The Metaverse Only "Failed" For Those Who Don't Understand the Concept

I just had a long and fascinating interview with Matthew Ball, who has a greatly updated version of his book The Metaverse, now subtitled Building the Spatial Internet, coming out on on July 23. I'll publish that soon, but meantime, here's Matt's interview with two people who've been building the foundation of the Metaverse since the 90s -- Epic's Tim Sweeney, and of course, literal Neal Stephenson.

There's much too much too summarize in a post here, but one highlight is how much the actual conceivers of the Metaverse, both as an idea and as an actual product, are confident about its underlying thesis. The only thing that's "failed" since the recent backlash against the term is the straw man version that had little relation to what was actually described back in 1992.

As Sweeney puts it:

I think what's been rejected is a particular vision of the Metaverse, which is people putting on VR headsets and going to the office and working with co-workers in this Silicon Valley chic art style, that was just totally lame and was never going to succeed. But on the other hand, if you look at what people are doing with their time in video games. Fortnite and Roblox and other immersive games like PUBG Mobile are growing at an amazing rate. People are playing them, enjoying them. You can identify now about 800 million people who engage in these kinds of experiences every month. And what they're doing is very Metaverse. They're going into a real-time, 3D environment with their friends. They're engaging in a variety of different experiences.

And as Neal Stephenson -- who's now a co-founder of three Metaverse-related startups (more about that in the interview) -- puts it:

We see postmortems for the Metaverse. And yet on the other hand, Fortnite and Roblox and other such platforms have got vast numbers of people using them. We just don't generally refer to them as the Metaverse, but people who kind of understand the concept know that that's what they are. So I think it'll be something like that.

But it's always been the case that the new technologies have a sort of currency in the language that eventually comes to seem sort of dated. So in the 30s, radio was this amazing kind of newish thing to a lot of people. And so you can still buy a little red wagons called Radio Flyer. It's just a wagon, it has nothing to do with radio, but 100 years ago, somebody thought it would be cool to put the word radio on the wagon because it had connotations of this is the thing of the future. And we see that with internet and with a whole lot of tech buzzwords that come and go over time.

I.E., "the Metaverse" as a buzzword is dead, long live metaverse platforms.

But why is the Valley sort of ignoring those 800 million people active in metaverse-type platforms in pursuit of dubious generative AI wealth? Matt and I get into that later this week!

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Comments

[Lex4art]

Well, a month ago I spend a few days browsing Fortnite user-created locations catalogue in search for museums, personal homes, galleries, future concepts and all kinds of other attempts to share own vision via virtual world possibilities in in Second Life-like fashion. I'm sure my search was quite thorough, but I haven't found much of those, and precious few existing were always empty...

Here all my screenshots, picked through this unexpectedly short journey: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18YB4XwQyI-kpZZNNZBFu4jjQ83Qbh6Aa?usp=sharing (if you're not familiar with Google Drive UI - double click on any image file to open up full view with left/right arrows buttons to switch between images).

IMHO Fortnite is not user-created virtual world by any stretch of this world meaning - you need to be Unreal Engine game dev to add decent content there (same it was for Blue Mars back in 2008 were Cryengine-2 game dev skills were needed, same it was with Sine Space with Unity Editor). It won't be popular - there are not so much people with decent game dev skills and free time to invest into that, those people already using their skills doing own projects...

[Lex4art]

Two decades ago there were a lot of people creating custom maps for Counter Strike Source - myself included - and we did the same thing using tricky Hammer editor for Source engine, that I see now in Fortnite - just with much better catalogue of those custom maps available via Fortnite game lobby UI (and no way to earn money). But still, it's not a virtual world - avatars limited to only one style (cartoonish) and only one vendor (Epic games themselves), no persistent inventory, no ability to build something persistent and so on - hope Tim Sweeney and Epic games team will try to expand this tiny step to virtual world business, but so far it's childish-cartoonish game with ability to do custom maps and huge potential for becoming something much bigger and serious (Unreal Engine 5 is great!).

[Lex4art]

*(and no way to earn money) - that was about Counter Strike of course, Fortnite allows that.

[Patchouli Woollahra nee Camilia Fidelis]

A fish fails when you judge it on its ability to climb a tree.

[Poggles Elite]

Lex4art, a metaverse is anywhere where people gather to socialize including playing games. Two decades ago as you said, I was making levels for TFC, CS, HL2, HL2DM using Hammer Editor and so were many others... We had clubs, we had courts, we had private homes, we had mad scientist death trap co-opt obstacle maps, of course challenge maps for rocket jumping, conc-jumping..
All that happened was we were limited to the assigned game avatars. There wasn't much difference from that to SL to what everyone does now.. Don't forget GTA4 online, which will find even MORE than SL's population just standing around, dressing up, driving cars and having fun roleplaying.
Having something for sale, or a store is not really a prerequisite for people to spend their money - we are just moving towards funneling everyone's money into corporate hands instead - by 'auditioning' would be creators and scooping up any of the pros, making contracts with them - while everyone else makes pennies.
One can dance in a club in Team Fortress Classic custom level, or they can do it in Fortnite, or in Second Life. The lines are blurred now, and Linden Labs is not offering what people want anymore, if it ever has.

[Lex4art]

2Poggles Elite
I can only speak about my own understanding of "metaverse" term - calling any game with chat/socialize a metaverse is devaluating this term, like it's no effort thing to have/create - just add an chat and modding ability to a game and viola - metaverse happens. Nope, this doesn't feels right - creating a successful virtual world platform is much more challenging task, so much that last successful attempt was in the shape of early years of SL and there is no progress since then in metaverse direction. That is how I understand it/feel it.