The Metaverse Can't Develop Like the Internet Since It Doesn't Have Open Standards -- But Metaverse Communities Can Help Change That. My Take On Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, Part 6

I'm blogging Matthew Ball’s must-read, nine part metaverse primer over the Summer; my take on Part 1 is here,  my coverage of Part 2 is here, with Part 3 coverage here, Part 4 coverage here, and Part 5 here.

As with previous parts of the Primer, Part 6, "Interchange Tools + Standards and the Metaverse" delves into just how difficult making a Metaverse worth the name will be. Because while many say the Metaverse is the Internet's next generation, the actual Internet was launched by academics and government researchers who valued open standards. But the major companies/platforms which are likely to launch the Metaverse are very much closed, for the most part:

All of the video games console operating systems, which are required to use console hardware, have chosen not to support open or third-party rendering API collections, such as OpenGL or WebGL. Instead, Microsoft Xbox exclusively uses Microsoft’s DirectX, while Sony uses its GNMX for PlayStation. Mobile devices typically support multiple standards, but they often restrict (or outright block) access to many drivers, which helps drive developers to their proprietary offering. PC and Mac are more open, but they’re optimized for Microsoft’s DirectX and Apple’s Metal APIs. As a result, a developer’s software needs to be written specifically for each platform’s ‘standards’. Fortnite needs to use Microsoft’s DirectX for Xbox, and Sony’s GNMX for PlayStation, Nvidia’s NVM for Nintendo Switch, and Apple’s Metal for iOS. Only Google’s Android has built its solution around OpenGL, but one could argue its dominance with Chrome and Chromium controls these standards for the web.

GPUs also have their own flavor of these protocols, too. Nvidia’s drivers are effectively a ‘platform’ that developers utilize to access a PC user’s hardware, working in concert with Microsoft’s DirectX, for rendering.

But if companies like these want to keep their standards closed, their customers, unified, can demand otherwise. As Matthew writes, the runaway success of Fortnite caused gamers to clamor for the chance to play together with their friends on other devices -- and their clamor grew so great (as did their threats to take their eyeballs elsewhere), even proprietary AF Sony finally complied:  

The lack of cross-platform integration meant that PlayStation not only had the worst version of Fortnite, but PlayStation owners had many better versions at their fingertips at nearly all times, and need not pay a dollar to use them. This fundamentally changed the impact of Sony’s no cross-play policy...  [W]ith Fortnite, Sony was missing out on most of the game’s revenue, driving PlayStation players to competing platforms, and had a small fraction of total players overall. Sure, PlayStation offered a better technical experience than the iPhone, but most players considered the game’s social elements to be more important than its specs. And finally, Epic ‘accidentally’ activated cross-play on PlayStation, allegedly without Sony’s permission, on at least three occasions — thereby rallying even more upset users to petition Sony for change, and proving the impediments were purely policy, not technology.

Collectively, this forced Sony to change its policies.

In other words, to all put that into broader terms: 

When a community of people who want to share the same virtual world together becomes large enough, no company can keep them apart.

At least that's an adage I'd like to believe until the next great Metaverse skirmish.  

This doesn't mean community spirit can be powerful enough to overcome all the challenges required to achieve (more) open standards. Trolls may be a constant outlier in virtual communities, and they make the lack of cross-platform identity sharing all the more vexing:

The limited range of identity and player data, too, is an impediment to the Metaverse economy. Consider the issue of toxicity in gaming. Activision might ban Player B from Call of Duty for abusive or racist language, but Player B can then go on to troll on Epic Games’s Fortnite (or on Twitter, or Facebook). Player B can also just create a new PlayStation Network Account, or change to Xbox Live, and while that means fragmenting his or her achievements, some of these achievements are locked to a given platform anyway. Of course, publishers don’t want to make their competitors’ games better, nor are they usually inclined to share their play data. But no gaming company benefits from toxic behavior, and everyone is negatively affected by it. Banks and other financial institutions didn’t used to share credit data, either — but, eventually, they realized credit scores benefited all. Competitors Airbnb and Vrbo, too, are now partnering with a third party to prevent guests with a history of poor behavior from making future bookings.  

Hey remember when Facebook identities were supposed to become universal log-in IDs across the Internet and quash, at last, our troll problem? Good times!

Read the whole thing here. Matthew teases blockchain as a potential solution to interchange/interoperability, something I've been thinking about (and working with) recently.

But that's for next week!

Image via this likely outdated tutorial on setting up cross-platform play on Fortnite.

Comments

[Osiris Goff]

what about opensim?

[Joey1058]

@Osiris Goff: I tend to think OpenSim is 'open' in name only, in that it's not tied to Second Life. It is still it's own platform that others can build their own worlds following the Linden formula. It'll take some major rewriting to make OpenSim compatible with, say, a VRML/X3D web world.

[sirhc desantis]

'Hey remember when Facebook identities were supposed to become universal log-in IDs across the Internet and quash, at last, our troll problem? Good times!'

Bit late, but that made me spray my coffee. Deserves a piece all on its own