Here's Why March 2023 is the Month Which Launched Metaverse 2.0

In my personal narrative for the evolution of the Metaverse, I'd arrange the historical timeline roughly (and very simply) this way:

Metaverse zero point, 1992-1996: Snow Crash published; VRML and several very early metaverse platforms launched, including Active Worlds and Cybertown.

Metaverse 1.0, 2003-2008: Second Life launched, along with a number of other metaverse-aspirational virtual worlds including Roblox in 2006.

Metaverse 1.5, 2014-2022: Facebook purchases Oculus and its "Path to the Metaverse"; VRChat, Rec Room, and other next gen metaverse platforms launched; Fortnite's crossover success and Roblox's huge IPO and Matt Ball's essays help catalyze excitement and awareness around the concept within the mainstream business world, culminating in Facebook changing its name to Meta.

Skepticism over Meta's approach to the Metaverse, not to mention crypto, started toward the end of 2022, echoed by Meta itself, when its roadmap to the future failed to mention "the Metaverse" even once. Unsurprisingly, an internal survey of Meta staff last January showed waning confidence in the Metaverse, while a leaked presentation last February also showed Meta execs deigning to mention the Metaverse behind closed doors. 

With Meta effectively out of the picture, it's fair to say Metaverse 2.0 started this month:

We began the month with Roblox reporting that its Daily Active User numbers had grown by 20% from 2021, echoing an earlier outside report that Roblox now has 250-260 million monthly active users.

Early March also saw the launch of Frontlines, a Roblox experience which demonstrated that the platform could now deploy AAA-level games. Roblox the company supported the Frontlines team with funding and technical advice through its game fund, suggesting that we should expect to see many more experiences of this caliber soon.

Then last week, Epic rolled out a number of platform updates to Fortnite putting it much farther in sync with the Metaverse vision, including its Creator Economy 2.0:

Under the new system, Epic will pay out 40 percent of Fortnite’s net revenues each month to creators based on how much players engage with their islands. That means 40 percent of the money Epic makes from things like V-Bucks, its Fortnite Crew subscription, and in-game outfits (like for crossovers like YouTube superstar MrBeast and Resident Evil characters) — all of that goes into the pool. Fortnite currently generates “billions of dollars a year in revenue from player purchases,” Saxs Persson, Epic’s EVP of the Fortnite ecosystem, said onstage at last week’s State of Unreal event. So even if we assume that translates to just $1 billion in net revenues per year, at least $400 million per year is up for grabs.

Closer to home, this month Second Life's former lead developer Rod Humble unveiled Life by You, a new, incredibly ambitious merging of Second Life, The Sims, and an open game development tool.

Also in March, Linden Lab finally revealed its Unity-based mobile app for Second Life, while a community-driven Unity viewer with Second Life was also announced, and continues to gain momentum.

All of which is to echo Tim Sweeney's words from this month: "We can set aside the crazy hype cycle around NFTs and VR goggles. These technologies may play a role in the future but they are not required. This revolution is happening right now."

No word on when the mainstream tech world will realize all this, but fortunately, they're a bit too distracted by ChatGPT to spend much time declaring the Metaverse to be "dead". By the time they realize that ChatGPT is really just an incremental improvement to Google Search (basically), I expect they'll finally grasp that the Metaverse never went away, but kept quietly growing beneath their feet.

Comments

[Nadeja]

Meta/Zuckerberg only associated the word Meta/Metaverse to something laughable, sadly. VRChat at least is about as popular as SL, but more lively. Roblox and Fortnite have the opposite approach than traditional social worlds: a game first. And it's true they and others grew a lot, but how people consider them? I guess most people see them as just plain games. So they don't notice. As most things, reality isn't either black or white, Pac-Man or Snow Crash, though. And even traditional MMORPGs can have a social side, character customization, and be experienced in immersive ways; real life friendships and sometimes partnerships can start there as well.

The new mobile viewer has some potential to relaunch SL a little, even better with the planned new newbie avatars, considering that mobile-based or worlds that have a mobile client (Roblox too) are many times more active than SL now. It depends on how good the experience would be and how the Lab manages to position it among the several mobile competitors now. At worst it would be useful for many that have to rely on abandoned mobile viewers (Lumya) or sub-par or bare-bone ones.

[Nadeja]

As for ChatGPT, I won't use that as a search engine. The artificial neural networks don't memorize and retrieve data exactly as a database and also hallucinate, so they aren't so reliable for that task. GPT-4 using a search engine (i.e. Bing Chat or GPT-4 + plugins) instead works better: essentially an AI that uses the search engine for you and summarize the contents. Not stellar - and you still have to check the linked sources to be sure that the chatbot didn't hallucinate something (well, with humans too...) - but you can save some time and the model could also infer something by putting things together. I'd better compare those models to assistants. They help in many different ways and new applications come up every day lately.

Transformers-based models, such as GPT is growing since 2017, as they become better and better and more coherent. More they improve, more the applications. But even as just as a search assistant, it can be impactful: Google is hastily trying to catch up, so far with mediocre results, afraid to end up like Kodak.

In the meantime, ChatGPT reached about 100 million users in January and topped 1 billion visits from 153 million unique visitors in February.
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-1-billion/
To this you have to add further millions that are using Bing Chat (based on GPT-4).

Therefore I wouldn't dismiss this too quickly and it isn't necessarily following the same patterns of NFTs, crypto-coins, VR goggles (or 2006 Second Life, for what that matters).
On the one hand, you have those things that have little practical usage, if any (if not a sort of scam) and you have niche products that again aren't entirely practical or not easily available or not at hand.
On the other hand, ChatGPT and Bing Chat are as easy to use as any web site on your smartphone. Readiness and ease of use shouldn't be underestimated. These models are even meant to make your life easier.

[MW]

"By the time they realize that ChatGPT is really just an incremental improvement to Google Search (basically)"

---- not quite. Ted Chiang the SF writer has possibly the best description on what ChatGPT actually does, and the news is not good. Read the whole article, the scariest part is near the end. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

[John P]

Unreal Engine has the lead now, by miles.
https://youtu.be/dYk7byKHSRw

Just imagine soon there will be UE 6.0 then 7.0
Not sure about Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN)a new PC application for designing, developing, and publishing experiences directly into Fortnite, but it will evolve. MetaHuman is amazing, Now add Blender and Adobe Substance Painter. Linden Labs can't compete with all that money and developer talent.

Just imagine a new way of realtime animation with avatar touchpoints, fingers, lips. etc and AI for realtime dances, Say: Prompt Make a 5 min Salsa dance with MetaHuman, Me and female metahuman, Ginger partner follow.

[Lara]

I think it would be nice to include platforms like Habbo into those "histroy of the metaverse" lists. They were what drove me and lots of my then companions to SL as we grew older and were able to afford decent hardware. We rebuild Hogwarts with hundrets of rooms in one of those so called Retro Hotels and had a big RP community that lasted into the early 2010s. The size and activity there was something SL roleplayers could only dream of, it was big even in the official Hotels despite the giant price tag.

[Martin K.]

> Here's Why March 2023 Is The Month Which Launched Metaverse 2.0

I admire your optimism. I'll wait until 2024 before making that call. ;)