The conversation on concurrency tests and which virtual world deserves the title "metaverse" continues, with reader Matti Deigan nominating a world that's usually not under consideration by the metaverse cognoscenti:
Minecraft communities (Yogcast) have stuffed 2600+ users into a single server. And that's already an example of being able to connect multiple worlds together on a single server with teleporting between the worlds and services using portals…. Can that be then considered a metaverse as well?
Good question. Especially since, eight years after I first interviewed Markus Persson about his little indie game, Minecraft still counts 91 million monthly active players. Reader "LoirL" concurs, and jumps off from that argument:
I consider Minecraft to be the first breakthrough virtual world, created by its users, a prototype-metaverse perhaps. A new generation is accustomed to playing, creating, communicating, watching, listening, and reading via Minecraft. That children and teens are having formative encounters with games, online social experiences, and user-generated content across media platforms through Minecraft suggests that the future for virtual worlds is robust.
As youth grow accustomed to participatory imaginary worlds in which they can communicate with friends, customize avatars, create, play, share information, have fan experiences, follow characters and stories, compete in games, and strengthen media and computer skills in order to show off to and compete with their peers, they bring the elements of virtual world participation into everyday life. Since Minecraft emerged organically from single-player games into user-generated multiplayer synthetic worlds and a community-created virtual world, the experience of Minecraft is an experience of agency and empowerment.
She argues that High Fidelity's concurrency tests, while still small relative to Minecraft (or Dual Universe), remain meaningful:
The load tests in High Fidelity are significant because High Fidelity is working on a distributed model in which users own their virtual spaces, yet they are still part of something bigger and can be connected. It's the infrastructure of a metaverse, the crucial components of architecture and currency. So load tests are about pushing what servers can do, to strengthen the building blocks of what can become the metaverse.
I agree on the Minecraft angle. Many of the kids under 12 who played Minecraft 5-8 years ago graduated to Roblox, which counts over 50 million players, has more robust creation tools, and tends to attract young teens most. Fortnite is most popular with teens and twentysomethings, has many virtual world aspects (along with the shoot 'em up fun) and counts nearly 80 million monthly players. And what world, do you think, will Fortnite players graduate to next?
Image via: "Why Minecraft Not Second Life Is Most Successful Virtual World Ever Made"
Here we have creative games that get million monthly active users, even better if they have a mobile version. Minecraft and Roblox have a mobile version.
IMVU is a 3D chatroom and comes with a mobile version too: they used to have 600k monthly active users in 2008. Now they have 4 million monthly active users. That's about 8 times Second Life now, if SL still has an half million monthly active users (or accounts: a percentage of those are bots and people with multiple accounts).
Social virtual world platforms never had a huge success. SL is an exception that enjoyed a brief popularity and had a modest success (but pretty profitable for Linden Lab). Active Worlds, as far as I remember, never got past a concurrency of few hundred "citizens", now it's about 80-70 visitors, and I guess the monthly active users aren't many. Other ones didn't go very far or even closed.
High Fidelity is fascinating. There is always that hope that one day... but it's usage remains very low and I'm not sure if it's going to have a better history than Active Words. The pattern in most cases looks like that. Among the new gen, VRChat is by far most successful. I don't know how many monthly active users VRChat has, but given that their user concurrency is just a fraction of SL, it's unlikely that the monthly active users is a big number. It doesn't look like that it's going to grow any further: VRChat golden age was brief and it lost its momentum quickly, then stabilized.
VR remains a niche, while mobile goes strong. I know that some social VW plans to make a mobile version, maybe that would help a little.
Hard to know what will happen next, if someone will find the right idea to make a social VW a big success, but I suspect those graduated from Minecraft and Roblox, would graduate to another game. Or someone of them will create it.
Posted by: Pulsar | Monday, October 15, 2018 at 07:52 PM
It's also why, while Minecraft is a little further on the game axis than SL, why it's one of the very few 'virtual worlds' I'll mention as being the same type of thing, especially on highly modded servers. You may not be able to make things quite as arbitrarily as on Second Life, but it's still a cut above what most games allow.
Posted by: Aliasi Stonebender | Wednesday, October 17, 2018 at 02:52 AM