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Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

johncoogan.com

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Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#71

Post by adriand »

henning wrote: post #29

> There will be no cap on concurrent users. This is one of the hardest problems to solve from a technical point of view, but it’s critical. The biggest online games still restrict each session to around 100 players. Even though millions might be playing at a given time worldwide, a single server will be capped. Massive concurrency will make metaverse experiences feel very different from the present-day internet. Oh c…

I played Planetside quite a bit when it came out in 2003. It supported FPS battles with hundreds of people participating. If this kind of scale was the most important thing for shooters then the subsequent trend would have been to increase that scale, but that's not what happened.

My assumption is that games optimize for fun, and scale isn't necessarily fun. Soccer (football) permits 11 players per side on the field at any one time. Why not make it 25? Why not make it 100?! Wouldn't that be more fun? Presumably not.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#72

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

To answer the question posed by the title: Because the company vests all its decision-making power in one person, he has no oversight except from wacky SV VC, he is not someone with much business experience let alone life experience. Thus he can make crazy, immature decisions and no one can interfere. He is surrounded by yes-men and yes-women and other yes-people.

Someone submitted a keynote from John Carmack earlier today. He had a term for the type of developers who will likely work on building "The Metaverse". Astronaut architects or some such. He thinks they are lost in abstractions and fail to understand how things actually work. Don't take my word for it, go watch the video.

Also seems like Carmack is not too keen on the idea of strategically planned obsolescence. A programmer with both common sense and a conscience. Surprising he got mixed up with Facebook.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#73

Post by michaelt »

zabzonk wrote: post #6

Isn't this simply Second Life writ somewhat larger?

The fact a broad idea has been tried before without success doesn't mean it can't be successful.

There were smartphones before the iPhone - like the Nokia Communicator, Compaq iPaq and Palm Treo. They were a niche product - not the market-defining success the iPhone was.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#74

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #10

Gross. If anything, the more I have become ensconced in the internet the more I have begun to appreciate the physical world. My mental health must be wired to require actual trees, sunshine, birds, walks in the neighborhood.... Like a library, I want my internet to be there when I want it, but I don't want to live in it.

It's somewhat of a dystopian Ready Player One scenario but maybe eventually inevitable. The metaverse is a pretty direct extrapolation of economic growth in the sense of always doing more with less. Extrapolating the "with less" part leads to people's lives becoming virtual at some point, at least for those who can't afford much of the real world anymore because its good parts are overcrowded.

Unless we leave this planet and find an equally good one, the amount of quality real world out there seems limited. As the amount of "wealthy" people on earth continues to increase, the amount of real world wealth we share might not keep up. Especially if you think nature is part of that wealth, and especially if you take into account erosion due to things like climate change. A virtual world may become the only place for growth to continue.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#76

Post by [deleted] »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #47
krm01 wrote: post #9

As I was watching their 'keynote' I couldn't help but wonder about the many companies that took a similar approach and then died. Spending a ton of money on something doesn't make it automatically successful. [1] In fact, history has shown the opposite to be true. Take Facebook itself for example, it succeeded, not because it poured Billions into building its social network. Mark built something small, for a small ma…

> Google, Apple, Airbnb, Stripe, none became the giants they are because they spent billions on a grand vision. Google set out to catalog the entire internet on day one. If that's not a grand vision that they spent billions on, what is? AirBNB set out to disrupt the entire vacation rental market. Stripe set out to disrupt the entire POS payment market. Apple is the only one who fits your narrative: they set out to ma…

[deleted]

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#77

Post by mkl95 »

The only aspect of the Metaverse I'm interested in is how it will affect the landscape of massively concurrent, real-time applications, which hasn't advanced too much in the last decade or so.

Amazon's New World MMORPG is on the verge of crumbling a few weeks after launch, mostly because the game's networking sucks. Facebook's Metaverse is an all round shady concept, but it's pretty possible that it will result in some useful new technologies.

Re: Why Facebook is spending billions on the metaverse

#80

Post by dilyevsky »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #54
krm01 wrote: post #9

As I was watching their 'keynote' I couldn't help but wonder about the many companies that took a similar approach and then died. Spending a ton of money on something doesn't make it automatically successful. [1] In fact, history has shown the opposite to be true. Take Facebook itself for example, it succeeded, not because it poured Billions into building its social network. Mark built something small, for a small ma…

There's a ton of money and there's a ton of money. Facebook has a ton of money to spend. Whether they succeed or fail is anybody's guess but this kind of investment can't help but move the needle on AR/VR tech.

Not necessarily so if it’s all closed sourced proprietary tech. For example I don’t think Newton had accelerated pda tech probably the opposite
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