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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Wow! Didn't see that coming, but very interesting. When he says "the metaverse", does he mean Epic is working on one of their own? Or is it the one facebook is working on, and they have some sort of partnership?

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Epic has been talking about the metaverse for years... e.g. it came up a lot in their Apple lawsuit, and searching on google turns this up from mid 2019: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/115784180038569574...

So far it seems like they sort of vaguely want to turn Fortnite into it... but I haven't really seen much that I would call concrete.

>So far it seems like they sort of vaguely want to turn Fortnite into it... but I haven't really seen much that I would call concrete.

I always thought their Travis Scott event was a pretty good example of something you could call early metaverse-ish, going beyond the usual scope of the game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYeFAlVC8qU

Since at least 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG9-6k3RYIU

Slide 46 and on (mentioned on 48) is largely metaverse and a bunch of stuff presaging the Apple lawsuit, even though Fortnite hadn't launched yet:

https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/steamdevdays/slides2...

When you say “the one FB is working on” - the stated goal is for there to be one Metaverse, as there is one Internet.

Of course that requires protocol interop (as did the Internet with TCP/IP and HTTP) and who knows if it will happen for the Metaverse.

Metaverses are less fundamental than the internet, and there's no need for there to be exactly one of them (other than lucrative proprietary lock-in, anyway). Metaverses are application-level concerns, and will be built on top of the existing internet infrastructure. In the same way that a web browser is a portal to HTTP content, a metaverse application will be a portal to whatever application-level protocols arise to support them.

Metaverses are application-level concerns

I'm pretty sure that's not how they see it. I think the vision is of the singular Metaverse as the new narrow waist upon which all future apps are built.

Yes, and that's why it's an application level concern. A metaverse like they envision is a platform for the discovery of applications created according to certain standards, just like a web browser, and just like an app store. It's in every big player's interest to delude you into believing that there's only going to be one metaverse, and in particular that it's going to be theirs, but we have no more reason to believe these claims than we have reason to believe that there will ever be exactly one software platform in any other context. It's just a VR-focused app platform.

Have either Tim Sweeney or Mark Zuckerberg said that there's plans for only a single metaverse?

I think it's been pretty clear that they're going to work on their own metaverse products. Epic seems to build on Fortnite , while Meta have Horizon.

I don't believe either have stated compatibility as a goal.

They're each going to build their own metaverse and they're planning for that to be the one and only metaverse. They're planning to kill each other.

Yeah that's totally what I expect, which is why I'm confused why the person I replied to seems to believe there'll be a single one.

I know that the Web 3.0 Cryptocurrency crowd have ideas on the idea of a decentralized web with a shared ontological understanding, so maybe that's the source of the idea of there being a single metaverse?

But neither Epic nor Meta seem interested in a shared ecosystem. The metaverse is a product and their implementations will compete. I'm not sure if people would even want to be in two separate metaverses so competition will be fierce.

Most media (books/movie) sidestep that by usually having a single metaverse creator. That's in large part because it's narratively easier to deal with a single villain and universe. I don't know of any that posit having competing offerings.

Agreed. You can have Facebook and Twitter open in two browser tabs and switch between them, but will Facebook and Epic even support the same headset? How much hassle would it be to log out of one and log in to the other? I think they literally want to monopolize your face.

Sweeney laid out his vision here, in 2016 before Fortnite launched:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG9-6k3RYIU

Yes, Zuck discussed this with Ben Thompson for example: https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerbe...

Crucially he only seems to call out commerce and goods. He doesn't really say it'll be a single metaverse. It'll be similar to the app stores today. you'll have Android, iOS etc..and each will have some of the same apps, but they're not actually running the exact same app.

The metaverses will be similar. They'll end up with many of the same apps and experiences, but devs will have to publish independently to each platform.

> MZ: I think it’s probably more peer-to-peer, and I think the vocabulary on this matters a little bit. We don’t think about this as if different companies are going to build different metaverses. We think about it in terminology like the Mobile Internet. You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet and I don’t think in the future it will make sense to say that we are building our own metaverse either.

Seems pretty clear companies are talking about "the metaverse" as broad concept.

https://tech.fb.com/connect-2021-our-vision-for-the-metavers...

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/announcing-a-1-bil...

https://www.matthewball.vc/about

I think Epic is working on VR games, and saying metaverse is more cooler.

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