Why did the metaverse die? Because Silicon Valley doesn’t understand the concept of fun
Why did the metaverse die? Because Silicon Valley doesn’t understand the concept of fun
114 comments
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The metaverse died because it didn't mean anything, there was no clear thing you could point to and say "this is the metaverse". It was a collection of buzzwords designed to sell a dream to investors and nothing more.
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As a developer who loves to tinker with web stuff, I feel most of the tech scene and Silicon Valley are full of people who went into development just for the money. I almost see it every day.
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Yes, it wasn't always the case. I was in the Silicon Valley in the 2000's and it was full of techies who really believed in the open web, and even Google was a proponent of open standards.
A few years later it seems like the tech matured enough that being technically savvy was no longer necessary to be a successful founder. Slowly it stopped being about technical innovations and became about raising money, product marketing, A/B testing, etc.
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This is the cycle of co-option that takes place with any career that becomes profitable.
A lot of people don't realize that computers and programming in general were seen as "women's work" or "nerd shit" until especially the dotcom boom, and career women and nerds (of all genders) were displaced in favor of MBA-bros who the VCs and CEOs didn't disdain (not by being forced out, but by not being given the jobs and funding; the "paper ceiling" is often used for this).
Machine learning and crypto were also relegated to being "nerd shit" in their nascent years, and now look who populates those particular spaces: non-technical MBA-bros and snake oil salesmen trying to cash in on the hype (and building on the uncompensated work of others... in machine learning's case, quite literally so).
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I feel the same way. They’re in it to become a unicorn and get a big exit. They don’t care about making good software, just profitable software. The vibe in Silicon Valley stopped being hackers and became bankers.
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Silicon Valley has become a vehicle to secure VC funding. They've forgotten that is just step 2.
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"Metaverse" was the idea that you would use only Meta services instead of the wider Internet. Much like AOL and Yahoo tried back in the 90s and 00s.
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It's not strictly true that it didn't mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.
Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.
Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.
Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros' vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta's implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.
In reality, Meta couldn't offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn't have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.
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Sums it up nicely 👍
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Monorail Monorail Monorail 👋👋
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I call the dumb one Zucky
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This was the best illustration of that. Years and years of effort for some cash-grab that never happened.
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It never died, because it already existed for fucking years: Active Worlds from 1995 is where I started, Second Life later, now the dominant "metaverse" is VR Chat.
The corporate simpletons just never did their homework to see what the market is like for this.
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The word is meaningless, nothing like the metaverse as described in snowcrash ever existed. If you’re talking about a multiplayer game that tries to mimic the real word then you’re right. But that’s not what the metaverse actually is…or what the word stood for, before being ripped to shreds as a buzzword.
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Even further back there was Lucasfilm's Habitat all the way back in 1986. It's kind of shocking how little the idea of the "Metaverse" has evolved since back then. It's still just some virtual space with avatars, different hats and chatting.
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Wow how fascinating! Thanks for sharing that video.
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Is SL still around? I left my partially nude Darth Vader wearing a banana thong in someone’s art gallery and haven’t been back
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Exactly, they should have included fursonas IMMEDIATELY if they wanted it to work.
Even basic market research should have told them this.
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I remember Blaxxun's Colony City i think even earlier than that. VRML is the future of the past!
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Oh my god I remember this too. It looks like there's a revival project. https://www.cybertownrevival.com/
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Isn't fun just defined as "a period of user base growth followed by extracting every last dollar possible in an exponential growth pattern forever and ever because that's totally possible mhm it totally is!" to them?
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Indeed. "Funnel. Us. Notoriety."
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It died for the exact same reason every single aspect of life is getting shittier and shittier. Shareholders. When a company is publicly traded, it has NO CHOICE but to get worse and worse and worse, because shareholders will accept NOTHING beyond continuous growth. If you lose value in the market, they will run for the hills, if you plateau they will run, if you suddenly start making even slightly smaller gains, they will run. They are the sole reason for every decision, and because of that, every single decision will be a detriment to both employees and consumers. Underneath all the bullshit, this is why everything will go to shit eventually unless it is both privately held and by people with good intentions, which is rare to find tied together.
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I would argue Zuckerburg had a lot of control over this project, lost a lot of money, and shareholders, due to the structure of Meta as a company, could do fuck all about it.
... But in almost literally every other company on earth, yea this is the case. And meta made these decisions in a world defined by the relationship you just described.
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The question implies that it was alive at some point. Was it though? All I know about Metaverse is that a lot of "tech" journalists were writing about it, but I don't know anyone who used it. And I owned a Meta Quest 2 for 6 months.
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There is no metaverse. There’s VR games and multiplayer games, and metaverse became a word for anything that remotely touched any of these or that’s even remotely vaguely related. 3D assets → metaverse. Online game → metaverse. Video call → metaverse.
If you’re talking about Horizon Worlds, that’s a multiplayer game/social experience. Nothing about this is a "metaverse" as it is described in the book where that word came from.
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This is the wildest take I've heard. People don't trust meta because it's Facebook, because it's Zuckerberg. We've all seen what they do with companies they acquire (I used to be an Oculus rift owner).We've all seen how poorly they handle data, seems like there is a data breach every year.
Hell, when I was an Oculus rift owner I worked inside of Virtual Desktop some days. I'd argue that Meta killed my desire to work in VR.
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I think the article is accurate, and they make a good argument for the fact that Silicon Valley is anti-fun. Even without all the data tracking they still think people want to make money playing games, which is ridiculously out of touch
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They also seem to think that continually spending money to do mundane things in a virtual world is not a problem for regular people who actually have to watch their spending.
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In general, it's a tiny nerdy minority that doesn't trust meta or even cares at all about internet privacy. Unfortunately that's the only tiny minority who could have any interest in the meta verse.
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And those are the same people who are running dev-ops, infrastructure management, and acting as CTOs of companies. If you rely on enthusiasts, you don't wanna piss off the enthusiast community.
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It had nothing to do with trust or concern over privacy, that is still a vastly minority opinion otherwise these services would die overnight. Metaverse failed because it never even was a thing or a concrete idea that could be explained.
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Yeah, I agree, I want to get into VR eventually but I refuse to use any Oculus/ Facebook product, when the next valve headset comes out though I'm all over it
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The main problem is that they only focused on how much money they could make, and forgot to make it somewhere people actually wanted to be. Basically the developer equivalent of "here's the deal, you do something for me-" then they never finish the sentence.
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They did the reverse enshitification, do it shit first and then.... wait what then?
That said...it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.
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That said...it is VR although is getting bigger still plenty of people without headsets or people with issues with them.
That was one problem yes. There isn't really any need for the metaverse to VR only, at least not initially. Even Facebook actually came up with a sort of workaround for this problem where you could use your phone and navigate an avatar around with on-screen controls. It would have probably worked better on a desktop computer which is something they never bothered to implement but it wouldn't be that hard to make.
If it was actually fun and useful and people used it on a regular basis other people would be incentivised to go out and spend big bucks on a VR headset. Trying to get people to buy the VR headset first was never going to work, only enthusiasts were going to get one that way around, and they weren't actually interested in metaverse all that much, they were going after traditional gaming experiences, watching 3D movies, and porn obviously.
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Exactly this. When you read about the metaverse in something like Snow Crash, it's a place built by enthusiasts, very cheap to use, and people have the choice of DIY, or paying someone to do things for them.
In the facebook's version, everything but connecting costs money, and it's all done by facebook.
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I can't ever forget the first trailer where they pulled street art out of a street into virtual space, and then they had to tip so it wouldn't disappear. It was insanely transparent how any attempt at imaginative play was superficial, that the creators were completely out of touch with what people wanted, and squeezing money out of people was the ultimate goal.
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It never even existed and was this ambiguous buzzword that got way too much traction.
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This is the only true answer here.
Even Meta themselves said they want to "build the metaverse", at that point the word still had a somewhat clear definition. It then became a bullshit buzzword and lost all meaning. Now even Meta is using the word as a synonym for "VR" or "Multiplayer", which has nothing to do with the snow crash definition of the word.
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There's way, way too many buzzword chasers out there. How hard can it possibly be to assess something by it's own merits instead of looking for keywords that other Successful Cool Guys™ are promoting? Instead, we get people copying each other's hype to the point they build entire markets in intrinsically worthless things on occasion.
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i would add cost as a barrier to entry. as cheap as the hardware it, it needed a more heavily subsidized distribution.
apple only exists because they practically gave away equipment en masse to school districts as the market became flooded with 'ibm compatibles'
they built an entire generation of apple-loving folks by dumping huge amounts of money/resources into those programs.-
They almost died after that. Jobs putting colored plastic on the outside of Macs saved them.
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Well, and them replacing the rotting husk of MacOS 9 with a bastardized version of NeXTSTEP. That kinda helped, too.
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Quest2 is $300. That is a pretty reasonably entry price for a Metaverse. Problem there was more that Meta never actually implemented a Metaverse. Putting that thing on your head doesn't launch you into the Metaverse, but just into the home screen where you select apps to launch from a 2D menu. Their whole software stack does a terrible job of making use of the fact that you have a 3D display on your head. They didn't even have basic things like VR180-3D trailers for their games. There were no virtual shops to buy stuff. No cinemas to watch stuff. Just apps you can launch. Horizon World, which was supposed to be their Metaverse, was still just another app to launch and not meaningfully integrated with anything else. PlaystationHome was more of a Metaverse than anything Meta ever build, though even that fell rather short.
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The Metaverse died because everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg isn’t trustworthy and really had no plan.
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If there was any potential in a "metaverse", it would be picked up by people who know how to make something fun. In Silicon Valley or somewhere else.
That's not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
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If computer interaction benefited from being more 'like reality', then Microsoft Bob or any of the countless other attempts to create a reality- and/or 3D-based computer interface, would have caught on long ago.
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The thing is, computer interaction can benefit quite a bit from a 3D space. I really liked what Microsoft did with WMR Portal and how it let you organize your apps simply by placing them in a 3D space, meaning you could have a cinema space with all your video related apps, a stack with games that you were playing, a stack with games you finished, etc. You could have frequently used webpages pasted to the walls. You could just grab the things, resize them and put them somewhere else. It was far more intuitive than any 2D interface I ever used and extremely customizable to your needs.
The problem was that it was also incomplete and unfinished in a lot of other ways and Microsoft just gave up on it. Outside of WMR Portal there has been surprisingly little effort into building good VR user interfaces and even less when comes to actively taking advantage of the 3D space (e.g. plenty apps still use drop shadows to simulate 3D instead of making the buttons actually 3D).
Will be interesting to see how well VisionPro does in this space. They seem to be a lot better with the basic UI elements than everybody else (e.g. dynamically lighting them to fit the AR environment and using real 3D), but at the same time, their focus on a static sitting experience without locomotion drastically limits how much advantage you can take from the 3D. Their main menu so far looks more like a table-UI stuck to your face than an 3D UI.
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That’s not happening because the metaverse is pointless. Most people prefer having multiple tabs in a browser to do online shopping, chatting with friends, etc rather than moving a 3D avatar from a virtual supermarket to a virtual cafe.
Realistically, the only thing you'd actually want to do in the Metaverse is something you can't do in real life, utilising the features of a virtual reality computer generated environment to do things that are physically impossible. If only there was some way you could use a computer, with or without a VR headset, to fly a spaceship, use magic, and explore beautiful environments. There could even be these computer generated characters that could give you ideas about things you could do and places you could go, by giving you a reason to go there and do those things, and all of this could tie into a narrative element that turns it into a kind of interactive story, so you've got a reason to keep engaging with the computer-generated environment and characters. And maybe you'd get some of that cool computer-generated swag while you're there, which you could dress your avatar in...
Hmmm... there could be money in that idea. Someone should try making something like that.
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There's no use case for the metaverse that gives it any more value than a video conference. But I can set up a video conference for free, while the metaverse is set up to constantly extract money from the user. On top of that, the barrier to entry is too high in both cost and practicality. I can buy a high quality webcam for a fraction of the price of a VR headset, and I don't have to strap it to my face just to have a meeting.
In order to justify the cost of being in the metaverse, there has to be a value return that makes it worthwhile - something that can't be replicated with other simpler and cheaper options. Right now, the metaverse is a platform run by grifters ripping off other wannabe grifters and the gullible.
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There doesn't need to be a value return - if it's fun. Unfortunately, it seems designed specifically to be brand safe for future advertising instead of appealing to real people.
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There doesn’t need to be a value return - if it’s fun.
This is fine, for a video game. But the metaverse isn't being marketed as a video game, it's being marketed as a social and utility platform.
Also if it is just a video game then there's nothing more compelling about it than any other video game... and also it's a crappy video game built around microtransactions. It's not fun, it's a dead mall.
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The metaverse could be successful but it needs to be a protocol not a proprietary product by one company, least of all Facebook.
Right now anyone can make a website if they know how to program one. It can be hosted on any number of services or you can host it yourself if you have the hardware. Your website can look like anything, have any functionality you want, be as complex as you want, be as large as you want. You can use website builders or you can go entirely custom. There is a huge range of options.
What now needs to happen is that same thing for the metaverse. It needs to be a standard programming language or set of programming languages that people can learn, that will enable them to build experiences. Those experiences should be hostable on any old server and a routeing protocol needs to be developed so that people can access them without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Second Life does a very good job of modifying the web URL concept to work for virtual worlds, just copy that. There also needs to be a standardised API for returning feedback responses and querying available interfaces (vibration motors, speakers, lights, force resistance motors etc) that all headsets and interaction devices use.
Perhaps some kind of federation service that enables different servers to interact with each other for transferring items from one environment to another and making sure that they make sense in all environments.
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Another underlying aspect is the dimensionality:
- Paper is 2D
- IRL items are 3D
- webpages are... you'd be tempted to say "2D", but look at the links, in how many directions one can move across webpages... they're n-D!
Going from nD to 3D, is a step back, and even when people don't realize it consciously, they'll keep falling back to the superior webpage solution.
Until someone puts the nD mobility into 3D worlds, there is no chance for them to take over.
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Third Room by matrix.org does all of this.
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Like VRML from the 90s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML?wprov=sfla1
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The metaverse was stillborn.
It was the hype for like 4 weeks and was dead before it even existed
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It's crazy how Zuckerberg hyped it up to the extreme, even renamed his company for it and than never actually build anything remotely worth of that name. What is going on in Horizon Worlds still looks less interesting than what they demoed with Facebook Social all the way back in 2016 on Oculus Rift.
Just give me a virtual space where I can watch movies, play games and go shopping with friends. It shouldn't be that hard to build something that at least feels a bit deeper than just yet another chat app. Or take the silly stuff CodeMiko is doing, that is what I expect to be happening in the Metaverse, yet it happens in 2D on Twitch. Even Meta's own conferences are still real world events with video screens, not events in the Metaverse.
I don't mind the idea of the Metaverse, but the implementation is lightyears behind of where it should be.
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I feel like part of the impetus for the name change, and perhaps the extreme hype to some extent, came from trying to distance themselves from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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I'm pretty sure it is hard
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Other businesses got hyped and signed up in droves, but they forgot they need a user base.
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The crazy part is that it is not even clear what they signed up for. Everybody started talking "Metaverse" as if it was an actual thing. But it never was. There never was an app, a standard or much of anything.
Second Life ain't exactly perfect either, but at least that's an actual thing that exists and in which you can open up your virtual advertisement booth.
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I think this article makes reasonable sense. Also that quote from Spez is so disheartening. Glad I'm not on reddit anymore
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God, they even want to make leisure time into a side hustle. Is it so much to ask that they let me not think about my participation in capital for like, two hours?
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I've just invented a pillow that bombards your dreams with ads.
For the user it is free, and it is literally the most comfortable pillow you will ever lay your head on
It has a White noise generator, and a built-in fan so that it's constantly the cool side of the pillow. It is exceedingly soft and yet surprisingly supportive but you will see ads every single moment of REM sleep for the rest of your life and once you've gotten used to using it if you stop using it you will never be able to fall asleep again.
Currently Microsoft meta Amazon and Netflix are all in a bidding war to purchase this technology from me.
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Small correction - Steve Huffman is u/spez, he's the current CEO. Alexis Ohanian was one of the co-founders and was on the board of directors for a while but I don't think he's involved with Reddit any more except probably as an investor.
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VR Chat is still here and doing well. Its good for niche stuff. When the tech is ready maybe it can reach the mass, but the current tech is not ready yet.
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Was the metaverse ever alive? All I ever saw were posts about what the metaverse could be, but I never even knew it was an actual thing that existed.
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Meta's very own Horizon Worlds still hasn't even launched globally, it is still restricted to a small handful of countries. On top of that it isn't even a Metaverse in any meaningful sense, it's just yet another VR chat application.
What separates a "real" Metaverse from a normal chat app is that it connects all the other applications into one unified virtual space, but Horizon Worlds ain't doing that and nobody else is either.
Sony's Playstation Home back from the PS3 days or Second Life are still closer to a Metaverse than any of the modern attempts.
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I'd argue that the MiiVerse for the Wii U was up there too.
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I misread the headline as "Stardew Valley" and it was a real headscratcher
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Those damn farmers, always working the fields instead of generating entertaining VR universes!
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Engineers make Star Trek tech because people want to live in Star Trek. No one (besides Zuck) wants to live in Ready Player One.
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Fortnite shows that there are people interested in living in a game enviroment where they are surrounded by recognizable brands. But Meta's infomercial vibe with bland, low budget, dead-eyed characters, which are so sanitized they didn't even have lower bodies, is not anything close to anything that anyone wants.
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The weird thing is they actually do have the tech for photorealistic avatars. But they didn't implement because if they did then inevitably people would use it for "virtual encounters" which Facebook don't want to deal with understandably. But at the same time if that's what people want to do with it and you're not letting them that's a problem.
This tech won't work if it's run by one boring ass company.
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- dense housing
- VRchat is mainstream
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I don't think it was ever born to have died. I think they grossly overestimated how much this tech would improve
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It died because meta (which everyone still sees as facebook) is a toxic brand, even to the average consumer now.
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Really, no. That's not it at all.
It's because it's been almost exclusively pushed by hucksters. Just like blockchain, whose driving inspiration in the marketplace has been crypto and NFTs.
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It's very difficult to just burst into the mainstream without carving out a niche first, and Meta's Metaverse failed because they couldn't carve out that niche.
Though even if they had tried, the very tech nerds who would be their early adopters already don't trust them because of their shady deals (did anybody say Cambridge Analytica scandel?), so they weren't ever going to fork out money for this.
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Not just their business practices, but also just the oculus purchase.
I already had an oculus. I was told (via press release) that I wouldn't have any issues with not having a Facebook account...only for them to turn around a little while later and require a Facebook login.
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People don't go to virtual spaces because they want to compulsively buy things, they want entertainment and social interaction. The more "buy this! buy that!" you shoehorn into a platform that is hardly ready for even normal gaming experiences is not going to take off imo.
Roblox is terrible but they worked out the model a little bit more intelligently. Make an engine where it's free to join, host experiences and create new ones relatively easily. They have a shop where virtual items can be bought and sold and Roblox takes a major cut of virtual currency to real currency and store transactions, but outside of that their involvement within the games themselves is less pronounced.
Even if I don't play Roblox myself, it's popular with kids and this platform I think is more capable of becoming a VR universe than Horizon worlds or other buzzed "Metaverse" implementations.
Even Garry's mod servers have more interesting interactions than Meta's pet project. And I don't trust Meta enough to touch a platform they develop.
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After I watched a guy having to pay real dollars for clapping(!) in a vr open mic night thing I had no further questions about "the metaverse".
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The Metaverse died because they tried to monetize it before it's even a thing. Buy a virtual plot of land? With crypto and NFTs? Hell no!
VR Chat exists and it, and it's free.
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It's gonna come back in some shape. Imagine being able to make users live inside your little world, and you can manipulate their emotions and track them around the clock. Wet dream.
Facebook and Google are doing this already but at least without the virtual world graphics.
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Dear tech developers, if you are listening please put VR projects on the back burner. They are an interesting future technology but the currently possible technology that people would adopt if it were economical to do so is AR. A simple heads up display with an integrated personal assistant has enormous potential in both personal and business uses right now if it was reasonably priced and reliable. You could replace cell phones.
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AR has a huge battery life and size problem. The amount of video processing that thing would need to do to be useful, would result in an enormous device with an hour or two of battery life. Rendering it useless for any real world consumer application.
On top of that it has a gigantic privacy and surveillance problem.
And if that wouldn't be enough, what the heck are you going to do with it? Everything an AR headset could do, you can do today with your phone already. There is very little need to wear that functionality on your head all the time.
For some rare business use cases it can make sense, that's why Microsoft Hololens is still around, but even they struggle to finding any areas where it makes it past the "nice idea" stage and actually into a working product.
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VR is just a marketing hype to collect VC money, that's it.
Just like crypto, AI, Cloud, Big Data, share economy, Internet of things, etc. They all get hyped like hell, burn billions of VC money, and after a few years actually useful products might appear, but are several orders of magnitude more mundane.
It's so predictable, that even Gartner found out about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
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A simple heads up display with an integrated personal assistant has enormous potential in both personal and business uses right now if it was reasonably priced and reliable. You could replace cell phones.
I'm honestly wondering if the new Apple thing will take off like this. It's overpriced, but this is the company that sells $700 wheels to people successfully, and the concept looks great.
You know all those programmer memes about screen arrangement? You could have them all and more with a single headset.
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What in seven hells in this article on about saying King came out of Silicon Valley?! King couldn’t have been further from Silicon Valley.
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Don't dismiss an entire group on the actions of a single person.
114 comments