but just look at what VR companies are doing. They're not doing that. If you look at what Meta is doing from the outside, at least, it sounds a lot like the playbook of— How the Xbox came around, right? Where Xbox wanted to— was Microsoft, which had this reputation of being a big, boring company making text and word processor software. So they're old and they're boring, and now they want to go into gaming, which seems weird. But the way they did it is, oh, well, they created this subsidiary, and then they just said acquiring all those game companies and sort of tightly controlling the supply of content and experiences. And by buying all those companies and sort of brute-forced their way into legitimacy, right? And you can sort of feel that Meta is doing something very similar where they are this big and boring company and only your grandparents are on Facebook. But they bought this company called Oculus, and now they're buying all those game studios. And most of the hits on the Oculus are games that are built by studios owned by Meta, and they're trying to brute force their way into relevancy, right?
Top-down.
Exactly. So the power is within the company. If Mark Zuckerberg makes a mistake, it can widely affect the VR ecosystem and Meta's VR ecosystem and their games and their experiences. In the case of Minecraft, If Mojang made a big mistake, it's probably not that big of a deal because most of the energy around it, most of the hype, most of the content, most of everything is actually happening outside of the company.
Interesting. So what's missing? Why is Meta going for this side? Why are they—
Because you can control it. You cannot manufacture a success like Minecraft. You cannot wake up one day and say, oh, I'm going to build a game. And millions of kids are going to be creating content for it and making YouTube videos about it. You can have infinite amount of money. You cannot wake up and decide to do that.
No, but you can set in place some pillars for that to happen.
Okay, you can set some pillars in place, and that's risky. And is it, is it really going to work? And what are the investors going to say? And will the employees get excited about this? And in the beginning, it's going to be painful. In the beginning, there's going to be 10 guys using our Minecraft 2.0, and we're gonna look like idiots because we're putting all of this time and effort into it and no one is using it. So we'll look like idiots for 10 years and everyone will make fun of us. Or we buy our way into relevancy because we have this huge pile of money and we buy game studios and we go into this strategy where, you know, it sounds like it's pretty obviously gonna work, right? From their perspective. And so there is a strategy that they decided to win to win. And I think it makes sense. You're a gigantic company, you have a huge pile of cash, use it. And also this strategy of trying to build a new Minecraft, if you do that, you're trying to compete with everyone because you don't need lots of money to try to build a new Minecraft. You just need to be really, really good at it. But if you go in the strategy of Owning this entire thing, who can compete with you? Only the companies that are incredibly rich can compete with you. So you've already sort of— you're playing a game where you have an edge, and that's what they're doing. And on my side, I'm playing a game where I have an edge.
Which is engineering the platform where people do feel an incentive and a sense of purpose to do all of those creations.
Exactly. And I don't care if I have only 10 people using it for a long while and we look like idiots and no one understands what we're trying to build, because I've done it before. My first VR headset, no one understood VR. No one understood why you would want to build your own VR headset from scratch. And a few weirdos started building my VR headset from scratch. And those weirdos attracted other weirdos, and we were all a bunch of weirdos being happy all together. And then we ended up being thousands of people building my VR headset. And actually soldering the components ourselves. And I don't mind doing this all over again. I don't mind going through that process from scratch again because I believe that after using VR every single day for over 6 years, and VR is the thing I care the most about in the world, regardless of the company, I would be doing VR anyway. So I think I have a very good sense of how to make it much better. And I think it resonates with a lot of people in the industry. And so we'll just be doing that. And I think I can attract really, really good people to contribute to building that ecosystem.
