"Yeah," I said. "Jon Stewart even did a segment about it on The Daily Show."
"Really?"
Yes really and you can watch it here. (Note to Comedy Central: Did you forget to enable embed settings?) Jon Stewart even had an embedded reporter in Second Life: Rob Riggle as the bodacious avatar Beowulf Porpoiseburg.
Just got this pretty amazing breaking news note from Shawn Whiting, Head of Influencers & Partners at Rec Room:
"Shortly after the holidays, Rec Room crested 3 million VR monthly active users... A majority of those VR monthly active users are Quest 2. [Emph mine - WJA]
"We're very happy with the VR growth but at this point VR is a pretty low percentage of our monthly players. Rec Room is seeing much more growth on iOS, Android, PlayStation, and Xbox due to there being billions of those devices out there collectively."
So that's something! Last December I estimated Rec Room had 4-5 million monthly active users across all devices, but based on Shawn's wording, total Rec Room numbers is likely to be well over 10-12 million MAU.
This is quite an impressive milestone for metaverse platform growth -- and more key, for usage of the Quest 2 headset on metaverse platforms. Quest 2 has an install base over 10 million, so at least 15% of that (i.e. 1.5 million) are active on Rec Room.
As part of Meta's Horizon monetization announcement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had an in-world chat/demo with several community creators (watch below). And before I get too ranty, let me start by saying that's a smart and good thing! If you want to foster a positive and thriving metaverse platform community, you definitely want to show the community that their creativity is highly valued, even and especially by those at the very top of the company.
So that's a small but solid step in the right direction.
That said, around 6 minutes in, while talking about Horizon's collaborative creation features, Zuckerberg says something so jaw-dropping I had to watch it several times to make sure I heard it right.
One of the things that we're trying to do differently is the whole co-developing experience and the fact that everything you're building is in Horizon itself... it really is just different from all the other experiences out there. [Emph mine - WJA]
Maybe I'm missing some context, but it's difficult to conceive of a context where this statement is accurate. In-world, collaborative creation has existed in virtual world/metaverse platforms for at least 20 years. Actually more like 22 years, because this was a core feature of Second Life when it was still an alpha demo called Linden World. Like some guy wrote:
As Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka spoke to their financial backers, a projector displayed a live video feed of Linden World, projected on the wall. Other Linden staffers were in-world, running a demonstration that the investors could watch. A few of them were using the building tools the staff used to create content. And as it went on, the investor’s eyes drifted away from the meeting, and to the screen... This, everyone realized, was what made their world unique.
Later on, Minecraft and other platforms launched with similar functionality.
But surely Zuck knows all this. So maybe he's just referring to in-world collaborative creation in social VR. If so, he'd be on slightly safer ground. But there are other metaverse platforms which already have this feature -- including platforms compatible with the Quest in the Quest app store.
Here's what collaborative creation in VR looked like in Rec Room three years ago:
Meta, a latecomer to metaverse platform development, just announced the launch of a marketplace for user creators in Horizon Worlds, and you can see the potential problems right in the immediate details:
[A] “handful” of Horizon creators will be able to sell virtual items and effects in the worlds they create for others to explore. The idea is that creators can sell everything from access to a VIP section of their world to virtual items like jewelry or a special basketball, according to Meaghan Fitzgerald, the product marketing director for Horizon...
Meta will be taking a cut of what creators sell, though exactly what that take can be is a bit complex. For Horizon purchases, Meta is taking a 25 percent cut of the percentage that’s left after a platform fee. For platforms with a 30 percent fee, like Meta’s own Quest Store for VR titles, the creator will be left with a little over half of the sale price (the math there being that Meta is taking 25 percent of 70 percent).
Emphasis mine, as it bears emphasis. It's good that Meta is giving (some) users access to monetization -- by definition, a core feature to a metaverse platform -- but this initial roll-out comes with some obvious challenges:
Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts), who chairs the subcommittee, seems to have a surprisingly solid understanding of virtual worlds. He described virtual worlds as a “glimpse into future [and] a window into current reality for millions of people.” He noted that “at their best, virtual worlds are vehicles for understanding across boarders and in communities.” The concerns he listed were also on point: consumer protection, intellectual property protection, online banking, gambling, and child protection.
Most of those concerns are still concerning, and yet to be adequately addressed!
Philip's appearance was a friendly fact-finding one, but that was when metaverse platforms like Second Life only had hundreds of thousands of active users. Now they're used by nearly half a billion people, the plurality of whom are minors in the United States. (And in the US, minors enjoy a special legally protected status.) So the next time subpoenas start flying, CEOs should expect the questions they get from Congress to be much more pointed.
In the weeks since my interview in The Atlantic, officials/staffers with at least two major world power governments have reached out to me, asking for advice as to how they might regulate metaverse platforms. I won't name them specifically, beyond saying that they're from member nations of the EU/NATO, and that this is in addition tothe EU Commission looking into metaverse regulation announced recently.
In fact, I just had a very off-the-record chat with one of these government research groups yesterday, and was impressed by the level of knowledge they already had about metaverse platforms and their underlying technology, most especially VR headsets.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying: Government regulation is coming. So if you're a metaverse developer -- or for that matter, create and sell content on metaverse platforms -- you should anticipate that legislation directly targeting you will soon be up for serious consideration.
And unlike with social media platforms and the Internet giants of the last decade, which gained unsustainable reach and power long before governments could catch up, metaverse regulators have something of a head start.
This shouldn't be too much of a surprise, when (for example) 40% of United States Congress members are Gen X or Gen Y -- i.e., people who grew up with games and online virtual worlds, and are often personal users of them. (As just one notable example, AOC is not only a gamer but uses platforms like Twitch as part of her political outreach.)
What kind of regulation should we expect? If a metaverse developer asked me that, I'd be tempted to say, "C'mon, you should already know what they're concerned about."
That aside, here's at least some of the topics I'm pretty sure (or know for a fact) that government bodies are looking into now, framed in terms of five starting questions*:
"[My boyfriend] went to try one of those other metaverses and ever since, he hasn't been the same... down there."
Pretty well-played, Linden Lab! I guess you could say "other metaverses" include equally leg-less Rec Room, but Meta's Horizon Worlds is the clear target. Wonder if Philip Rosedale, who recently returned to helping develop Second Life as a alternative to Meta's "ad-driven behavior modification Metaverse", had a hand (leg?) in this April Fool's smartassery.
While the announcement is all about avatar legs, the Viagra-scented video of sexy babe avatars talking about their boo's problems "down there" make it pretty clear what we're actually talking about (wink wink):
The well-reputed tech analyst Forrester Research just published this extensive report on the Metaverse, "The State Of The Metaverse: Look Beyond The Hype To Uncover The Real Opportunities". As the title might suggest, I was one of the many SMEs they interviewed for it, and it's nice how much it aligns with my enthusiastic-but-allergic-to-hype perspective. You can see that in the chart above, suggesting that less than half of all Internet users (Digital Immersives and Digital Socialites) are prime early adopter targets for Metaverse platforms. Personally I'd estimate that Digital Immersives will always remain metaverse platforms' core user base. (Which is still quite a lot of people!)
As part of the report, Forrester conducted a consumer/business survey which brought out some surprising (occasionally vexing!) findings. For instance:
Marketing executives are way more excited about branded campaigns in metaverse campaigns than actual consumers.
Only a third of all US consumers who understand the concept are excited about the Metaverse and consider it a positive technology.
Nearly half of all consumers who understand the Metaverse concept associate it with Facebook/Meta (!!!).
In the lead-up to my interview in The Atlantic last week, this recent blog post by veteran Internet thinker Anil Dash helped crystallize my thoughts around community and the Metaverse. Because while it's not specifically about the Metaverse, Anil's insights very much apply to metaverse platforms, especially around fostering community and user content creation.
Here's how, he explains, not to do it:
Find the inevitable initial bad actors or harmful content on your platform, and make them the responsibility of the least resourced, most marginalized team in your organization. When that team’s leader suggests structural changes that might prevent future harms, push them out and replace them with someone who had previously only ever been focusing on growth at all costs.
Half-ass all attempts at moderation and building safety into your platform, choosing only to react belatedly and inconsistently when hate and exploitation happen in your community. As a result, only the bad actors will truly thrive as creators on your platform, since everyone else will get hounded off as soon as they gain any traction or audience.
His analysis isn't simply theoretical, or based on years of watching platforms fail at community and content management - they also reflect Anil's role as founder and CEO of Glitch, a popular and much-used platform for creating web apps:
Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse is a gratifying deep dive interview with me in the Atlantic, for Charlie Warzel's Galaxy Brain free newsletter. Charlie and I plumb into the virtual world/metaverse topics I've felt strongly about in recent years, and it's wonderful to get a chance to have the space to explore them in The Atlantic.
Here's some of my favorite highlights in a much larger article, along with some links to the New World Notes posts I'm referring to.
I’ve learned that, as humans, we take all of the big challenges of real life and the complex social structures of the physical world and they get re-created in weird ways in a digital, social space. Racism, for example, is an enduring issue and an interesting one in these worlds. There are very basic questions: If you can change your avatar to anything at all, what race would you choose?
What are some good examples of surprising things you’ve seen people do in Second Life?
[I]f you give a user community powerful enough creator tools, what they create in these worlds will be far more interesting than anything a major company can officially create...
Philip Rosedale, one of the creators of Second Life, has mentioned that there are are 1,600 Second Life users who earn $10,000 or more a year selling virtual content. I know a few people on the high end who are making millions. And it’s not just Second Life; this is all happening now in Roblox and Fortnite and other places, too.
I’m still taken aback at just how little [the staff at Meta] seem to have learned from past platform iterations.
[This new] metaverse hype wave is so similar to 2008. Everything’s being repeated now—the same news stories, the same assumptions, the same mistakes. During the 2008 hype, the tech was not ready for a mass market. Today, it has become a mass-market phenomenon with Roblox and Fortnite and other platforms. I think there are upwards of half a billion people who are now active users on a broadly defined metaverse platform.
Some more links after the break. First up -- my answer on the mistakes being repeated now:
