Star Atlas occasionally appears on my Metaverse Radar as a virtual world to potentially follow, but this report from CoinDesk leaves me wondering if it actually is a metaverse platform at all:
... Star Atlas has two tokens that drive all game operations: POLIS and ATLAS. POLIS is the governance token with a market cap of $14 million and ATLAS is the payment token with a market cap of $18 million, according to data from CoinGecko. Players buy ships, NFT-based space vehicles used to explore deep space, from the in-house marketplace to start the game. These spaceships with different details, crews and components are critical in a player’s capability to fight rival factions and discover assets scattered across the Star Atlas metaverse...
And so on. Little or nothing is said about powerful content creation tools, which is a core feature to the Metaverse. Star Atlas's design document also says little about that, beyond a single vague reference to "optionality to incorporate player-created content". Compare and contrast Star Atlas with Dual Universe, and the former comes up short:
Now that's much more Metaverse. (Though even here, Dual Universe doesn't have direct integrations with the real world economy or external technology, so even doesn't meet the original criterion.) And once again, here's our working definition derived directly from Snow Crash:
The Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of users through VR and other devices, highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools. It is integrated with the real world economy and compatible with external technology.
All that said, and until I see otherwise, Star Atlas is better described as more like, say, Eve Online with NFTs and crypto. Not a criticism of course -- becoming a fun sci-fi MMO is a perfectly good goal. But why call oneself a Metaverse if one is not really even trying to become that?
The word “metaverse” is starting to become meaningless.
Posted by: Ryan Schultz | Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at 01:25 PM
Working definition of "metaverse" in early 2022: "hip virtual world"
Posted by: Martin K. | Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 02:51 AM