Whenever topics like Snow Crash and the Metaverse come up, I'm amused at all the comments from people talking about what it will be like when the Metaverse is i

Whenever topics like Snow Crash and the Metaverse come up, I'm amused at all the comments from people talking about what it will be like when the Metaverse is invented. The Metaverse already launched. It's called Fortnite. Epic isn't done building it, of course, but they know what they are doing and have read every chapter of Gibson, Stephenson, and Ready Player One (just as those authors have paid attention to the actual real life career of Tim Sweeney at Epic). The team at Epic also has insane amounts of money to throw at their work because they have demonstrated success in game design, economy design, and large scale low latency architectures. The fact that it's an actual real functioning product is why it doesn't look like what most people thought v0.1 of the metaverse would look like.