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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Union, yes!

I'm waiting to see how this "metaverse" thing works out, as it moves from the dreams and bullshit stage to the actual implementation stage. Big, high-quality shared virtual worlds are hard. There really are no off the shelf solutions that Just Work. Epic is spending US$2 billion on this. Roblox has 90 dev teams. The NFT crowd has announced lots of stuff, and shipped only very basic worlds such as Decentraland.

Bored Ape Yacht Club's "Otherside" supposedly launches in mid-July, with very ambitious goals. We'll see.

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> how this "metaverse" thing works out

Not looking too good. Especially since the interest rate hike (the free money faucet was tightened), but the timing might be coincidence.

https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...

Honestly, the whole metaverse thing has always felt to me like a bunch of baloney. Why exactly would anyone want to join metaverse? What purpose does it serve?

I view it as something that is inevitably happening in spite of all these large companies who are tying to own it. They are to the metaverse what AOL was to the worldwide web.

> own it

Own what, exactly? Is "metaverse" just a new word for "cyberspace"?

effectively, yes, but don't tell the MBAs. We'll continue to go down the route of individual, centralized "meta-spaces" in the sense that people will hang out on discord like they always have, except now with a VR avatar.

Rinse and repeat for everything else done online.

Metaverse is already successful, but it's called Second Life and VRChat and Club Penguin and...

I still can't believe that Facebook trademarked a prefix.

(I'm not surprised they tried; but surely they should have failed.)

The metaverse will succeed if it breaks free of the walled gardens; a federated distributed internet - controlled by the users.

Otherwise the users will continue to be the product, eating an illusion of freedom that only ever tells them what they want to hear and think they already know.

What is my incentive as a game developer to make a "big, high-quality shared virtual world"?

Second Life is "a cash machine", according to its owners.

Turns out that no advertising, rent land, sell memberships works.

It is an absolute cash cow around three million usd a month: http://www.gridsurvey.com/ (website works it's just painfully slow). Able to run on server hardware from the early 2000s. (There are also other major sources of income related to currency exchanges between Lindens and USD, and non-landtier subscriptions).

Personally I see it as a reason why the current metaverse schemes are a scam, since there are numbers right there that profit is from selling what are essentially indirect server rentals (that becomes more profitable as time goes on as server prices drop). Rather than a one time 'crypto' purchase silliness, that scammers have essentially set their sites on.

This is good motivation to make a metaverse. It is not a good motivation to enter one as a developer.

Presumably, the stuff you develop in metaverse would allow you to monetarily benefit from it as well, and that should be good enough of a motivation for a lot of devs to enter the space.

For a rather primitive example: look at Roblox (the closest functional approximation of a proto-metaverse) and see how much money some Roblox games can make. In 2020, Roblox devs generated about $328mil in revenue, with 32 of them getting paid over a $1mil. And that's not even mentioning that a lot of them were made by one person.

Same as your incentive to make games for the App Store. Market access.

Connections and sale of assets. Look at VRchat.

But the only ways to give money for VRChat is the subscription for extra avatar bookmarks and a fancy nameplate. And from what I understand, the deeper into it people get, the more likely they are to stick to one avatar.

This is a pretty good deal for the users, but it's not going to pay for a Meta quantity of developers.

Yet if they put in all the mobile money extraction mechanisms into it, why would people choose Meta's product over VRChat?

Fortnite makes billions just selling skins, which people can only use one of, no?

Meta will be taking approximately 50% of all sales on their metaverse platform IIRC.

Seems a bit much.

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