Power Doesn't Always Mean Profit: What Builders of Digital Ecosystems Can Learn From the Metaverse

The supremacy of Big Tech increasingly rests on their ability to build and manage digital ecosystems, but power does not always translate into profit. Meta's costly metaverse experience offers a cautionary tale: by the time Horizon Worlds had been live for two years, fewer than 200,000 people used it monthly, and content creators were paying fees of up to 47.5% on virtual goods sales, draining the incentive for complementors to participate.

Apple is now making a strikingly similar bet with its Vision Pro headset, pursuing the same model of tight orchestrator control that Meta ultimately had to abandon.

This Fortune piece argues that attempting to control everything is one of the cardinal sins of ecosystem design, and that the real lesson from the metaverse is that complementors have genuine power to shape an ecosystem's trajectory, simply by choosing not to show up.

Read here.

Authors: François Candelon, Michael G. Jacobides and Katie Round