> But he fears that most of the companies working on such a project have missed one essential component of lasting success: the fact that people are as much creators as they are consumers. “There isn’t as yet any evidence that people want to have a purely consumptive entertainment experience in social virtual worlds,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any evidence in human history that you can get a billion people to just kind of sit there and veg out, watch stuff. You can’t get to the kind of usage levels that metaverse brands want to get to with a consumer non-participatory experience.”<p>I think this is the money quote. Meta seemed to be under the impression that people want to invent digital versions of themselves just to consume content and engage with brands.
Step 1. Build at least 1 decent mmo. Have an off-game hub where people can interact and show off stuff they collected in said mmo.<p>Step 2. Keep adding more games and activities, boom! Metaverse.<p>Facebook went all in with VR and social interactions but who cares about any of that when you give users no reason to use it. You need the GAMES first otherwise why would people want to be in a glorified version of a zoom meeting?. This stuff is obvious and yet they keep wasting billions on this cart with no horse in sight.
I saw a Second Life demonstration at the Sun Microsystems booth at the 2007 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Reno, NV. As I recall, I was in a sort of virtual conference room. I was amazed and blown away and thought to myself, this is obviously going to be the Next Big Thing. I'm glad to see Second Life is still active. Also the Guardian article is a bit long, but really quite good if you have time to read it.
Points from the article:<p>- At its height in the early 2000s, Second Life attracted only around a million monthly users, a fraction of the number enjoyed by some online video games (the makers of Fortnite claim a consistent 80 million)<p>- The population skews middle-aged and around 20% of users have a disability that makes real-world interaction difficult.
Rosedale suggests that one reason virtual worlds are not as popular as they have been hyped is that people have difficulty "embodying" a virtual avatar, projecting themselves into it. I have no problem with doing that, but I'm a Second Life user. It does seem somewhat plausible. First-person video games avoid that requirement. But there are also plenty of third person games too.<p>Another thing he says is that pure consumerism fails on virtual worlds because people want to create. I actually think this might be part of what has made SL a niche interest. At the very minimum, an SL user must "create" their avatar through combining a plethora of commercially available avatar components. A typical avatar consists of 10 to 40+ different pieces bought separately from different creators, a long with customizing the 50 or so shape sliders. Avatars aren't a single fixed mesh like in other worlds. This makes people watching super interesting because every avatar is unique and indivudialized. But you can't just grab a pre-made avatar and call it done without looking like a "noob", and I think this is actually a hurdle to wide adoption.
I have been wondering for a long time why someone hasn't made a better Second Life.<p>I think Second Life is awesome, and I would love to play a game like it. My problem with SL is just that the game and its interface feel so janky.<p>It has horrible graphics and the interface is weird. It's just not fun to actually do anything in the game.<p>If someone made a better version, with good graphics and a decent user interface, I think it would be way more successful.
The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain. It's about <i>buying into</i> the metaverse, buy your plot of land, buy your sneakers, buy your new hairstyle, buy your emote laugh animation. Every possible interaction is monetized. It's baffling, like why would anyone want to spend time in a dystopian capitalism simulator.<p>VRChat seems to embrace the pure spirit of the thing, from what I can tell as an outsider. People are free to express themselves and be creative, making their own avatars and worlds from scratch if they want. It seems like a wacky hangout space, the whole point is to not have constraints. Trying to turn it into anything beyond that seems like it would fail.<p>But then again, I also don't understand why people drop thousands of dollars on Fortnite skins. I don't feel out of touch with tech, but this I simply do not get, at all.
One point the author could have mentioned, which provides <i>some</i> context is Linden's original CTO, Cory Ondrejka wound up as Facebook's CTO way back in the 2010 time frame. When a number of us were laid off from Linden Lab in 2010, quite a few landed at Facebook. During the 2010's Facebook was positively lousy with former Lindens.