New World Notes

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2025年4月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します

Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

Ex-Meta Director Helps Confirm What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds: "No One Loved the Product"

Ex-Meta Director Helps Confirm What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds: "No One Loved the Product":

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. 

Read the rest on my Patreon.

Going to Augmented World Expo in Long Beach Next Month? Use This Discount Code & Meet Me There!

I'm once again signing books at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach next month (June 10-12), and am excited to say that's where I'm also introducing a new 2025 edition of the afterword. Hope to you see there!

If you are interested in coming, here's a special 10% off discount code: 

Enter SPKR25D during sign-up. Save money on entrance fees for more fish tacos.

And let me know in Comments if you're coming!

VRChat Working on In-Platform Creator Economy for Custom Avatars

A sharped-eyed Redditor recently noticed VRChat's tab for “Granted Avatars” had been changed to “Purchased Avatars”. Which, yes, means VRChat the company is actively working on an in-platform creator economy for avatars (I can confirm after talking with insiders). That the user interface has been changed suggests it's coming soon (i.e. this quarter or next), but I haven't been able to get a specific launch date.

In any case, this does mean talented VRChat avatar creators like "lackofbindings" (who created the avatar above) will soon-ish be able to sell their works on the platform, instead of doing so on Gumroad and other third party sites.

Speaking of VRChat, Wired has finally a huge feature on the virtual world's burgeoning rave dance club seen, something that's fascinated me for years. Excerpt:

Cajsa's Choices: Delightful SL Travel Photos from Stina McGillivary

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Stina McGillivary has a knack for spotting the unique and unusual on her Second Life journeys. I mean do all visitors to Buddha Garden notice this little mouse when the totality of the sim is so overwhelming? A lot of people who go sightseeing, here in SL or in RL, walk through the sites, making sure to look at everything. A few people, however, are less concerned with looking at everything and are interested in a more intense kind of seeing. She sees both the macro and the micro. She beholds the sim. 

This is a fantastic capture. It’s adorably cute, but it’s also really quite beautiful. I love how she gets the spokes of the umbrella to perfectly align with the tree behind it along the right side where the moon shines down. The way the tree and umbrella come together is sort of magical. I just love everything about this picture. p.s even looking for the mouse, I could not see or behold it. 

For more of Stina’s fabulous travel shots, click here:

Top 5 Posts Including: An Epic Win for Metaverse Platforms, Why Meta Wanted Horizon Worlds to Compete With VRChat, and Linden Lab's New Community-Driven Growth Strategy

• WATCH: Raph Koster's Stars Reach Already Attracting Early Builder Communities -- Even in Pre-Launch With Periodic Server Wipes!
• Epic's Court Victory Against Apple Likely to Be a Big Boon for All Metaverse Apps, Including Second Life; Oberwager Cautiously Optimistic
• Horizon Worlds Pivoted to Compete With VRChat Around 2019 (Unsuccessfully), Says Senior Meta Veteran
• Man Visits “Dead World” There, Finds There’s More There There in There
• Linden Lab’s Creator Partnership Program Part of Company's Daring New Pivot to Grow Second Life With SL's User Community -- Here’s How

Now That Tim Sweeney's Saved the Metaverse from Apple, Let's Watch Him Discuss Its Future for FOUR HOURS

Seeing that Sweeney saved the Metaverse from Apple this week, this ridiculously long interview he just did with Lex Fridman is worth a watch. Seeing as it's four hours and twenty five minutes, you'll probably want to watch in parts. I'll pull out highlights when I can.

Please share your own favorite points they discuss in comments! 

SL Creators: Last Chance to Take This Short Anonymous Survey on the State of the Second Life Economy!

Click here to take it. I know people on mobile were having trouble with the embedded version of this survey, so hopefully this direct link is easier. I'll close the survey after this coming weekend (probably).

WATCH: Raph Koster's Stars Reach Already Attracting Early Builder Communities -- Even in Pre-Launch With Periodic Server Wipes!

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:

Epic's Court Victory Against Apple Likely to Be a Big Boon for All Metaverse Apps, Including Second Life; Oberwager Cautiously Optimistic

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: