New World Notes

Travis Scott Likely Sold Some $10 Million in Virtual Content from Fortnite

Fascinating tidbit from this Forbes profile of hiphop start Travis Scott, on his groundbreaking Fortnite shows earlier this year:

The implications of his Fortnite concert quickly became evident. For Epic, it proved that the company was well on track to becoming more than just a maker of video games. For Scott and, really, the entire music industry, it laid a path to a new revenue stream. Scott grossed roughly $20 million for it including merchandise sales, according to a source, much more than what his concerts typically gross. It showed that a virtual performance, once dismissed as a gimmick, could be as much an act of artistry as an old-fashioned live show.

Emphasis mine, because wow. At first I assumed Epic developer Fortnite paid Scott most of that $20 million, but running some industry standard estimates on the Fortnite content the Travis Scott show was selling, it's likely half or more of that was virtual goods sales. Here's the back-of-envelope math:

Unready Player 2? Reviews to Influential Metaverse Novel Decidedly Mixed

There's an official ROBLOX experience promoting Ready Player 2, the new sequel to the metaverse novel partly inspired by Second Life and became so influential, it was required reading for employees at Oculus.  (Because why not make a dystopian novel about a future so horrible everyone wants to live in VR a company's frame of reference.)

But is the sequel any good, and worth a read over the holidays? A advance couple reviews below with mild spoilers,  so caveat geeker:

Roblox's Jaw-Dropping IPO Filing: 31 Million+ Daily Users, $589M+ in 2020 Revenue, Most from Mobile; User Creators Earned $209M+, Up 3X from 2019

Above: Image from ROBLOX's stock filing, data from the first 9 months of 2020

ROBLOX just filed its Form S-1 in preparation for going public, giving us a good glimpse at the virtual world platform's metrics. And they're pretty amazing! I'm still digging into it, but its 2020 standout stats for me so far:

31 million daily active users in 2020, nearly doubling since 2018:  "Daily active users, or DAUs, on Roblox grew 47%, from 12.0 million DAUs in 2018 to 17.6 million in 2019, and grew 82%, from 17.1 million in the nine months ended September 30, 2019 to 31.1 million in the nine months ended September 30, 2020."

52% of Roblox's revenue now from mobile apps: "For the nine months ended September 30, 2020, 34% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Apple App Store and 18% of our revenue was attributable to Robux sales through the Google Play Store..." The vast majority of Roblox's activity is from mobile usage too: "[D]uring the same period 68% of our engagement hours on the platform were from users who signed up through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store." 

With nearly $600 million in 2020 revenue for company by September, total annual revenue could exceed $800 million or (with the new pandemic quarantine and people indoors during the holidays) even reach toward $1 billion. But how much of that revenue is shared with Roblox's user creators, who make the bulk of the games and other interactive entertainment on the platform? That brings us to another interesting point:

NeosVR Makes User-to-User File Sharing an Immersive Social VR Experience

 NeosVR, an impressive indie social VR metaverse project backed by Patreon funders  (featured previously here) continues to impress. In the latest update, lead developer Frooxius shows off its latest feature: the ability to import files and share them with other users. And rather than accomplish this with a 2D pop-up menu (the obvious solution), Frooxius makes it truly immersive: The files are 3D objects that can be manipulated, moved around, and given to other users in VR. You know, the same way file sharing has been depicted in fiction about the metaverse forever.

Dual Universe: Traditional Game or Metaverse? One Virtual World Scout's Take

Here's a recent walkthrough of Dual Universe, the would-be metaverse from J.C. Baille and team that launched last September, from renowned virtual world explorer Luca (previously here and also here), mostly featuring its ship-building capabilities.

Luca's initial take on Dual Universe overall, with an interesting point on whether it plays like an online game or a full-fledged metaverse:

Gumroad Online Marketplace "Another Peg in Place for the Metaverse"

I mentioned how there's a growing real cash economy for VRChat-based content on Gumroad, an online marketplace for digital content, and reader Joey1058 explored the site deeper, then came back with this brief report:

I took a look at Gumroad. This site is awesome. It's not tied specifically to a particular VR world. This means that somewhere up the road, creators can expand their line for any world they see fit to sell to. One more peg in place for the metaverse!

Quite possibly! In all honesty I didn't know much about the site before this, but it claims that nearly 72,000 creators are selling content on the platform; according to SimilarWeb, Gumroad gets over 12 million monthly visits in recent months, which is quite decent. My pal Leigh Alexander sells her fiction on Gumroad and has this endorsement on the homepage, which is good enough for me.

Also to Joey's point, the content for sale on Gumroad isn't locked to any specific virtual world. (It even has some Second Life-related items for sale.) I don't know if Gumroad will ultimately become the main commerce site for the Metaverse (single or plural), but I think he's right that some kind of independent marketplace like this will be key to making it viable.

Saying "Second Life is not a game" is an excuse for not demanding a better & more fun virtual world (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: A nightclub experience... in Grand Theft Auto V Online

While the "Is Second Life a game?" argument has basically gone since SL launched, reader "0xc0ffea" (who also co-hosts the largest SL community on Reddit) posts a fresh perspective: Whatever SL is on an ontological level, not treating it as a game has contributed to its lack of evolution:

 SL users and, more importantly, its developers need to play more games.

There is a shocking disconnect when switching between SL and modern games (even 7 year old games like GTA5). By comparison, SL barely runs, fundamentally fails to operate as a social platform the moment you get a few people in the same location (or try to converse in group IM), lags to hell and back, and it's users have been conditioned to blame each other for the overall poor experience.

A little gaming makes it very apparent that SL's technical woes are not caused by that one person who dared to wear those shoes with that hair, happened to have a scripted attachment, or had the audacity to load slowly.

"SL is not a game" has been a handy excuse to gloss over it being architecturally stuck in the days of single core processors.

Here's why, she goes on:

Edge Computing Will Transform the Metaverse: My Article for Samsung Next

"Edge computing is opening a door to the metaverse" is a just-published article I wrote for a new web magazine from Samsung NEXT, the venture funding arm of the tech giant, and as the name suggests, it attempts to explain how edge technology will transform our expectations for VR, cloud computing, and building a mestaverse worth the name:

Edge computing -- in which compute, storage, security, and networking occurs physically closer to end users and their devices -- will enable us to think about the metaverse and related applications in a new light...

In the eyes of many industry insiders, edge computing will be an essential pillar in the metaverse’s creation, by enabling developers to reduce latency in virtual worlds. This technology could empower new and better devices and new virtual experiences that support many thousands -- and eventually, millions -- of concurrent users in the same shared 3D space.

As an elevator pitch to explain edge computing, I often say, "It's basically a real life version of the Piper Net from Silicon Valley." And as you imagine, in it I talk with Philip Rosedale, Jim Purbrick, and a lot of other luminaries who've been working in virtual worlds for nearly two decades, waiting for this technology to come. Philip and Jim of course have some interesting perspectives on edge computing, such as how it will improve the audio experience of virtual worlds:

David Lynch Appears as Avatar in Breakroom from Sinespace to Accept Award at First Major Film Festival Hosted in a Virtual World

Acclaimed artist and filmmaker David Lynch recently appeared in avatar form in Breakroom, the virtual world for live events from Sine Wave Entertainment (a sponsoring partner to New World Notes). Lynch did so to receive an award from Mexico’s Guanajuato International Film Festival (or GIFF), one of world’s largest annual cinema events. Due to the pandemic, GIFF moved many of its scheduled events to a virtual campus built in Breakroom, so hundreds of registrants could safely watch short films in competition, attend panels, even participate in a studio pitch session.

As a longtime Lynch fan, it was a professional highlight to help bring the master creator of dreamlike alternate realities into a virtual world for the first time. Lynch and his assistant safely logged into Breakroom from his home in Los Angeles, from the very same spot where he shoots his famous weather reports. As you might have guessed, getting his iconic hair as accurate as possible for his avatar was the most challenging task. To make it a truly Lynchian event, the entrance to the theater lobby where the director received his award was even made to look like the Red Room from his cult series Twin Peaks. (We did consider adding a backward-talking midget as well, but that’ll have to wait.)

More details and video below. With this event, GIFF became the first major film festival to move its activities to a virtual world, but with the global pandemic still raging, I expect many more will follow. As for Breakroom, it’s recently hosted virtual world conferences for Stanford and the United Nations, and will soon launch a speakers’ events series open to all -- stay tuned.

Does the Metaverse Require Real World Money?

Last week reader " irihapeti " argued that an essential facet of the metaverse is "[the] ability to deposit and withdraw my money safely and securely, so that I can buy stuff/experiences for any particular world/game/viewport of the metaverse and/or get paid for stuff/experiences that I provide in any of the different offerings/views."

Some other readers pushed back on this notion, and  so irihapeti expanded further:

Money is quite important to stimulate User Generated Content. That people can make stuff/experiences for use by other people like themselves within the various views and get paid to do so.

I think that most people would quite like a single wallet (as Joey mentions) to connect their RL payment method too. And from the wallet buy the different tokens (in whatever form they are for each of the views) to buy the stuff within the different views

Buying different tokens is no different to buying USD, Euro, Pound, AUD, etc to buy stuff in each countries local shops

And as I mentioned, the way I think to do is this is with a Tilia-like facility. [The Linden Lab spinoff company] It manages the trading of tokens between the users, and their conversion to to/from RL fiat currencies. We need only connect our RL payment method to this one point.

When we don't have a wallet then we are stuck with connecting our RL payment method to each and every world/view.

I seriously suspect irihapeti is right that Linden Lab very much hopes Tilia becomes the payment manager for the metaverse (or metaverses). But lately I've been thinking about the first point quite a bit.

Is it really important to have a real world money exchange feature in a metaverse to encourage user-generated content?