Above: Radio Remembered How a Father's Lost Art From Second Life was Reborn in Fortnite
Good points by "EmptyEyes", reflecting on how algorithms tend to homogenize metaverse platforms:
Metaverses are weird beasts, outside of Fortnite, it feels like they refuse to compete with one another. They're like MMOs in that sense.
They cater very strongly to their existing communities and don't really try and change things too much for fear of upsetting those communities.
Trying to appeal to their "average" player only leads them to a slow death. They should be trying to capture as many diverse player groups as possible.
As you eluded to, social media sites understand this. The average is not truly mass market appeal. Mass market appeal is giving everyone exactly what they're looking for when they're looking for it.
In some mediums you just have to settle for the average, in others, like this space, you don't. If VRChat, Roblox, Rec Room, Second Life all appeal to different niches then that means there's lots of room to grow. Take something from them all. They are clear targets that you can say, "Hey I want to convert some of VRChat's players, lets add x, y, and z to make that happen."
Fortnite does this. I don't play myself (it lacks deep home decorating, character customization, adult content, and roleplay that's competitive with SL), but you can do so many things in Fortnite. You can build if you want, you can race, you can fight, you can play Rock Band, and so much more. There are so many niche audiences that it serves.
Also I'm not saying alienate your core audience. I'm saying that if you have the resources, you should grow your audience. Ensure your appeal doesn't drop to core users, appeal to new audiences as well, and then support them both.
Bonus points if you choose to grow into audiences that are at the intersection of large and easy to appeal to.
This connects nicely with the recent conversation around advertising Second Life. It's a mistake to create a marketing strategy based on what only seems to be the most popular activity in SL -- social fashion roleplay -- when that ignores the many multiple niches of other communities creating content that has a proven existing market. For instance:
Second Life sandboxes have most/all of the features offered in Minecraft's sandbox mode, plus many more features/functionality. Why not create a marketing campaign/new landing page/first time experience targeting the 100 million+ Minecraft players in search of a new platform?
Sea of Thieves, the open world pirate/sailing MMO, reported 40 million players in 2024! Imagine an SL ad promoting pirate roleplay in a far larger world with much more UGC/creative freedom, targeting Sea of Thieves fans.
There's several urban roleplay mini-MMOs in Second Life that would appeal to the many millions playing Grand Theft Auto Online looking for edgier content and more creative freedom.
And so on! At some point I'll put this into an expanded post, but metaverse platforms definitely need to grow beyond their core audience, or face plateau.
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