New World Notes

Carmack: Quest 2 Price Was Raised Because Free Metaverse Platforms VRChat & Rec Room Are More Popular Than Quest's Premium Games

Update, October 17: Carmack later acknowledged that Rec Room and VRChat do make money for Meta via 30% commissions on in-app payments. However, as most free-to-play multiplayer games/worlds monetize at under 10% (usually much less), it's still likely the case that the vast majority of Rec Room/VRChat players on Quest aren't paying Meta anything through those platforms.

I noted yesterday that the Quest 2 attach rate seems pretty small based on Meta's reported revenue numbers, but the rest of that story -- and the explanation for why the Quest 2's retail price was recently raised -- comes from senior Quest advisor John Carmack himself, in his Connect 2022 keynote.  

Basically, he says, Quest 2 owners are not buying enough premium content and instead, are using their headset for free-to-play metaverse platforms VRChat and Rec Room.

"When you have some of the most popular apps on Quest are free apps, VRChat and Rec Room, that we get no revenue from at all, and while they are sitting there at the top of our ranking list in many cases, there's there's not a lot of internal push for that," as he puts it. (Watch above at about 41 minutes in.)

This is a pretty jaw-dropping revelation. Meta developed the Quest 2 and the Quest app store to grow the market for its metaverse platform. But instead, Quest 2 owners are going in droves to VRChat and Rec Room -- leading metaverse platform competitors.  (Rec Room alone, as I recently reported, had 3 million active VR users, most of them on Quest.)

In fairness to Carmack, he adds that he's completely supportive of that happening. Full context of the quote below, and thanks to the eagle eyes of VR devs Derek Johnson and Kim Baumann Larsen for catching this point that I originally missed! 

Decentraland Update: 1800+ Users Spent the Ethereum Value of USD $25 Million on Virtual Land Plots

Ari Meilich of Decentraland,, open standards-based social VR world, recently posted an update to last week's successful selling of USD $25 million worth of virtual land via Ethereum (ETH). He addresses some of the controversy over how tokens were released (excerpts in comments of the original post here), which is a bit too inside baseball for me to have an immediate opinion.

What's more interesting to me is how many people bought virtual land, and how much -- which you can see in this chart from the blog post: Just over 1800 users. And if I'm reading the chart right, most users bought virtual land plots for the ETH equivalent of USD $24, but on the high end, 32 people bought virtual land worth USD $7200 or more.

Which, you know, is pretty impressive:

Iris Wants to Know: What Are Your Experiences with the DMCA Process in Second Life?

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

With the removal of the Wowmeh mesh body line from Second Life, there's been a lot of talk about whether or not the DMCA process is helpful in SL, or just a huge hindrance. In case you missed it, the Wowmeh body was a phenomenally successful mesh body that was the target of a DMCA takedown. Creator Baby Ghosn maintained that it was unjustified and malicious, but as she was unwilling to release her personal information to someone she claimed was purely a troll, she decided to revamp Wowmeh and replace any potentially dubious components. When she released the new body it was taken down again, allegedly for being a re-release of a taken down item. At that point Baby called it quits, saying that the process of supporting and defending Wowmeh was more than she'd expected and was willing to take on. 

While Hamlet has already explained his position that Second Life and the DMCA process are incompatible, I'm not so sure. That's why I want to hear from SL designers who've ever tangled with either end of a DMCA. Click here to fill out a super-short survey and share your experiences, and share it with fellow SL content creators! Next week, I'll report back with results and the most interesting feedback received.

Law & Ogres: Don't Miss These Two Must-Visit Second Life Events Opening Today!

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

If you're looking to get out an about this coming weekend, there're no shortage of events to attend. But with the start of a new month comes the start of two new fairs, both of which opened their doors today (and both of which I'm eager to scope out for myself). 

The first of these two events should ring a bell, since it's become one of the most hotly anticipated annual shopping fairs in SL...

Should OpenSim Use Bitcoin As Its Virtual Currency? (And Why Not Sell Linden Dollars for Bitcoins Too?)

Bitcoin is an open source, peer-to-peer virtual currency which is generating a lot of discussion among the digerati lately, who variously describe it as either the most revolutionary innovation since the Internet itself, or an impractical exercise in libertarian onanism. (Or something in between.) One major hurdle: There's very few goods and services to buy with Bitcoin. Meanwhile, OpenSimulator is an open source, peer-to-peer virtual world technology which is lately showing some relatively impressive activity, but has a huge hurdle of its own: There's no universal currency with which to buy virtual content across the many OpenSim-based worlds.

Are you sensing a match made in metaverse heaven? Linden Lab alumni Karl Stiefvater sure does:

it is the PERFECT solution for creating an economy on the opensim grids. the viewer acts as your wallet, and exchanges bitcoins with the seller’s wallet. done. so how do you make that million dollars? well, you go and implement the bitcoin wallet in a third party viewer and the proper hooks for opensim.

Read the rest here. Offhand, it strikes me as a good idea, and maybe it can be extended even further:

What The Lawyers Learned When They Met In Second Life

Earlier this month, the American Bar Association held a conference on intellectual property law in Washington D.C., and virtual worlds played a significant part of the schedule. That included a simultaneous conference and reception in Second Life itself, broadcast at the ABA event, where lawyers could participate as avatars, (It was put together by the Second Life Bar Association and the Virtual Intellectual Property Organization.) I asked one of the co-hosts, Matthew Asbell (known in SL as Matheus Saramago) of Ladas & Parry, LLP, to tell me the key takeaways from the subsequent conversation, and he generously gave me seven. They're definitely worth thinking about, especially in light of the recent DMCA notice filed against SL fans of Frank Herbert's Dune franchise. Which of these points do you suppose will be the most crucial in the near future?

• Most content creators, performers, and other users don't understand the risks that they are violating other's IP rights in SL, and may even perceive the growing presence of IP attorneys as an attempt to shut down the virtual world.
• Most users wrongly believe they are anonymous and that their communications in world are private.
• Most content owners have yet to see/experience Second Life or other virtual worlds, have no idea of the extent of violations of their rights in the virtual world, and risk losing at least some of their rights by not enforcing them in the virtual world.
• Most attorneys have never seen/experienced Second Life.
• Virtual worlds are not separate jurisdictions with their own laws (at least not yet.)
• In view of the absence of confidentiality resulting from the SL Terms of Service, attorneys should not attempt to communicate legal advice to clients or to discuss matters with potential clients in-world.
• There are numerous potential copyright, trademark, privacy and other legal issues inherent in planning a mixed-reality event.

Images courtesy Matheus Saramago.

Two Lawyers Puzzle Over Second Life®'s Trademark Policies

Under Second Life's new branding and trademark rules, do I now need to put an ® symbol on this blog's top banner?  I don't know, Gwyneth Llewellyn doesn't know, and curiously, two intellectual property lawyers who are active commentators and Residents of Second Life don't quite agree on that question's answer, either.  This comes out in a fascinating Comment thread in my post on the subject, with Benjamin Noble, author of an upcoming book on virtual law published by the American Bar Association, and Kit Meredith, in real life an IP rights lawyer with a perspective of her own.  (Click their respective images, to read their Comments, or extended posts on their own blogs, Benjamin's here, Kit's here.)  The conversation revolves around "nominative fair use" and what rights the Linden's Terms of Service agreement entail.  In other words, manna for men and women in the burgeoning field of metaverse jurisprudence-- and vertigo for me.

Meanwhile, the Lindens' PR representative tells me a clarification statement is coming today or Monday.

Update, 3/31: Actually, no announcement has come.  "Due to a high volume of inquiries on the topic,"  Lewis PR's Peter Gray tells me instead, "Linden Lab plans to address these questions in another blog post which should be up soon."