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The metaverse was never alive in the first place

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Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#131

Post by Y_Y »

tiedieconderoga wrote: post #31
Animats wrote: post #23

For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong. I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are tes…

>Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse. IMHO, this is a crucial and often overlooked point. In order to gain popularity, a metaverse platform needs the sort of offbeat creator trendsetters who tend to push boundaries. Without them, the platform feels sterile and business-y. With the sort of content they…

Have you seen how much it costs to get an endorsement from Giant Talking Penis? Having that level of social clout means most firms can only afford to advertise in meatspace, because of the huge good will and consumer loyalty she commands.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#132

Post by zmmmmm »

Kapura wrote: post #6

In my mind, the ambiguity of what "the metaverse" actually means allowed a bunch of people to sell it as panacea in different realms. When the smoke cleared and you were left with MMOs, video chat, and vr setups people don't buy or use, a lot of those castles start to fall over. However, stuff like Fortnite or Roblox, which seemingly fulfill many of the Metaverse promises, continue to be reasonably successful. But th…

> the ambiguity of what "the metaverse" actually means

If you root cause on that you come back to, Zuckerberg made a big splash with his announcement and then followed up with .... nothing. As much as anything, these other things were filling a vacuum. Of course it got filled up with toxic garbage.

The inexplicable thing to me is purely that Meta has failed to deliver anything closely resembling an experience that represents their own advertised ambitions. Case in point, Horizon Worlds still even now hasn't even launched in my country (near to one of the top 10 economies in the world). How is it even possible that something the company put at existential level of importance hasn't even launched? It's either a massive fail of execution or they never really actually had their heart in it.

I do wonder if Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency", flattening of the org structure and refocusing on engineering leadership is in part borne from the reality check of basically failing to deliver on all this at a technical level.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#133

Post by zmmmmm »

sacnoradhq wrote: post #41

VR was tried over and over in every decade since the 80's. If there was a there there, the category would already be occupied and its products would be ubiquitous. As it stands, most people don't see value in it as anything beyond a Google Glass or a game console attachment.

I don't see how you can divorce from technilogical factors. There was a "there" there for smart phones and yet we didn't get them until a host of technical factors made them reach a certain form factor that was acceptable.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#134

Post by tjpnz »

otikik wrote: post #121
chaostheory wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. This is what the VR purists are missing: normal people are not going to spend about $2000 or more for a desktop gaming PC, and another $1000 for the VR headset and base stations. The setup even for techies isn’t easy and straightforward either. Wires are also no fun for VR Regardless of how you feel about meta, it’s really impressive that they were able to ship a decent 6DOF, standalone, VR headset at $299 w…

> VR headset at $299 Wasn't Facebook losing money on each headset sold, though?

The same is done for consoles with the expectation being they'll recoup their losses through software sales. The problem is that you need to offer a compelling experience first, which Meta has failed to deliver on.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#135

Post by nikita2206 »

nstart wrote: post #69

One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves. If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach hous…

How can you dogfood a product if the product itself isn’t ready for production use yet but its idea changes the fundamentals of how you work and hence develop.

It would be similar to criticizing the first ever bridge builders that they don’t use their own yet under-construction bridge for constructing that bridge, and instead transport their construction materials on water.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#136

Post by prawn »

nickdothutton wrote: post #5

I’m old enough to think of the metaverse as like the one in Wild Palms[1], and so I don’t think we’ve seen it yet. I also really dont see Facebook/Meta being the company to crack it, I think it’s much more likely to be some kind of games company. Not a firm that sells ads. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Palms

I wonder if Epic/Fortnite have much exploration going in this area or if they're too limited by a fear of harming their cashcow? They have fantastic visuals/engine, a huge young audience, creative environments and established commercial relationships.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#137

Post by bandrami »

poglet wrote: post #54
bandrami wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for me the graphics and speed aren't the problem; the problem is that there is nothing for me to do in metaspace except maybe fly around and see other bored people flying around.

GTA V appears to be a very popular multiplayer game, so if a metaverse could have GTA V graphics and multiplayer performance then surely some GTA like activities could be implemented.

I mean, I don't play GTA, so there's that? And if I did play GTA I would... I don't know... play GTA, rather than playing a less interesting version of GTA.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#138

Post by bastawhiz »

nikita2206 wrote: post #135
nstart wrote: post #69

One thing I can never get over is the fact that despite all their claims of going all in, Meta never seemed to actually be invested in the Metaverse themselves. If they really believed in it, the first priority of the company would have been to make it so that every non hardware unit of their physical offices was shut down and people were told to go work from the metaverse within the spaces of their homes, beach hous…

How can you dogfood a product if the product itself isn’t ready for production use yet but its idea changes the fundamentals of how you work and hence develop. It would be similar to criticizing the first ever bridge builders that they don’t use their own yet under-construction bridge for constructing that bridge, and instead transport their construction materials on water.

Bridge builders shouldn't be getting the public to use their under-construction bridges

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#139

Post by TeMPOraL »

Nemrod67 wrote: post #114
jheriko wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some game developers do want to do this. i've gone out of my way in the past, even as a junior, to make efforts in offices to encourage developers to play their own game, and preferably with audio on and for more than 2 seconds at a time... and on the target platform instead of your turbocharged dev pc. this can be as simple as a high score competition (imagine making a game with scoring mechanisms and no leaderboard…

I worked in a medium-sized Racing Games studio, and we were only 5 players out of 100. When I asked for testing time and space with the team, management shut me down. It's like selling a good product is secondary XD

It's the gamedev version of Agile. Release early, patch often.

Re: The metaverse was never alive in the first place

#140

Post by danaris »

tiedieconderoga wrote: post #31
Animats wrote: post #23

For the tens of billions of dollars spent on metaverses, what's come out has been pathetic. Decentraland, Voxels, and Horizon look like video games from 1990. There are people running around saying this can't be done. They're wrong. I've written a metaverse client that yields GTA V graphics quality and frame rate for a big virtual world. Talks to Open Simulator and Second Life servers. A small number of users are tes…

>Fourth, there's really no role for "brands" in the metaverse. Despite all the hype, no real world brand has had any significant success in the metaverse. IMHO, this is a crucial and often overlooked point. In order to gain popularity, a metaverse platform needs the sort of offbeat creator trendsetters who tend to push boundaries. Without them, the platform feels sterile and business-y. With the sort of content they…

> With the sort of content they will produce, however, family-friendly advertisers will run for the hills.

I mean, honestly, this in itself is one of the big problems with how our current society and economy work. The idea that most of our world should be "family-friendly" in the sense of censoring many perfectly healthy parts of human interaction and experience is toxic.

The current implementation, that often lumps most queer topics in with those that are "not family-friendly", is orders of magnitude worse.

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