New World Notes

Roblox's Odd Blocky Avatars Are A Key to the Platform's Success: Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters

Pictured: Intrance and LAGurlz, creators of the hit Roblox experience Starving Artist

As Roblox reaches upwards of 300 million monthly active users and continues expanding its feature set, one common reaction is basically: Wait, isn't that just a game platform for kids with blocky, LEGO-like avatars?

Yes... and very much no. As I explain in Making a Metaverse That Matters, Roblox has succeeded not in spite, but in good part because, of those avatars:

Fortnite FTC's First Fine on a Metaverse Platform - But Expect More Soon

If you or your kid played Fortnite between January 2017 and September 2022, you may be eligible to get a refund from a $520 million settlement between Epic and the Federal Trade Commission for bending online privacy laws protecting minors and getting those minors to buy in-game items from gacha-style* loot boxes. Go here to file that claim.

And if you don't need to file a claim, you can still marvel at two things:

• Wow, Fortnite may have 37 million paying users in the US -- over 1 in 10 people in America! That's how many Americans with Fortnite accounts who are being contacted by the FTC. (Then again, the FTC may be messaging anyone in the US with a registered Fortnite account -- I'm double checking this.)
• This seems to be the first of its kind: A successful fine/settlement by US government regulators against a metaverse platform.

There's been close calls before -- for instance, earlier this year, Roblox started hiding ads from 13 and under players after an FTC complaint. But far as I can recall, the Epic case is the first one where US dollars earned from virtual world purchases were then collected by the Federal government to be returned to consumers.

This also means the FTC knows enough about how metaverse platforms work (or don't work for consumers) to start pursuing other policies on other platforms. I do know government agencies have been quietly gathering notes:

 

Ask Me Anything About "Making a Metaverse That Matters" on Inkwell!

Click here to participate in a Q&A about Making a Metaverse That Matters on Inkwell, the public conference on books for The WELL, the legendary online community forum. (Starting now and for the next two weeks.)  It's viewable to everyone online, but if you want to pose questions and aren't a WELL member, you can still e-mail them to inkwell at well dot com.

We're already jamming along, here's some favorite thoughts so far:

"The Metaverse" of Today is a Bit Like "The Information Super Highway" of the 1990s -- Excerpt from Making a Metaverse That Matters

If talk of "The Metaverse" seems a bit obscure or confusing, it's helpful to compare it to a buzzy expression from ancient times (by which I mean the 1990s): The information superhighway.

Often touted by Wired magazine and celebrities (along with Vice President Al Gore) throughout the 90s, it was a common buzzword and late night punch line for years. But what did it actually mean? That was probably best illustrated by a series of AT&T ads from 1993 narrated by Tom Selleck.

Watch above!  The eerie thing is that every "you will!" promised in these ads did indeed came to pass a decade or two later. We do in fact watch whatever movie we want instantly, have remote meetings from the beach, and so on. Ironically, most of these technologies were not actually developed by AT&T itself. (For me, I frankly just think of AT&T as my annoyingly expensive and slow Internet Service Provider.)

While it's not a perfect analogy, it's worth keeping in mind when thinking about the Metaverse -- a topic I discussed with Neal Stephenson himself in Making a Metaverse That Matters:

Unity Price Increase Would Be a Gut Punch to Many Metaverse Platforms -- Especially Those Now in Development

In case you don't know any 3D graphics developers, roughly the entire community has been roiling over an unexpected price increase for using the graphics engine:

With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue.

Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees.

The new fee system will begin at the start of 2024.

That's quite a bit when it comes to popular Unity-based games/virtual worlds, most of which are free, and end up downloaded many millions or tens of millions of times, hitting developers with fees in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. (There's also a fee when the same user installs multiple copies to different devices.)

More key for New World Notes, here's some of the leading metaverse platforms that run on Unity:

• Rec Room
• VRChat
• Zepeto
• ... and the upcoming mobile app for Second Life.

Yes, this price change might impact development and release of the long-awaited Second Life mobile app! 

However, after chatting with some developer colleagues, my take is the impact may ultimately end up a gut punch, rather than a crippling blow -- but the blow will be felt for years:

Roblox Leaping the Metaverse Age Cliff With VOIP Calling, PlayStation Expansion, Dating Experiences and (Sigh) Generative AI

If you missed the recent whirlwind of Roblox announcements, they read like the company's concerted attempt to the cross (in a single leap!) the Metaverse Age Cliff, that point in the lifecycle of a platform where usage tends to drop sharply as the user base reaches adulthood:

• Coming later this year in early release, Roblox Connect is an avatar-to-avatar voice chat system. Most metaverse platforms already have some variation of this, but seeing as Roblox has 300 million monthly active users -- i.e. nearly the size of the entire US population --  this feature will create a calling network large enough to compete with traditional phone carriers.
• Roblox is coming to PlayStation 4/5 next month, connecting it to an install base of over 150 million households, primarily comprised of core gamers in their 20s and 30s.
• The company also unveiled a generative AI assistant (video below) to create 3D content.
• Roblox CEO David Baszucki is again promising "dating experiences" coming to adult-age users in the next 5 years, where "thousands"  of people will start real life relationships. This is basically re-branding an existing phenomena for a mass market/Wall Street audience -- thousands of people already do that in virtual worlds every day.  Indeed, the 20-something developer couple I profiled in the book first met in Roblox. (More on them later.)

Pictured: Frontlines, recent user-created Roblox experience ideal for PlayStation crowd

This is on top of the recent Meta Quest integration and the little covered news (from a reputable data gathering source) that Roblox has amassed 300 million monthly active users. If the PlayStation launch is successful, the company will have a near-unbeatable lead among metaverse platforms.

As for the generative AI, I'm still a bit skeptical that it will be more than a brief novelty -- but it will take a platform of Roblox's size to determine that. Watch below:

The Problem With Meta's Approach to Avatars in Horizon Worlds -- Excerpt, Making a Metaverse That Matters

With news that Meta's Horizon Worlds metaverse platform is finally coming to mobile in the run-up to next month's Meta Connect developer conference, here's an excerpt from Making a Metaverse That Matters on the fundamental mistakes Meta is still making in its approach to avatars -- including insights from Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka, who went on to become a top VP at Facebook, led the company's acquisition of Oculus VR -- but has serious misgivings about Meta's “infantilized human avatars”, as he calls them:

Linden Lab Hiring Senior Product Manager of Second Life to Shape the Original Metaverse's Future for "Millions of Customers"

Linden Lab has a new job opening that's been up on the website for at least the last several weeks:

Senior Product Manager at Linden Lab

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager (remote) to elevate multiple facets of our Second Life product. This person would also enable growth and scale by shipping features that improve our customer experience... 

As a Senior Product Manager, you’ll utilize in-depth product knowledge to successfully drive key projects on Second Life. You’ll work alongside a supportive team of people across engineering, design, QA, and other cross-functional teams to build products and new experiences and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the original metaverse. And finally, the pleasure of seeing your solutions ship, scale, and make a measurable impact on millions of customers' lives across the globe.

Emphasis mine! I've been hoping that the recently unveiled mobile version of Second Life would not simply be an app that targeted existing users, but instead aim to grow the audience well beyond the core established user base of 500,000-600,000. This new job listing seems like a solid indicator that Linden Lab is indeed attempting to grow the Second Life community, building off the momentum of the mobile app after that's launched (late this year/early next).

I can't emphasize how important a mobile app is, even for long-running metaverse platforms like Second Life:

Like I wrote in 2020, IMVU floundered for years as an also-ran competitor to Second Life; after it rolled out a mobile version, here's what happened:

Listen: Pondering the Potential of The Metaverse for Dystopian Purposes

Here's an interview about Making a Metaverse That Matters on the Plutopia News Network, hosted by Internet OG Jon Lebkowsky with fellow OGs Wendy Grossman and Scoop Sweeney. Watch above, though please disregard my disheveled look -- I realized only at the very last moment that this was an on-camera interview!

One spicy topic we get into that other interviews about the book haven't yet brought up, starting at around 43 minutes in:

The desire by many technologists to turn the Metaverse into a dystopian pacifier for the poor of the world. While little discussed (it's only one of many dystopian possibilities, and not the most likely), I do think it's worth knowing how many serious and/or successful technologists really do think a VR-powered metaverse could ever be satisfying escape from real misery. 

Excerpt from the book: 

Ultima Underworld's Untold Influence on Early Metaverse Development -- Including Second Life

Watching Philip Rosedale and Avi Bar-Zeev talk about early days in metaverse development, reader "Nadeja" points out another early milestone that's often under-appreciated -- the launch of pioneering game Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss: 

Another interesting thing is that in March 1992, just a few months before the publication of Snow Crash (June 1992), another influential work in the history of virtual worlds came out: Ultima Underworld. Although it wasn't set in a cyberpunk world and it was single player (as a RPG, you interacted with NPCs), the player's character was also called Avatar (apparently, Stephenson came to the idea independently, even though it was called "Avatar" in the Ultima series since Ultima IV, 1985), the gameplay was nonlinear and with emergent storytelling, it was an immersive sim:  There was crafting, fixing the equipment, cooking and eating, you needed sleep too, and to carry different kind of lights, each illuminating the walls differently and eventually burning out.

Its first-person 3D engine was quite sophisticated for the time (and influenced Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D engine too, that was a lot simpler and flat, but also a lot faster): you could look up and down; when you walked, the camera would bob slightly to simulate the motion of the walking; you could jump, swim, and even fly, there were slopes and bridges, you could drop items inworld from your inventory (not too different than "rezzing" in SL), you could take notes on the map, and many other things...

It gave you the sense of being in a real environment, freely explorable anywhere and interactive, and with customizable avatars. By today standard maybe you won't call it a virtual world; but in 1992, when Snow Crash was published, Ultima Underworld was the closest thing to it. So this is the best Neal Stephenson or someone else could get from the most powerful PCs (and taking most of the hard-disk space) in 1992.

Great points! To which I can add a fun fact: Back in 2004, since I knew him through some of my early articles, I invited lead Ultima Underworld developer Doug Church to visit Linden Lab and judge an early Second Life game development contest.

Philip was excited to meet Doug, because as I wrote in the first book, Ultima Underworld strongly enforced Philip Rosedale's vision of creating a virtual world: