Just what nobody’s been asking for: Another metaverse offering

Keep taking big swings and you’re bound to miss, but lately, investment giant SoftBank has whiffed in truly spectacular fashion:

• Its Vision Fund had a rough last fiscal year — like, $32B in losses rough.
• It has ~$12B invested in troubled WeWork — where SoftBank’s handpicked CEO made New York Times headlines for “abandoning ship” last month.
• And Zume, SoftBank’s $375m mobile pizza-making robot, shut down after it couldn’t overcome a fatal flaw: cheese flying around whenever its trucks moved.

What’s next for SoftBank?

Oh, just hyping another big bet: a network of metaverses, the thing many other influential companies are retreating from.

SoftBank-funded Improbable detailed its upcoming project MSquared last week, which, according to CNBC, calls for a 3D virtual space where 10k+ people can concurrently live, work, and interact, with an emphasis on “interactive entertainment experiences,” like parties, games, and concerts.

• A chaotic demo video for MSquared shows people dancing en masse and a frantic, crowded auction for a statue of a goat.

What differentiates it?

MSquared will be available through cloud streaming, so it won’t require any software or, say, a $3.5k device to access it.

Improbable is courting partners to develop experiences — and if all goes according to plans, per CNBC, MSquared will be available via desktop, then eventually mobile devices and gaming consoles, by year-end.

So, uh, get ready to duke it out with 9.9k dancing friends at a virtual goat auction, we guess?

Some good news: It’ll be hard for Improbable to lose more money on the metaverse than Meta already has (its Reality Labs division lost $13.7B last year).