Why Valve May Be Slow to Make Its Own Metaverse (Comment of the Week)

Why does Valve seem so bearish about making the metaverse when it has everything it needs to do so? Reader Martin K. proposes this pretty good analysis:

It might be useful to break down the most popular ideas of what today's metaverses are.

Partly, Newell appears to refer to the crypto bros' metaverses, which were never attractive to gamers and will only benefit a tiny percentage of their user base, i.e. sooner or later that metaverse idea will be disappointing to the vast majority of its fan base.

Then there is the Ready-Player-One-inspired idea that the metaverse is like many AAA open worlds in one game - think GTA, Red Dead Redemption, EVE Online, and many more all in one game. Developing such a metaverse is just not a solid business idea - neither with nor without VR support. (Hint: if it was a good idea, then it would be a much better idea to develop just a small part of it at much lower cost and risk.)

Somewhat related is the idea that the metaverse is not a game but a layer on top of many (AAA) games such that they become more "interoperable", which might include many things (e.g. sharing avatar skins, virtual equipment, achievements, communication across games, etc.). Of course, Valve is very interested in pushing that idea forward for games on Steam, but they probably have worked on all the low-hanging fruits already and know very well how difficult the other parts are.

Here's a good thread by veteran game designer Damion Schubert on the interoperability problem.

Martin goes on to talk about UGC platforms that Valve might be considering as competitors:

Then there are multiverses with user-generated content such as ROBLOX, Minecraft, Fortnite Creative, Core, Second Life, VRChat, Rec Room, Horizon Worlds, etc. With Steam Workshop, Valve had already a lot of experience with monetizable user-generated content and they integrated more features of UGC multiverses into the Steam ecosystem (SteamVR Home, SteamVR Workshop, improved Steam client with better party chat, etc.). I guess the slow adoption of VR hardware and the limited appeal of UGC multiverses to the Steam audience convinced Valve that UGC multiverses do not fundamentally challenge Steam's business model, giving them time to further polish and expand their ecosystem.

I'd quibble slightly to say that VRChat is the most popular VR app on Steam, and Garry's Mod, the multiplayer sandbox game platform built on Valve's Source engine and published by Valve, is still insanely popular 16 years after it launched. But to undermine my own quibble, the very most popular games on Steam (Lost Ark, Elden Ring, and the latest Counter-Strike, at the moment), have little or no user-generated content beyond avatar customization and what the players themselves actually do in the multiplayer space. 

Comments

[George Djorgovski]

Let me offer a counterpoint.

The original Metaverse as envisioned by the cyberpunk fiction writers (Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Stross, etc.) was essentially an extrapolation of the Internet, as an immersive 3D parallel world where the users interact through their avatars, but with the gaming overtones, for the literary purposes.

Somehow that degenerated into a now prevailing interpretation of the Metaverse as a gigantic collection of (interoperable?) games and social spaces, or even just calling individual games "metaverses", which makes even less sense. It is like calling one's website "my internet". Maybe this is because most people engaged in this business come from the gaming world. I think that this completely misses the point, and there is no future in it. All this will accomplish is to doom the term "metaverse" as a misguided notion that will be forgotten and/or mocked.

Instead, we will see a continued evolution of the Internet, where all of the humanity's informational content is, and where most of the human activities are, driven by the evolving technologies, including XR. There will be gaming and social spaces, of course, as there already are in the current incarnation of the Internet as a global parallel cyberspace, along with everything else that people do. And that is where the people will stay. To think that there will be a new, separate gaming and social cyberworld distinct from the evolving Internet, a gamers' Metaverse, is just plain foolish, in my opinion.

Incidentally, Zuckerberg does seem to understand this, never mind all of the usual critiques of him or his company. His record and vision give him a lot more credibility.

[Martin K.]

> an extrapolation of the Internet, as an immersive 3D parallel world where the users interact through their avatars, but with the gaming overtones, for the literary purposes.

I think that the literary purposes don't just determine "the gaming overtones" but a lot more of the features of the metaverse as presented in Snow Crash, Neuromancer, and Ready Player One, e.g.: speed of travel is significantly limited. Why? For one thing: it's difficult to have an interesting chase without limited speed of travel. Another example: there is only one, unique metaverse. Why? Because it would be difficult to save the whole real world if a story unfolds in and is limited to just one of a million copies of a virtual world. Yet another feature of the metaverse in those novels: it's persistent, because without actions having persistent consequences, it's more difficult to find meaning in a story. And the list goes on.

My point is: the metaverse in those novels are what they are because they serve literary purposes. I see no reason to expect that the internet will evolve into something even remotely similar: people will not accept significantly limited speed of travel in the internet; people will prefer navigating the internet without random users being able to watch them because they access the same website; people will prefer using text search to quickly scan terabytes of data instead of having to visually search through a 3D representation of that data; and the list goes on.

And by the way, one reason why Meta wants you to engage in more activities on the internet with your Meta avatar (see https://about.fb.com/news/2022/01/updates-to-avatars/ ) is of course that every time you sign-in to use your Meta avatar provides Meta with valuable data about what you are doing on the internet. It's perfectly consistent with Meta's record of tracking their users.