I feel like people in the game/metaverse industry haven't grasped how huge Sky: Children of the Light, the virtual world from Jenova Chen and his studio Thatgamecompany, has become. In 2023 it had over 50 million monthly active users and earned a record for most concurrent users for a live virtual concert; based on recent download/rating numbers, it's likely to have upwards of 100 million MAU now. (I'm checking that with Jenova.)
As a latest sign of its hugeness, the studio produced a feature film inspired by the world, and is debuting it inside the world itself. (Watch the trailer above.)
Speaking of which, I interviewed Jenova for Making a Metaverse That Matters, where he shared some design innovations which helped make Sky such a huge success. Here's an excerpt:
Kelly Stonelake is a 15 year veteran of Facebook/Meta, who recently filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging a series of highly serious charges around sexual assault, denied promotions, and a culture of discrimination.
While her lawsuit has been covered elsewhere, her last role at Meta included Director of Product Marketing of Horizon Worlds, which deserves special focus here. As I wrote back in March, a former Meta developer speaking on condition of anonymity described a workforce for Horizon who were mostly disinterested in virtual worlds or even VR.
Kelly Stonelake, speaking on the record with me, is able to shed more light on what went wrong with Horizon Worlds -- once touted as Meta’s early entry into the Metaverse, which the company even promoted with a Super Bowl commercial.
Seen that way, her insights also addresses a criticism I've come across often in recent years: If the Metaverse is supposed to be so important, why couldn't Meta, one of the wealthiest companies in history, succeed in creating it?
Because, Stonelake suggests, few people at Meta ever actually cared deeply about the product that was meant to help build it.
As I wrote back in March, a former Meta developer speaking on condition of anonymity described a workforce for Horizon who were mostly disinterested in virtual worlds or even VR.
Kelly Stonelake, speaking on the record with me, is able to shed more light on what went wrong with Horizon Worlds -- once touted as Meta’s early entry into the Metaverse, which the company even promoted with a Super Bowl commercial.
Stars Reach, Raph Koster's highly ambitious upcoming galaxy sandbox MMORPG, had its successful Kickstarter a few months ago, but longtime virtual world developer Matt Daly writes that a thriving player community has emerged -- even before the crowdfunder. Groups are already evolving and building in fascinating ways:
Stars Reach keeps subverting my preconceived notions of player/community motivation in metaverse / sandbox / MMO spaces.
This is GUNC guild’s little enclave - a communal effort of a bunch of players (guild members and not), terraforming, creating land bridges, planting trees, building (including a GUNCies restaurant), over the course of less than 2 full days… and all of this will be wiped in a week or so.
And they've done many versions of this before, across various planned pre-alpha testing server wipes, for months, before the Kickstarter bandwagon etc, just for the love of building, together.
There isn't even an in-game currency yet, or really much FUNCTIONALLY to do in these built cities yet… so it’s like a little product study trapped in amber, worth observing, because those systems and more will come, and by that point it's a product manager’s job to sort signal from noise, but for now the lack of those systems paints a pretty clear picture.
And it’s not due to the official Discord live chat either, as there are countless builds that have sprung up since the last wipe that have usernames on them I don't even recognize.
It’s been motivating me to document and curate a bit. It’s like the best of the modern artists like Lozano-Hemmer whose work is often designed to decay or disassemble itself.
In a time dominated by product management funnels and bottom line predatory Skinner box monetization models, and on the opposite end metaverse graveyard platforms that have no central thesis, this is pretty refreshing.*
Again, this social building is happening despite (because of?) Stars Reach being in pre-release, and all these user-created builds are regularly wiped from the world servers.
"People still going HARD in the paint building and refining, even though the wave is about to erase their sandcastle," as Matt puts it to me. "It's amazing."
Especially impressive because Raph's world isn't a traditional leveling MMO:
"Games like Rust do periodic wipes. Dune awakening will follow suit I think. Conan has them. But [Stars Reach] doesn't even have the mechanics to buttress that pain -- it's currently just pure building. So its just kind of awesome to see how intrinsically powerful that loop is to certain player types."
Matt tells me Stars Reach user creation is similar to worlds like Rust and Second Life, by the way:
Seemingly everyone in tech is talking about a huge ruling in the long-running Epic Games v. Apple dispute:
[J]udge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just ruled that, effective immediately, Apple is no longer allowed to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and blocks the company from restricting how developers can point users to where they can make purchases outside of apps. Apple says it will appeal the order.
As part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot: Impose “any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app... interfere with consumers’ choice to leave an app with anything beyond “a neutral message apprising users that they are going to a third-party site”.
Epic head Tim Sweeney has called his dispute with Apple (and Google) a battle for the Metaverse, since most metaverse platform users access the virtual world through their smartphone -- but because Apple and Google charge a 30% cut on in-app purchases, and metaverse platform companies are hugely hobbled.
Now, the mobile version of Epic's Fortnite -- and Roblox, and VRChat, and Rec Room, and yes, Linden Lab's Second Life -- can enable in-app purchases without that huge 30% fee, or even encourage users to buy virtual currency from their website.
Reached earlier today, Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager is cautiously optimistic:
I keep learning more about how Meta, one of the most powerful and profitable companies in human history, has been unable to grow its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds. Part of that story is told in my book (plug!), while another part of the story I wrote about here, in which Meta leadership decided to develop Horizon Worlds with a VR version of Meta's React code of mobile apps, called "ReactVR" -- leading to a team of 2D app developers driven by engagement metrics and retention numbers, but little experience in virtual worlds or VR.
There was, briefly, an acknowledgement that "The Metaverse" would require learning. Horizons started out as an experiment alongside Rooms and Venues then grew and sucked all of the oxygen out of the room when it was decided that Meta needed a platform to compete with VR Chat.
Yes: VRChat, the social VR virtual world first created by a tiny startup, grew organically with little marketing, but still far outpaced Horizon Worlds in terms of active users, even (and especially!) on Meta's own VR platform. So Meta pivoted to catch up.
Roblox reached 82.9 million daily active users in 2024 with 80% of those playing the popular game on mobile devices, according to Roblox's annual report.
PC was the second most popular platform at just 17%, followed by consoles at 3%.
Disappointing that Roblox hasn't been able to diversify usage much beyond mobile, which would also lead to a more diversified user base. (I.E., not just mostly kids on their parents phones/tablets.) But by the company's own data, that hasn't happened yet.
I've asked this before, but here I go again: What's the point of prompt-based world building, when we already have many multiple 3D building tools which are user-friendly, feature-rich, and, well, fun? This point must be repeated, since Meta is currently promising we can build faster and smarter with GenAI Tools in Meta Horizon Worlds:
Today, we’re excited to follow up on that commitment by expanding access to the desktop editor and its GenAI tools into the UK and Canada in addition to the US. These tools dramatically reduce development time from weeks to as little as hours; accelerating the ability of creators to translate their visions into high-fidelity worlds that users love.
Watch the demo above. It makes me wonder if anyone at Meta has ever watched a speedbuild video before. Because here's one from a Sims 4 user who's not only building about as fast and with the same quality output, but enjoyably chatting as she does:
Quark Multiplayer is a new networking engine showing off the ability to deploy worlds/experiences with thousands (and thousands) of concurrent users in the same space. Coming soon to an SDK for Unity and Unreal, you can apply for Early Access here.
It's a project from new-ish UK start-up MetaGravity, I'm not too familiar with the team, but I like what they're trying to accomplish. And the site has more technical background on what they're building:
