Despite Leeds-headquartered games studio and developer Dubit creating experiences and games for global brands across the “metaverse”, it’s a word the company’s CEO now tries to avoid.
The metaverse was touted as the next big thing by social media tycoon Mark Zuckerberg, who plunged billions into the emerging technology as he envisioned a utopia of virtual and augmented worlds filled with people gaming, socialising or working.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has reportedly started to shift away from pitching the metaverse to advertisers in the midst of staff layoffs, cost-cutting and billion dollar losses.
“We have tried to avoid using the metaverse word because it’s become very blurred,” Matthew Warneford, CEO and co-founder of Dubit, told Prolific North.
Building games and experiences for brands, artists or musicians, Dubit has worked with Nickelodeon, UEFA and H&M and has even created concerts for the likes of Charli XCX and Pink Pantheress in the metaverse.
Charli XCX’s performance in the metaverse was nominated for MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMAs) first-ever metaverse category last year. Created in Roblox by Dubit for Samsung, the team used motion capture to film the artist performing, turn it into 3D and publish it on the platform.
“What Facebook and now Meta has done is try to conflate virtual reality (VR) with the metaverse,” Warneford explained. “When we talk about metaverse, or at least with gaming and UGC (User Generated Content) gaming, the vast majority of people are experiencing these spaces on mobile phones, tablets, computers. There are very few in virtual reality. Virtual reality is just a way of accessing the content, but it’s not what makes the metaverse a thing.”
Dubit was valued at $55m in 2021 after raising $8m to launch what was the ‘world’s first’ live esports league in the metaverse called the Metaverse Gaming League, which started in Roblox and is now streamed weekly connecting brands and partner games.
“The best way to think about it is it’s 3D spaces that you explore as an avatar, which is very similar to what we did 20 years ago. The key difference, in my opinion, is that anybody can create these spaces and these spaces need to link together seamlessly.”
But back in 1999, there was no metaverse. A budding virtual world was on the horizon, created by Warneford and his group of teenage friends who would later go on to become “accidental entrepreneurs.”
From teenagers to working with global brands
The young Dubit team set out to build the first browser-based virtual world during the dotcom boom, with an ambition to create a dedicated space for young people to interact with each other online.
“We had a very simple vision at the time. There were very few authentic places for teenagers to hang out online. It felt like it was all being done by marketers that were trying to be cool, but it wasn’t cool. We thought: ‘Let’s create our own space.’”
