Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com