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Why did the metaverse die? Because Silicon Valley doesn’t understand the concept of fun
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Technology
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They needed VR to convince people that this one fad of virtual real estate and tradeable virtual items totally wasn't exactly like Second Life.
Well that was always my problem with Facebook's implementation as well. If I'm paying money for virtual real estate I'd rather just pay money for the server and then control it myself. It never made sense to me to let one company host the code, because there's literally no benefit to me for them doing that. Usually the benefit of letting a company host the code is that it costs less money, but if I'm going to be paying virtual rent every month anyway I'd rather just have server access.