Content is king: how to break the blockchain industry

Guide:

In the circle of the entire blockchain, there are many investors, speculators, developers, and project parties. The most scarce is the “consumer” of the C-end, because no application and content really solves the needs of consumers. Content is the winning rule in many industries. We can make great efforts to build better performance infrastructure, but where does the content come from? Just like a movie theater can't play a movie all the year round; a VR device with no content to play is just a boring decoration; the blockchain has no products that can be used by the public, and it will always be a small group of people in the enclosure. high. "I am too difficult." Giao brother broke the hearts of many Dapp developers.

This is an industry that has been played by the price of the currency. The blockchain has revolutionized and the waves are raging. You see that the price of the mark is far more cost-effective than the project. The blockchain scams, the tide recedes, and you find that only you are still Hard to climb on the beach…

Some optimists say that from the beginning of the Victorian Internet – the telegraph, to the traditional Internet, to the mobile Internet, the initial stage is not difficult and controversial.

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One of the most famous examples is that when Bill Gates introduced the Internet on television in 1995, the host came to the sentence, "Have you heard the radio?" When people don't understand the same thing, it is easy to carry it on. criticism. Only this time, it is the turn of the value of the Internet – blockchain.

But chicken soup can only warm the heart and can't solve the problem. What is the problem with the blockchain industry? An article by Bill Gates more than 20 years ago is the answer: "Content is king." The development of the industry is inseparable from consumers, but only high-quality content can attract users, and the lack of application is the biggest problem in the entire industry.  

Blockchain applications require consumers, not clones

The Internet is now a source of water, electricity and electricity in people's lives. If you find someone from the street and plan to use Internet technology, the outcome will be disappointing. You can't understand it, and people don't like it. If you pick up your mobile phone and introduce an application, the communication efficiency will be much higher. Grandpa and aunt can understand it and will ask for it. "Is this a 啥App?"

After all, ordinary users don't care about how water and electricity coal comes from, only care about how to use it, and the price is not suitable. Correspondingly, when we introduce the blockchain to users, we also need to present specific applications. But when you pull out the phone again and introduce a blockchain application, you will find that you can't get it. It’s easy to choose one, grandfather and aunt take a closer look.

"Hey Dapp, isn't it an app, it's not as good as my mobile phone, I want to get a problem with a letter in front?"

In a nutshell, the number of Dapps is too small and the development team is too small. 2018 is the first year of Dapp. According to DappReview, the number of Dapps is more than 1,500 throughout the year, with an average of more than 100 Dapps per month, with a total transaction volume of $4.8 billion. In the first half of 2019, the number of Dapps has doubled, and the total transaction volume in half a year has also exceeded $11 billion.

In terms of vertical comparison, Dapp's ecology seems to be developing well, but it is worth noting that active Dapp is only half of the active Dapp, and the lottery and high-risk categories have always had the highest proportion. These types of Dapp development costs are relatively low. The potential benefits are considerable and the price/performance ratio is undoubtedly the highest.

Many homogeneous projects came from the same team, a Dapp fell, and a vest was added. Of course, they are also enough to make a difference and contribute to most of the transaction flow. The stronger the reproductive ability of this type of Dapp, the more the malformation of the current Dapp ecology. A healthy ecology should be a hundred flowers, not one or two types.

Interestingly, in the circle of the entire blockchain, there are many investors, speculators, developers, and project parties. The most scarce is the “consumer” of the C-end. The essence is that there is no application and content that really solves the consumption. The needs of the people.

Of course, you can say that "fried coins" itself is a huge application to solve the demand. It is understandable that investors and speculators are participants in this global 24h*7 non-stop application. In addition, no scale-oriented C-side applications have been seen, allowing consumers to pay their willingly.

11 years ago, when the AppStore was just born, the plagiarism of imitation was also endless. In the first two years, you could find hundreds of similar weather applications, or just stupid applications that made strange noises. Apple has taken advantage of its centralization organization. In 2010, Apple published the App Store Review Guidelines, which states:

"There are already 250,000 apps in the App Store, so we don't need more software to demonstrate "Fart". If you can't develop something useful or provide some up-to-date entertainment, your app may not get through. ”

Apple has removed a large number of flashlight applications.

Nowadays, history is repeating itself in the blockchain application. You can see many clones in the same chain, and even in other "parallel universes", you can see those familiar faces. Dapp released by the platform).

However, the blockchain is decentralized. There will be no centralization mechanism like Apple. It can use a piece of paper to keep a lot of tribute Dapp out of the door. We can only hope that more developers will enter the market, and even some large companies and big capital will enter the market, so that the content of the industry will be enriched and the pool will be stirred up.

Going back to reality, because of the low return on content investment, investment institutions often have this perception: First we need to build powerful tools, and once we have the tools, we can build applications. Before we translated a USV article "A ridiculous analog butterfly effect: a thousand military horses to do the public chain" discussed this topic, should we first do the content, or do the infrastructure first?

This time, we try to find answers in other areas, maybe the stone of the mountain can attack jade.

Games and * films – help VR enter a steady development period

2016 is the first year of VR. With the popularity of head-mounted VR and various cottage VR devices led by Oculus, HTC and PlayStation, Volkswagen is familiar with this new term. However, VR equipment is expensive and uses less, making most consumers not ready to embrace VR.

The word of the first year seems to be poisonous. In the first year, it was a high light. After the first year, it went downhill. In 2017, VR was robbed of the limelight by the twin brothers. "Pokemon GO" was popular all over the world. QQ and Alipay also launched the AR red envelope in time, which sent warmth to players who could not play Pokemon GO in China.

In 2018, VR experienced a gradual recovery after the bursting of the industry bubble. Here, we must thank the big director Spielberg. The appearance of the movie "The Number One Player" really cheered up the VR industry. Some investment bank analysts and market research organizations have said that the film will become a catalyst for the VR market.

According to the statistics of China's VR/AR Market Quarterly Tracking Report released by IDC, the entire VR market continues to grow at a high speed. Among them, the VR head-to-head shipments in the Chinese market in 2018 were 1.168 million units, an increase of 123.6%.

Compared with the much-watched hardware field, VR content has always been a shortcoming in the industry, and its content and types have been difficult to meet user needs. After the first year of VR, the industry has not been able to climb from the bottom, except for the underlying software technology and hardware components to be further broken, the content of the barren is even more difficult to say.

At some VR industry conferences, the words “content is very important” are often mentioned, but after being underestimated, most of the time, we are still discussing topics such as 5G and hardware devices.

There is a saying in the market that when the industry chain is built, the content will naturally arise. In this regard, a VR content practitioner believes that "I am not against 'naturally there', but the content will not suddenly change from 0 to 100, or to learn from the teeth."

Some VR hardware vendors have realized the urgency of content requirements. On the eve of CES2019, HTC announced that it has partnered with Mozilla and AWS to integrate the VR browser Firefox Reality and the development cloud service Amzon Sumerian into the HTC Vive headset, hoping to attract more developers to participate in the development of VR content and apps.

In March of this year, Oculus said it would build a larger, more "complex" software library in the next few years.

“In the next few years, we will focus on developing VR content and applications, working with large developers and publishers to research deep and complex software.”

Rumor has it that Oculus has developed Robo Recall for game giant Epic Games $10 million budget

In the content of VR, what exactly is the category that solves the pain points of users? The game has always been one of the directions of many giants to bet. Whether it's Beat Saber, SuperHot or Robo Recall, these games do take advantage of the uniqueness of VR to give players an immersive new gaming experience.

3-4 years ago, the previous generation of VR equipment was still pinned on the computer, and it was necessary to drag a heavy and thick data transmission line and place the positioner to be used normally. The $800 HTC Vive, plus a computer that can run VR games for at least 8,000 yuan, is self-evident for the average user.

The bulky HTC Vive (pictured left) and the now lightweight Oculus Quest all-in-one (right)

Today, four years later, the Oculus Quest VR all-in-one has completely separated from the computer and the locator. With the head and the handle, you can enter a new virtual world. The price of 399 dollars will greatly reduce the threshold. In the game content, excellent works are frequent, but the ceiling on the hardware level is also obvious. In the face of ordinary computers, hardcore players can continue to "live" for 12 hours or more, but on VR devices, two hours is almost the limit:

1. Most of the VR game content will involve the movement of the body. The amount of exercise for two hours does not have to run 1000 meters.
2. VR head display weight is still not light, two hours of wear will make the player's head discomfort, eye fatigue
3. For the wireless VR all-in-one, the endurance limit has been reached in 2-3 hours.

It can be said that the game application has forced the hardware to make a huge progress in the past four years , from dragging the line, with the bulky head display, to let go of the bondage, and relatively easy to play in the virtual world. The product of the next iteration must be: lighter and more durable. Another content area that is pushing VR hardware advancement is actually the scene where VR is the biggest in user experience. (You know)

Everyone knows that PornHub is the traditional yellow website with the most traffic. Although it has a VR zone, the content is so sloppy. The birth of VR has gradually spawned a large number of new players entering the field. The fastest ones that may be running now are VRbangers, the first company to make 6K Porn content on the whole network.

Although the clarity and expressiveness of 4K in normal displays is good enough, in the world of VR, 4K movies are no longer in your head-mounted devices due to the significant increase in viewing angle (often over 180 degrees). So clear, the user demand that comes with it is a higher resolution. After the launch of its own 6K film source, VRbangers has seen a surge in website traffic and subscriptions.

VRbangers also supports BTC payments (the first time Vincent has paid for such sites)

However, unfortunately, most of the VR heads still do not reach the resolution of 4K, not to mention 6K. Even Oculus Quest can't decode 6K videos at all. Instead, a lot of second-line VR brands use 4K lenses very grounded. Some third-party players support 6K movie hard decoding playback. The existence of VRbangers began to force the VR hardware to further iteratively upgrade on the display level.

These landing scenes have helped the VR industry to gradually recover after the bursting of the bubble, which is inseparable from the content of money and the needs of consumers. If you don't believe in the improvement brought by VR, please be sure to try VRbangers. I believe that ***Hub is a passerby.

Content is king – the winning rule in the competition of the console game industry

18 years ago, Microsoft announced a high-profile entry into the console game market and launched the first generation of Xbox game consoles. In the 18 years since then, the console game market has entered the situation of the three countries. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft have faced each other in the ups and downs of the host. In the console game industry, there is an old saying that "the game is the only one in the world" . The so-called exclusive game refers to the game product that is only released on one game console. If the player wants to play this game, he must purchase the corresponding game console. The Big Three have their own game consoles and ecosystems. They spend a lot of resources on exclusive games and spare no effort to bring excellent games into the game, attracting players to buy their own hosts.

Sony PlayStation is part of the game character

Sony is well versed in this, through investment or direct acquisition, has obtained a large number of exclusive game resources, and these companies or studios that develop exclusive games for Sony's host platform, collectively referred to as the first party studio.

Among them, there are the famous "Uncharted Waters" series, Naughty Dog, the development studio of "The Last Survivor", and the studio Santa Monica Studio, which is famous for the "God of War" series. These 3A masterpieces have made great contributions to the sales of the PlayStation console. Every time a new generation of consoles comes out, they are inseparable from the works of these first-party studios.

On the one hand, the wealthy Microsoft spent huge sums of money to buy out the exclusive rights of some famous IP games, on the other hand, it acquired some studios as the first party content reserve. Boogie, a well-known blogger on Youtube, reviewed his conversation with Microsoft Vice President Mike Ybarra in a podcast. Boogie asked Mike:

“Why would Microsoft buy so many studios at the end of this generation of hosts?”

Mike said:

“The reason is simple, in order to dominate the next generation console market .”

According to Boogie, Mike went to those studios to ask developers:

“What project do you want to do?”

Developers ask:

“How much budget can we get?”

Mike said:

"I don't think you may understand it. This is not our problem. Our question is what kind of game you want to make. We are Microsoft. We are not bad. We just want to know what game you want to play. You are the most crazy. What is the dream?"

Nintendo is an alternative in the industry. On technology and capital, Nintendo has been opened by Sony and Microsoft. At every time the host changes, Nintendo’s new host seems to have both hardware configuration and performance. Behind the other two opponents an era.

Why is it still standing still?

DR partners bought a total of 5 switches during their trip to Japan in February this year.

Nintendo's Switch was not optimistic from the earliest quarters, and sales exceeded expectations in the first month of the first launch, with a total shipment of 2.74 million units. In the same period, its first game masterpiece, Zelda: Wilderness, sold more than the game console. More than 20,000 sets, sold 2.76 million sets. In fact, most players just buy this nearly 2,000 yuan game console for this game.

Nintendo has dominated the game console market since the 1980s, and has accumulated a large number of well-known first-party game IPs, including Mario series, Zelda Legend series, Pokemon series, and Star Card. There are countless series, "big chaos" series and so on.

Technology is not a core competency, but the old game is much stronger than the other two. From the first generation of Mario's level design to a textbook-style classic, now the "Wildness" is redefined. In the open world of gameplay, Nintendo has no rivals in the playability of game content.

I talked so much about it before, what is the relationship with the blockchain? Just like the Big Three in the console game market, each public chain hopes to build its own application ecosystem and realize the prosperity and application of the public chain. But the reality is that every public chain is bragging about its own technology, and hopes that the technology is in place, the developers will have it, the application will be there, the user will have it, and the ecology will be there. The good point to say is Roadmap, and the hard part is to dream.

Content is the winning rule in many industries, as is the blockchain industry. We can make great efforts to build a better performance infrastructure, but where does the content come from? Just like a movie theater can't play a movie all the year round; a VR device with no content to play is just a boring decoration; the blockchain has no products that can be used by the public, and it will always be a small group of people in the enclosure. high.

How to break

This article mainly attempts to elaborate two points:

1. Application iterations infrastructure evolution and evolution
2. Application is the core weapon of ecological platform competition

And these also apply to the blockchain industry, how to develop content in the blockchain industry? Need more capital to enter the market and even more big companies to enter. It is not difficult to understand that building a content ecosystem requires funding and resources.

Capital is now more inclined to invest in a public chain with a larger imagination and a better "good" story. Investment applications and content can neither be as high-reward as secondary market investment in virtual currency, nor as low-risk as primary market investment infrastructure. This puzzle seems to have been thrown to the public chain itself.

For the public chain, if you want to have a real user, not just a speculator who holds the currency, there is a long way to go in developing the ecology. Seeing a lot of public chains trying to buy some simple and simple games, using Dapp to advertise the progress of ecological development, but actually a ghost chain without users, this is tantamount to painting a cake to fill the hunger and deceive yourself.

If you have such money, you should try to make a mistake and see if you can find out some Dapps that really solve the user's needs.

If you didn't plan to do it well, then you might as well take the money to pull the plate. Compared with some spicy chicken Dapp, it is better to explain to the "investors" of the community.

In the long run, we hope that more investment institutions and public chains will actively change and bring more ammunition to the entire industry. Only in this way can the blockchain fly into the homes of ordinary people as soon as possible.

I hope this is not a luxury.

Source: DappReview

Editor's Note: The original title is "Content is King"

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