I was reading this article this article about the Metaverse when it hit me where all the mistakes were being made.
It’s all about experiences
Roblox is making this huge splash and is being sold as toys and cultural items at an amazing rate. My Walmart has movie toys, but they're obviously for adults and come with higher pricing. The Roblox toys are mostly sold out. The same can be said about Minecraft. The local book store sells more Minecraft books and Roblox books than stuff about cartoons or movies.
The games create an experience, and the fans love that. Facebook can't create that, so they've created a false version of the idea, and are paying for nice articles about their ideas.
The word Experience is being used carefully, because it's expected to become the next big thing. There is a book on it and everything. The problem is, the experience economy has been slowed or not moving the way the really big names want. Meta wants to create the Experience, but has no clue how that works. It's a buzzword and not an understanding. It's the Kinect vs the Wii all over again. The Kinect was a great piece of kit and I loved it, but the entire game design and promotion was a false idea on why the Wii worked so well.
We've already seen the Metaverse on PS3 and it was a similar result. Yet, every few years some big name wants to make it again. I suspect they read too many people read Snow Crash which influenced so many books, anime, movies, and game designers.
The metaverse is a failed concept since day one. The facts are unless you can have true immersion it’s redundant and if they can create true immersion they won’t need a metaverse. If you have an implant that can regulate neurochemicals then they can regulate “good” and “bad” thought, hold pleasure hostage, and “shut down” humans at will. The advancement of technology has been trending solely one way, and it’s towards the loss of our god given free will.
That would likely control the sex drive as well.
What did we skip over to?
I reread your comment to get better context. I agree, Minecraft, Roblox, and others are Metaverse and have been winning for a while. The attempt to seclude the person into immersion does not seem to be as popular as the tech companies want. They want control, and being able to leave means they can't have that. It's why the word Immersion gets misused.
So the entire idea is stuck in 1997 and the office workers haven't caught on to what is happening now?
It's Cyberpunk fetishism, in a way. Neuromancer required inventing the Matrix because the internet didn't exist to draw inspiration from yet. This has become retro-future in the 40 years since it's invention, and should be regarded as seriously as valve computers or space-faring zeppelins.
Good point. I saw Blade Runner the other day and had a similar thought.
I like how VRChat did it. Giving the community tools to create, and have lax moderation (which might be because unlike text-based media, VRChat doesn't have a log of everything said). They literally have a unity SDK wicht users can use to create (game) worlds and avatars, something facebook will never allow.
Even if facebook somehow made something as free and good as VRChat, users won't migrate to the big evil company.
True. This is an open world vs controlled world scenario. Those who only know control can not fathom what is happening.
It waa dead when a metaverse was made fun of for women being virtually "raped" and them making rules and stuff to stop it lol.
Remember in second life how they had Unicorn eggs, and the only way to get one was to be fornicated by one.
They should have just bought Roblox and added VR to it.
Did they end up buying Zynga, the creators of Farmville?
I checked, it was bought by take2 this year for $12.7 Billion.
You have a good point, but I don't think Facebook is actually thinking this through.
It's weird because they never usually have problems buying up other companies just to own the IP, namely Oculus itself. You'd think they would have acquired some software to go along with that. Rec Room is another example that would be perfect for them. It's a VR game with a much smaller userbase than Roblox, but it would give them a good footing to start from.
They could do that, but I get the feeling this could be all smoke and mirrors to keep investors.
Facebook didn't want games, it seems they wanted to create some kind of an office use case, where workers could be tracked right down to 'where they were' and 'what they were doing' from anywhere. So they bought a game peripheral and used games to fund the idea of creating some kind of a new office productivity tool with it.
If that's true, they deserved the response.
I don’t see how anyone could read or watch ready player one and think that was a positive thing to strive for….. the world is so crappy that people would rather live with a headset over their eyes. I love video games. But I don’t want the world to be so crappy that the only positive thing to do is hang out in a video game.
I've met people who wanted to be hooked up matrix style so long as they could play games like WoW or Minecraft.
If you think Meta verse is about the consumer AR/VR market. You’re mistaken.