New World Notes

Avatars for Kamala: Why US Players of Fortnite, Second Life, VRChat & Other Metaverse Platforms Should Vote for Harris/Walz

SL image by Alsatian Kidd, who also has thoughts on the election

When I briefly noted that Philip Rosedale had endorsed Harris/Walz during a recent YouTube livestream (watch below), some reader comments were somewhat surprising:

Like Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner with family, politics really should not be discussed, and it really has no place in SL

Rule #1 about all video games. Keep. Politics. Out. Of. Games.

But Second Life is not even a traditional game: It’s a metaverse platform, which by definition, is integrated with the real world economy -- and is therefore subject to government regulations formulated by elected politicians. Second Life content creators regularly receive bills from the IRS, which even has a written policy about taxing Linden Dollars; SL content must adhere to US laws banning online gambling, and so on.  

There are hundreds of very good reasons to vote for Kamala Harris and vote against Donald Trump. But even if you are only thinking about the future well-being of your favorite virtual world/metaverse platform, and the user communities in them -- be it Second Life, Fortnite, VRChat, or many others --  here are a couple core reasons to cast your vote for Kamala:

Retaining Lina Khan to Protect Metaverse Companies & Consumers

Lina Khan, appointed by Biden/Harris as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, has been a fierce defender of both metaverse platform users and players against powerful interests. 

Last year, her FTC won a $245 million refund for Fortnite players targeted by “dark patterns to trick players into making unwanted purchases and let children rack up unauthorized charges”. 

And then this year, her FTC filed an amicus brief in support of Epic’s bid to require Google to open up in-app payment options apart from Google Play. As Tim Sweeney has often said, both Apple and Google’s control of mobile payment systems and their 30% commission fees threaten the future of the Metaverse. Just this week, Linden Lab’s Brad Oberwager mentioned to me how this IAP 30% charge is a serious challenge for fully bringing Second Life to mobile.

There’s a huge number of other outstanding challenges for metaverse platforms. If Harris/Walz win, Lina Khan will in all likelihood remain head of the FTC.* If Trump wins, Khan -- already a target of GOP animus and powerful donors -- will be gone. Leaving metaverse consumers and creators to fend for ourselves. And whoever Trump/Vance appoints when Khan is gone, I wouldn't expect a full SL mobile app during their reign.

There’s an even more important metaverse-centric reason to support Harris/Walz:

Resonite Update: One Year After Launch, Patreon-Sponsored Virtual World Has 10,000 Monthly Active Users from 60,000 Installs

This report brought to you by the Virtual Worlds Museum, now creating digital hubs across many virtual worlds. Contact the Museum team here to get involved!

It's been almost exactly a year since the launch of Resonite, the free-to-play virtual world/metaverse platform that was spun out from a prior project (read about its history here) by lead developer "Frooxius", who supported its creation from his Patreon, which currently brings in $18,000+ per month.

Since then, the indie project has seem some fairly impressive organic user growth. Here's some recent Resonite stats:

• About 10,000 monthly active users
• Almost 60,000 installs/user accounts total
• About 60-75% of users are on VR headsets, versus the PC client
• 45% of Resonite users are from North America, while 23% are in Western Europe; 13% are located across Asia

I got this data from Resonite's finance officer (known as "bobthegood" on Discord/in-world), which is another indication of it's evolution into an actual business. (The platform is slowly selling education and enterprise/government SaaS licenses to organizations.)

As for the culture of the current user community, Bob shares this (along with the pic above and some influencer videos):

Watch: Zuckerberg Unveils Horizon Worlds Updates: "Improved" Avatars (Except Not), and Hyperlink-Like "Primitives" (Sounds Familiar!)

Courtesy the eagle eye and video capture skills of Rhiannon from Avacon, here's Zuckerberg at this week's MetaConnect announcing "improved" avatars and HTML-like building blocks for the Metaverse, which he calls... "primitives".  

Someone should write a book about this one sentence!

RE "improved" avatars, the problem isn't Horizon World's avatar graphics quality, but their fundamental conception:

Nick Yee and his QuanticFoundry firm, by the way, about 1 in 3 men prefer to play as female avatars. (With about 1 in 10 females choosing male avatars.)  

Why did Meta design avatars to look like their real life owner, when 1 in 3 males don’t even want avatars that share their real life gender?

As we’ll explore in later chapters, the popularity of non-realistic avatars reflects the internal motivations of people who most enjoy metaverse platforms -- especially the very young, who comprise their core user base: They are in virtual worlds where they can explore and create and experiment with identity, which they are still developing and in their own lives. 

As for "primitives", that's been a core term for building blocks in Second Life for over 20 years*. But then again, Zuckerberg probably heard the term in a Facebook presentation.. from founding CTO Cory Ondrejka:

The Limits of Gen AI, the Immersion Divide, and The Rise of the Metaverse Generation

Above: InTrance and LAGurlz, creators of Starving Artists, a game approaching half a billion visits

If you accept the common Valley wisdom, the Metaverse is “dead”. As recently as 2022, tech conferences and startup pitch decks were awash with the term, first coined in Snow Crash; now, you scarcely see it anywhere, as if wholly supplanted by generative Al.. The backlash is so profound, it almost has the feel of an intellectual purge. 

So what I’m about to say may seem totally deranged, but I assure you it’s completely defensible:  

Metaverse platforms continue to grow in mass market adoption and revenue, far outpacing even current darling OpenAI in terms of actual user numbers. (More on those numbers down below.) This growth is happening while sustainable, scalable use cases for generative AI still seem far away or niche, and sober analysts are already pointing to the category as likely being an overhyped bubble.

Why is the business world missing this? The answer, I’ve discovered, speaks to deeper cultural and generational biases that can even obscure sound financial analysis.

The Metaverse by the Numbers 

To level set our references, the Metaverse as originally described in Snow Crash is roughly this: A vast immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful user creation tools which are integrated with external technology and the real world economy. Not coincidentally, that also happens to describe the core features of highly popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. That’s not a surprise, since both of them (and many others) were directly and avowedly inspired by Snow Crash.

Most of the leading metaverse platforms I tracked in my book Making a Metaverse That Matters in early 2023 have since seen strong growth. According to analytics firm RTrack, Roblox in December 2023 reached 354 million monthly active users; it counted 400 million MAU this July, and currently has 380 million MAU, 

In other words, not only does Roblox already have more users than the entire United States has people, it’s in striking distance of reaching half a billion MAU fairly soon. And that’s just one of many successful metaverse platforms.

Overall, total monthly user growth tracked among the leading metaverse platforms -- including Roblox, Fortnite (100 million MAU), Rec Room (23 million MAU), Avakin Life (14 million MAU), and VRChat (10 million MAU) -- has increased by about 140 million people since 2023, for a total global audience of an estimated 690 million active users.

To be sure, this is incremental growth to existing platforms; but surely generative AI represents a transformational, categorical leap?

Maybe, but that’s still far from proven. And setting aside the rhetorical jazz hands of AI evangelists, the actual numbers are not quite convincing.

Metaverse v. Gen AI: Some Hard Contrasts

The top generative AI platform by far, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, only has some 100 million monthly active users -- far less than Roblox. This is obviously not an apples-to-apples comparison, but in basic terms of “activity that many people regularly do on the Internet”, metaverse platforms still dominate over gen AI.

A revenue comparison is also not an impressive win for the AI narrative. OpenAI is on track to earn $3.4 billion this year… which is almost exactly the figure Roblox is forecast to earn in 2024. And what revenue AI earns comes at tremendous losses: as Sequoia Capital recently reported, AI companies will have to earn about $600 billion per year just to cover the costs of their computing infrastructure. Which might be justified if a compelling scalable killer app had already emerged, but as Goldman Sachs firmly noted, it has not.

So why has attention shifted so thoroughly away from the Metaverse towards such a profoundly unproven technology? Valley flightiness for the latest buzzword is part of the explanation, as is Meta’s uniquely floundering metaverse strategy, desperately centered as it is around its own line of VR headsets. (Despite Neal Stephenson himself frequently insisting VR is not a prerequisite for the Metaverse. ) 

But I’m convinced something deeper is at work.

Horizon Worlds Has Powerful Features, Says Former Meta Dev -- But Meta Isn't Giving the Platform's Creator Community Enough Visibility

Above: A Horizon Creator Community jam that Diaz managed

Is Horizon Worlds a more powerful platform than we give it credit for? Social scientist Dr. Ruth Diaz, who was formerly a Community Design Developer for Meta, recently shared some user-made Horizon Worlds builds with me (above), arguing that the platform has several features which do make it worthwhile. (More on that below.)

The problem, she tells me, is that Meta hasn't given the user community enough visibility -- or even engaged with them enough to begin with.

"Get to know the community," as she puts it in form of advice to Meta, "and focus your programming not on popular worlds, but enriching worlds. To me, this reflects that Meta's developers are still struggling with actually spending time in the LIVE app with those creating in it."

We've seen reports of Meta telling its staff to "dogfood" Horizon Worlds, but to Dr. Diaz, the company's standard doesn't go far enough: "When they say 'dogfooding', they mean using a separate app to try out new features."

In Meta's absence, she tells me, Horizon Worlds has become "an influencer-focused culture" -- "versus investing in genuine community building, which would mean up-skilling and investing in community leaders, instead of burning them out until they are canceled or leave on their own."

This might help explain why the last report of Horizon Worlds activity was only 200,000 users from 2023. But while Meta may not be supporting the user community as much as it deserves, Ruth tells me there is (or was) a community of engaged user creators on the platform expressing themselves in profound ways to the best of their abilities:

"A rich world doesn't have to be a complex world or a profoundly eye catching world," as she puts it. "It just has to have a story in it, that gets you in a really deep place. It rips open your heart with grief or joy. You know you are in the middle of someone's wound and/or rebirth. Some of the most heart-opening worlds that I've mentored into existence are made by people who still do not consider themselves creators. They are stories of severed limbs, severed relationships, hopes, and secret dreams, all woven into metaphor in a way where the emotion bursts through the people experiencing it... Influencer culture changed everything."

I've heard related things from other veterans of Meta who worked on Horizon Worlds. It's certainly a stark contrast with, say, VRChat, which is highly community creator focused, and is vastly more popular than Horizon Worlds even on Meta's own VR headsets.

Anyway, I asked Dr. Diaz to tell me about Horizon Worlds' advantages, and she shared this mini-essay: 

Meta Could Be Turning Horizon Worlds Into a Cross-Platform Virtual Machine (Guest Post)

Above: Experience offered on the Meta Horizons page

Meta Connect is happening next week, and longtime New World Notes reader Martin K, an executive who works in XR, recently sent me some intriguing thoughts around Meta's Horizon Worlds. On the surface, it's an also-ran metaverse platform that has such a tiny user base, it barely registers on my platform leader chart.

But Martin argues that Horizon Worlds is destined to be a different arrow in Meta's quiver:

The Meta Connect 2024 conference is approaching fast, and there is no doubt that Meta will talk about their metaverse-app Horizon Worlds at the conference. Even though Horizon Worlds was announced almost 5 years ago (at the time as "Facebook Horizon"), and even though Meta bought and closed competing metaverse apps (e.g. Crayta), and even though Meta is aggressively luring its users into Horizon Worlds, the app is still far less popular (according to Google trends) than other metaverse apps competing on Meta's platform, e.g., Roblox, VRChat, or Rec Room.

Which begs the question: why is Meta clinging on to Horizon Worlds? What's their plan for it? 

Here, I suggest a change of perspective:

Metaverse Interoperability Across Multiple Platforms Was Tried By IBM & Linden Lab But Didn't Catch On -- Here's Why.

Why the Metaverse is Beating Gen AI https://t.co/0CegcGDiSk

— Open Metaverse Interoperability Group (@open_metaverse) September 6, 2024

Thanks to everyone from the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group especially host @jimmy6DOF for the fun and spicy conversation last Friday -- you can listen to the whole thing above (starting around 4 minutes in), with some particular spiciness around 36:30, where I mention that metaverse interoperability of virtual objects has been tried before and fairly failed, a topic I go into at length in my book. So below is a somewhat edited excerpt on that subject:

 

Gizem & The Battle to Make Virtual Money Real: Free Excerpt to Making a Metaverse That Matters on My Patreon!

My in-depth interview with Gizem Mishi Akin of Blueberry fame is coming soon, but meantime, I've posted an excerpt of Gizem's incredible Second Life story from my book Making a Metaverse That Matters on my Patreon, free for all members:

Once upon a time, a girl sitting by herself in an ancient city traveled through a looking glass full of lightning and changed her life forever. 

Gizem Mishi was a college student in Istanbul when she came across a YouTube video of “Skye Galaxy”, a bohemian-looking avatar with a powerfully resonant voice, performing in a virtual world to a throng of swaying fans. This was how Gizem first discovered Second Life. By the time she attended her second Skye Galaxy performance, she had learned the world’s creation tools sufficiently well enough to create a polka dot dress for herself -- her first item of avatar clothing for the platform...

Join for free to read the rest. Featuring an amazing photo of Ms. Mishi in Turkey! Plus read New World Notes' 2009 profile of Skye Galaxy here.

Tomorrow at 11am on X/Twitter: Join Me & OMI on Spaces to Chat Metaverse vs. Gen AI!

Join Wagner James Au @slhamlet with us on Friday!

Open House & Talking all things Metaverse -- what it was -- what it is -- what it could be -- and why he thinks it's beating GenAI !!!

Here on X starting :
11AM(PST) 2PM(EST) 6PM(UTC) pic.twitter.com/3OQTiPIAzO

— Open Metaverse Interoperability Group (@open_metaverse) September 4, 2024

I'm on an X/Twitter Space tomorrow at 11am PT co-hosted by the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, where we'll be getting punchy about the continued vitality of the Metaverse and metaverse platforms, especially as compared to the (largely) unsustainable hype of generative AI. Get your questions ready and join the fun! 

Afterward (around Noon PT), we'll be hitting a virtual world after party in the web-based NOWHERE, in a space co-hosted by the Virtual Worlds Museum -- will share the link when we're there! 

Here's Why the Metaverse Works, Leading to Massive Platforms Like Roblox, Fortnite & Many More

The growth of leading metaverse platforms in 2024 is now nearly 700 million active users -- increasing by 140 million people since Making a Metaverse That Matters came out last year. (See chart.)

But why are platforms like Roblox and Fortnite -- or for that matter, Second Life -- so successful?

Plainly put: Because the Metaverse, more or less as Neal Stephenson originally conceived it, works.  

As described in Snow Crash, the Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that's simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology. 

Each of these elements contributes to the strong/steady growth of leading metaverse platforms: