The metaverse was never alive in the first place

For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong.

I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are testing it. It's a long way from feature complete, but the graphics part is working nicely. Users need a midrange gamer PC (NVidia 1060 or better, at least 6 CPUs). This is a reasonably difficult problem, but it's not impossible.

Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, says that the 600 million people using game virtual worlds should hold an online wake for the metaverse. He means Fortnite and Roblox users. The metaverse is alive and well for gamers. But it's not headed for Facebook/Twitter scale.

So what went wrong? The NFT clown car, and Zuckerberg, went wrong.

The NFT guys are all Make Money Fast. Most of them never even shipped a virtual world. That didn't stop them from collecting money from suckers. Slowly, at the rate of about one every few weeks, the SEC is bringing the hammer down on those guys.[1] The ones who shipped something just slapped something together and called it a metaverse. If you haven't visited Decentraland, check it out. It's 1990s graphics quality. It's also empty; it runs about 260 concurrent users.

The whole Meta fiasco, and its motivations, has been covered elsewhere.

So what are the real problems?

First, the metaverse is boring. If you build a good virtual world, it's about as interesting as real life. Most forms of entertainment have an interesting event density about 10x to 100x that of real life. Metaverses don't. You have to make your own fun. Second Life has this problem. It's fun for people who are into building, creating, and exploring. It's not fun for people who want to be passively entertained. This limits the market.

The game-derived metaverses, Fortnite and Roblox, are games with social areas on the side. Fortnite discovered that by accident. Their game has rounds of play, and you have to wait for the next cycle to start. So they have a "lobby". People hanging out in the lobby to socialize became a thing, and they built on that to allow users to have social spaces.

Second, there are technical problems. Metaverses need to look as good and play as well as AAA title games. This is quite possible, but not on a $99 WalMart laptop or a phone. "Cloud rendering", as with Google Stadia (closed), Vortex (closed), and NVidia GeForce Now (still around but the price keeps going up) is an option, but the economics don't work out. Nobody can do free to play with cloud rendering. Metaverses on a current gamer PC can work quite well, but most people don't have those.

Third, there's the VR nausea problem. If you put people in a VR environment where they can move freely but the visual world is not rigidly locked to the real world at all times, about 5% - 15% of the population becomes nauseated. VRchat shows that there's a market for this anyway, but it's about 22,000 concurrent users. The only real stat in this business is how many people are logged on right now, measured from outside the system. All other numbers can be "adjusted".

Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse. These are game worlds. A branch of Sotheby's or Hermes does not make sense. Also, showing fashion items in worlds with crap graphics just devalues the brand.

So, it's a niche. Right now, there are seven games on Steam with over 100,000 users logged in. That's probably the size of the metaverse market.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...

One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves.

If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach houses, coffee shops or wherever they physically were. Every meeting would have been held in the metaverse. Every all-hands, in the metaverse. Every employee in charge of people would have been working with the product and engineering to create experiences for the team to bond and share time in within the Metaverse. Meta should have lived and breathed as a company within the metaverse. Pre layoffs that would have been more than 86,000 concurrent users who would have a daily direct impact on the product.

Instead, Mark wanted people to come back to the office.

The Metaverse by Meta died when their people touted it as the future of work and play but then did absolutely nothing to use it that way themselves.

I think some sort of "metaverse" outside of Meta Horizon Worlds could have been real, but I don't think anyone would have taken it seriously because it would have just ended up another Second Life, Garry's Mod, or VRChat.

That just doesn't sound like the next trillion dollar idea. It's barely a repeatable million dollar idea.

Is there a possibility for some sort of new protocol and client software where people navigate 3D spaces that can be viewed by virtual reality headsets?

Sure, I think so. But that too would be dominated by some sort of 3D GeoCities.

It's not like people are going to be rushing to create the next Scottsdale Fashion Square and Apple Store in VR.

There's vaguely this idea floating around that you could give a potentially cool thing to teenagers, and that thing being a VR third-space of sorts, but I think it would take someone with a meaningful vision to elucidate what that looks like, because it's not VR malls, and it's not Second-Life et al.

It's totally something else. Who knows. Maybe it's chilling in a forest with a campfire and playing music together and sharing memes in tree houses.

What happened to doing something cool first instead of focusing on the money? Everything that took off that I can think of was cool first, and the money came second, then it was milked to death until it wasn't cool anymore.

Meta went straight to the end.

If you look at Facebook's original success then it was all down to being in the right place and the right time with the right product. It was one of those billion to one scenarios that Zuck and those other two brothers arrived at through pure luck. People were giving away data online which other companies lusted after. Now how do you repeat that? Well you don't but other lucky startups can be bought which Facebook has a history of doing. Buy anything which might have social aspects to it and the dartboard eventually gets the bullseye hit.

Now if you want to invest in your own product and make it a success then Facebook has no experience of doing that. It's why Metaverse is doomed to fail. Add in that users are leery of Facebook's motives and their perversions for spying on your every waking moment. Hopefully they will implode and die.

In my mind, the ambiguity of what "the metaverse" actually means allowed a bunch of people to sell it as panacea in different realms. When the smoke cleared and you were left with MMOs, video chat, and vr setups people don't buy or use, a lot of those castles start to fall over.

However, stuff like Fortnite or Roblox, which seemingly fulfill many of the Metaverse promises, continue to be reasonably successful. But they don't try to market themselves as "the metaverse," and while their have been brand tie ins, the product is marketed to players, not businesses.

The writer missed a great opportunity with the closing sentence:

> Now that the market noise has died down, maybe the metaverse can get a real chance at life.

That should have been “maybe the metaverse will get a second life.”

It's a bit of a repeat of the early nineties and various companies trying to own the internet. None of it worked until people rallied around a bit of technology that worked based on open standards. Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash around the same time Tim Berners Lee worked on Mosaic, the first proper web browser. One of those things worked. In the years after we had crap like Compuserve, AOL, and others trying to sell off their walled gardens as the Internet. But about ten years later it became clear that the internet really just meant tcp/ip, email, browsers, and all the rest. The lowest common denominator that worked across the thing became ultimately the only thing people wanted.

Of course there have been attempts at open standards for VR. Things like VRML existed 20 years ago and there have been more recent efforts. You can buy VR goggles from a range of vendors and there are lots of games and other things you can use with them. But it's all disconnected stuff and little walled gardens. So, none of that adds up to a coherent web like experience where you can move from one thing to another without leaving your browser just by clicking links.

You can of course run a browser and project it onto your goggles but that seems a bit pointless as the content is almost exclusively 2D. But why is that? Movie producers have been producing 3D movies for ages. Why don't Netflix or Amazon or anyone serve any of that? Reason: standards are missing and there's a huge chicken egg problem of no audience and therefore no content. What little content there is is rotting away in archives owned by companies interested only in walled gardens that don't actually exist. So most of that content is basically unused after it leaves the theaters where people can enjoy it in 3D. And that's just movies.

As long as companies insist on walled gardens, this chicken egg problem is theirs to solve. No content means no users show up and the only people that buy VR goggles are gamers interested in checking out some of the walled gardens.

I hear Apple is about to join this party. They love walled gardens. I don't have high hopes for theirs.

> The same criticisms don’t apply to the technologies that underpin the metaverse

Interesting, so what tech are we talking about?

> As it turns out, people really like collaborative open worlds, as evidenced by Fortnite’s estimated 80 million monthly players

Ah, yes, 3D games. The metaverse killer app was hiding in plain virtual reality. But... this nagging doubt...

> metaverse companies attracted $120 billion in funding during the first half of 2022 alone

Which prompted me to prompt my trusted GPT-0 LLM: "cost to setup a game studio?". The answer was eloquent yet hallucination inducing:

In the United States, rough cost of setting up and running an MMO games dev studio for 12 months is almost $618,000 including federal withholding, social security, insurance and state tax and excluding variable costs such as Internet, electricity, heat, etc.

So by GPT-0's reckoning, you could use the metaverse funding of $240 bln per year to fund 240K (two-hundred forty thousand) game studios per year.

Put that in your meta-pipe and smoke it.

VR was tried over and over in every decade since the 80's.

If there was a there there, the category would already be occupied and its products would be ubiquitous.

As it stands, most people don't see value in it as anything beyond a Google Glass or a game console attachment.

I’m old enough to think of the metaverse as like the one in Wild Palms[1], and so I don’t think we’ve seen it yet. I also really dont see Facebook/Meta being the company to crack it, I think it’s much more likely to be some kind of games company. Not a firm that sells ads.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Palms

Folding Ideas (Dan Olson) did a pretty fantastic takedown of the Metaverse/Decentra failure nexus a little while ago, "The Future is a Dead Mall: Decentraland and the Metaverse". Like all things Dan, long as hell be he makes it very much worth it.

https://youtu.be/EiZhdpLXZ8Q

Mark going all-in on the metaverse to the extent of changing the company name has done wonders for my imposter syndrome. Call me a hater, but it is cathartic.

'Metaverse' is a stupid term anyway that had no value beyond referencing Snow Crash. Let 'Meta' sit on that stinker now and forever. When the tech is ready (for real this time!) we will know what it should be called (suggestion: Virtual Reality, or VR, for short).

At a very rudimentary level, I feel like Roblox is the closest thing to the concept of a metaverse as displayed in Ready Player One.

You have an avatar, that can traverse in and out of thousands of shared player made experiences, and you take your things with you. Is there much more to the concept?

The Meta VR headsets, if I am not mistaken, had eye tracking, and a way to read your face gestures. Why would you let an ad company acquire that information?

"The Journal also found that Decentraland and The Sandbox, two well-known metaverse platforms emphasizing digital currencies, reportedly had fewer than 1,000 daily active users by late 2022."

I tried Decentraland and it was buggy (graphically), the games were awful & normally required substantial investment to join (for example an NFT to join Poker games), and everything was dead.

the metaverse exists for 2 decades in second life. It's where people go to enter 'the world' and live an alternate life. It doesn't matter if it's not VR because the important thing is to trick the brain.

There is the open source version of it, OpenSimulator with a few thousands of diehard users having all sorts of fun in their own self-hosted simulators (https://opensimworld.com) .

Ironically these worlds will live long after zuckerberg's and cryptobros' failed creations. More ironically, nobody invested a single dollar in those. Instead, 'the metaverse' became a testament to how money can dazzle and blind people's judgement.

It really gripes me, that everyone is saying THE metaverse.

It's not THE metaverse, when there are multiple competing metaverses - it's just A metaverse then. Facebook/Meta is trying/failing to build A metaverse (and it's even debateable if what they are building qualifies as a metaverse) - and so are those other companies.

You only get THE metaverse, when there is only one. THE internet qualifies for that THE moniker, because it's one big, open, interoperable thing built on shared standards - not owned by any single company, and no matter what browser/device/ISP you are using, you get access to the same whole.

Metaverse is alive and well it's called Roblox

I just can't get over these numbers. Imagine people had instead spent 120 billion into fighting climate change, it would have made a real impact.

I have no doubt the metaverse will be the future. Obviously it's hard for people to imagine the possibilities. It's also hard to explain it to people who lack imagination. I think it opens up amazing new horizons for humans to be a part of. From work to recreation. One example, you are working, writing code. You have virtual monitors hanging in front of you. No need to have a physical monitor with limited real estate. Your virtual monitors can be any width or height. They can be swiped aside or brought into focus. Your teammates appear and disappear as the needs dictate. You can have that virtual golden retriever you always wanted, lying by your feet. Music is playing in the background. This while you sit in the Taj Mahal. Later in the day you want to walk on the beach in Bali. One gesture, you are there. It's live and it's sunset. So yes, I want the metaverse sooner than later.

> people really like collaborative open worlds

to do things that they cannot do in other ways, but there are plenty of other effective and more comfortable ways to do business meetings than wearing a visor or special glasses, maybe over prescription glasses. So it's a solution looking for a problem. No wonder that it was a hit for gaming or for very specialized tasks where a 3D representation of a subject is an improvement over the current technologies: engineering (not the software one), surgery, feel free to add to the list. Even video calls are not so fundamental compared to voice only calls, business or family.

By the way, everybody spends at least half of their career with prescription glasses: presbyopia hits as early as 40 if you're unlucky. Even at a more normal 50 it's a long time to retirement. Imagine the success of mobile phones if you had to slowly use them less and less after you turn 40.

If I can plug myself in and be in the “matrix” - sure. But I just don’t see how someone expects people live in a virtual world with present day technology. I mean, I used to play MMORPGs for 16 hrs/day, but that’s for a very small minority.

It’s a different kind of viewport for interacting with people and content. The better the content, the more people. Content will differentiate itself via the traditional mechanisms (effective storytelling, using the new capabilities of the hardware, etc.).

There has been a crack in a wall in Gorilla Tag for two years. My son has been telling me they are releasing an update that lets you go in the crack and explore. It has been really interesting to contrast the flailing of Meta attempting to coherently describe their vision of the metaverse with the ability of the Gorilla Tag developers to build a community around their game.

I’m hoping the concept of the “metaverse” can come and go before I ever care to learn what it actually means. Seems like just more made up nonsense NFT people are trying to shill.

> It’s just the word metaverse that has become toxic. So why are we still using it? Phrases like virtual worlds or immersive worlds convey the same meaning but lack the stigma of the original term. > And these are arguably better descriptors. According to one 2022 study of U.S. consumers, only 16% of people understand and can explain the metaverse. By contrast, anyone can understand the meaning of “virtual world.” You don’t really need to explain anything. For most tech-literate people, they get it.

I politely disagree. The metaverse is not (just) a virtual world. It's not just "the internet in VR" either.

A virtual world is just a single "verse". Only once you have many (connected) virtual worlds, you get a "multiverse". They key here is, that you can travel between these different virtual worlds, using one single avatar, one single client - and should be able to carry certain attributes and items with you, from one virtual world to the other.

To turn a "multiverse" into a "metaverse" you need to add in the real world as well. There has to be some amount of connection between those virtual worlds and the real world, with both sides influencing each other.

Just like the internet allows you to use one single browser (of your choice) to visit all kinds of different sites, connected through links. And using social logins, you are able to carry your identity (your user account) with you across multiple different sites. Combine that with the interoperability of email, where no matter what email client and email provider you use, you can send email from any server to any other server - no matter who operates them. And all of that you can do from your PC, your phone or from inside VR... And you can use it to order stuff on Amazon, order Pizza, unlock the front door of your house or turn up the heating, buy tickets to real events, or even use google maps and street-view (technically a "mirrorverse") to virtually go sight-seeing on real places across the world.

Combine all that stuff - the multi-platform-ness, the multi-provider-ness, the interoperability, the open-ness, the many virtual worlds combined with the real world - and only then are you getting close to what a metaverse would be.

And before you think that sounds awesome - also consider what an absolute privacy nightmare that would be.

it's a good thing Second Life never existed, 'cos if it had then all this metaverse stuff would just have been stupid

It seemed like the only people who could remotely have been considered excited about the concept was a very particular slice of the tech media echo chamber.

The Snow Crash Metaverse was kind of fun to think about. The Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse was DOA given the trashed reputation Facebook had by the time the pivot was announced.

Huh, for an article that started like this one did, I would have expected at least a mention of Google Glass (2013) and "glassholes" ??

Had it been Google doing this, the Metaverse would have been declared dead on arrival, not after this long.

Contrarian journalists: read snow crash, permutation city and tell us your experience.

sorta remarkable how meta blows $10+ billion on this failed initiative and the stock recovers much of the losses like nothing. goes to show how strong its core ad-powered business is.

When Mark came out with this Meta nonsense everyboy I know (mostly gamers) were laughing their a$$ off as Facebook was already called "a place for boomers" back then and it was ridiculed by all web3 folks. They never had the chance to convert those people.

From a gamer perspective the metaverse is something that have existed for a very long time (think Minecraft) and I was pretty sure that connecting all these universes was pretty much impossible because everybody is defending their own IP. You can't even stream on Youtube if there is a DMCA-protected song playing in the background.

It is just a cash grab including most NFTs, and I say this as a DeFi-enthusiast, and crypto-friendly person in general.