With Accounts in Decline, Facebook’s Focus is Scattering
Facebook’s number of daily and monthly active users has declined in the second quarter, the company announced.While infinite growth is the MO of most, if not all, businesses, Facebook having 2.7 billion users – roughly a third of the whole global population – means they must be reaching the limit of who can become a member, if they account for those who can access the platform and the fact they can’t expect all possible members to become members.
Stagnation is still an issue, which is why daily and monthly active user figures receive scrutiny. However, despite the sense that penetration is ebbing, Facebook continue to innovate and diversify their platform.
Facebook Gaming
What is getting considerable promotion and focus is Facebook Gaming. There is the streaming branch of Facebook Gaming, and there is the technical branch of Facebook Gaming.The Streaming Branch
The streaming side of things is trying to be built to compete with likes of YouTube, Twitch, and Mixer. What they’ve recently announced, which is huge news for streamers, is that Facebook will no longer charge fees on subscription prices: streamers will get one-hundred percent of the revenue.Additionally, having the streaming platform within the existing, main social media platform enables a convenient flow of traffic. They’ve already attracted popular streamers like Nepenthez, Disguised Toast, KingRichard, and Corinna Kopf, all signing exclusive contracts with the site.
Cloud-based gaming is its other prospect. What it offers is vastly different to the cloud-based platforms Google and Amazon have. Facebook want cloud-based gaming to revolve around free-to-play games, in a similar vein to the platform’s classic Farmville, which was based on simulation games like Zoo Tycoon and Dinopark Tycoon.
Facebook faces steep competition. The online gaming landscape is busy with giants of the industry, and they need to contend with the online casinos offering free spins to new members, as well as long-established fan-favourites such as World of Warcraft, League of Legends and the Triple-A PC gaming titles.
A seamless transition between gaming and social media is the ideal. It hopes cloud-based gaming will mean they can create and make available more complex games than they have been previously able to.
The Technical Branch
The technical side of things has two points of focus: cloud-based gaming and VR. Both of these are popular research technology in the wider gaming industry as of right now.
Facebook’s Oculus brand is already a household name in the VR world. Having released and discontinued a few VR products – Oculus Go, Rift, and Rift S – Oculus’s Quest 2 is it’s most recent release (September 2020) and pursuit. The original Quest got a lot of people excited for VR, as it wasn’t required to be tethered to a PC. It was standalone, and, because of this, it didn’t have much competition in the market. That is still true with the Quest 2. The new model is slimmer and lighter, has a higher resolution, and its base model is $100 cheaper than its predecessor. Reviews indicate it improves on the first Quest in a lot of ways. It has access to all the popular VR games, while you can also view VR-enabled videos on YouTube and other media too. It is immersive.
Facebook’s Approach to Research
Facebook have a lot of research interests, in some cases pursued through acquisitions like other major technology companies like Google. For instance, Novi, a regulated finance company, are researching cryptocurrency and blockchain for Facebook’s Libra payment system, which is the tech giant’s own cryptocurrency.
Of course, there are in-house research projects also. Some have obvious benefits for their social media platform. Natural Language Processing & Speech is one of those. The research seeks, through “deep learning/neural networks, natural language processing, language identification, text normalization, word sense disambiguation, and machine learning,” they hope to build robust translation solutions, which would help people talk and connect independent, to an extent, of their native or chosen language.
Innovation for the social media platform is a hybrid of maintenance and enhancing; it’s not just a new lick of paint. Whether or not they succeed depends on how well they truly know their users, and how adept they are at bringing those all-important sign up numbers back up.
posted by admin // 25-11-2020 // permalink
