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the good news is that the metaverse and the tech industry's very expensive obsession with trying to make it a reality will be a schadenfreude generator

the good news is that the metaverse and the tech industry's very expensive obsession with trying to make it a reality will be a schadenfreude generator the likes of which we've never seen before The tech landscape is littered with failed attempts, but we have here two very technically successful companies, Epic and Facebook, both trying to re-imagine the internet as something different. I'm not sure I'd write them off as a bunch of idiots quite yet. A bunch of idiots with a lot of money maybe... But look: Something is happening. You can close your eyes and pretend it's not. Apps are going to go away and the web continue to be The Way people access information online, and sucky little progressive web applications that hardly anyone is using or making money off are going to become awesome and NFTs will die. I mean, heck, it's only a matter of time until all those people who invested in bitcoin lose it alllllllllll right? You can sit there and laugh as how stupid they all are. ...maybe? If you want to. That's probably not a wise thing to do though. I think there are enough things going on, with enough competent folk doing them, and enough money behind them, that you're looking at the start of a change. Who knows how it'll go, but I think it might surprise people who are sitting around laughing. One thing that you can always bet on: Things change.

Animats 5y ago
Epic Tim Sweeney has been talking up a technically reasonable vision of the Metaverse for several years now. But Epic hasn't shipped much. You can load new game maps into Fortnite. That's about it. Unreal Engine 5 doesn't have much in the way of support for a world where users can change almost everything. It's still based on a model where you do massive optimization during build time.
xornox 5y ago
Exactly. Things are changing and it is not a bad thing if corporates try to be a change. Probably they fail, but even trying is better than doing nothing.
- harwoodleon 5y ago
  Here’s a thought: maybe corporates will change and may even become obsolete.
  - imiric 5y ago
    I can think of endless scenarios of how this plays out, and that is not one of them. Corporations rule us today and will only continue to grow larger and more powerful. There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms. See the futile fight for privacy some of us still care about as an example. We, the technologists, are complicit or directly benefit financially from this change. Governments are slowly catching up, pretending to control the monster they've let loose on their citizens, but are really in symbiosis with corporations, so nothing will change there. This Metaverse thing is not something to laugh about or dismiss. It will happen one way or the other. And all of it makes me want to pick up gardening and go live in a mountain shed away from it all. We've all read the sci-fi books or seen the movies to know how this plays out, yet are actively working towards that future. I have no words to describe it but mass insanity. I'm trying really hard to think about the positive aspects of this, but I'm coming up short. Will the future be more convenient? Sure. Will this help some people live out a better life in the real world? Probably. But the vast majority will be mindlessly plugged into this thing, isolated from meatspace, at the direct benefit of the corporations that produced the experience. There won't be a big war between man and machine. The Matrix will be built by humans, machines will help us do it, and we'll all want a taste of that juicy steak we saw in that ad. What are we doing...?
    - JohnFen 5y ago
      > There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms. I don't think history supports this prediction. We've been through several cycles of of this over the past few hundred years already -- the rise of powerful corporatocracy, followed by the people ultimately getting sick of that and knocking corporate power back. I see no reason to expect that pattern won't continue to repeat as we move into the future.
emodendroket 5y ago
I find it hard to see much of a serious case for NFTs, but I mostly agree with what you're saying. Even if it is a "schadenfreude generator," Amazon's attempts at having third-party sales on their site with "zshops" were a laughing stock until they weren't.
- redisman 5y ago
  We’re seeing only the first iteration of NFTs. Gaming can be interesting. Like if WoW had some unique Legendaries in NFT form I think that would be interesting and lucrative. I’m not sure if the incentive is there for existing games because you’re giving away control of the economy. But for upstarts they can use this as a way to get players to try their game instead since you could maybe sell some of the items for real money one day
  - swiftcoder 5y ago
    What on earth does the NFT part add here? WoW can add unique, auctionable items at any time using their existing tech. It's already a centralised platform, so decentrilisation doesn't add much...
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      That's really my question with almost everything related to crypto, "what is decentralization actually adding here?" It's cool, I guess, but it's wasteful.
      - input_sh 5y ago
        The only argument I've heard is the ability to transfer items between games, but that leads me to more questions than answers. Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one? Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks? Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique! Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings.
TapWaterBandit 5y ago
Yea, the major problem with this take by the OP author is it assumes that a cynical attitude and some questionable analogies means there is nothing new left to invent in how we use the internet. This seems extremely dubious to me and also shows a severe lack of humility. There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason). It may end up being BS but dismissing it out of hand seems extremely foolish.
- worrycue 5y ago
  > There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason). There is good reason to be skeptical given the long list of failures and Zuck hasn't shown why his take would be different yet - to my knowledge. In the words of Morpheus from the Matrix, "Show me."
- bombcar 5y ago
  John Carmack has shown himself capable of repeatedly making good video games, and even when not the greatest still technologically amazing. Mark has shown that he successfully didn’t destroy a MySpace clone that prints money. Other than that what has he done besides buy already large companies?
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  Have you heard of Facebook Gaming? It's a streaming platform, like Twitch. Launched in 2007. Nobody uses it. Did you buy an HTC First, the infamous "Facebook Phone" that was so universally panned, they couldn't even ship out their first production run of phones, despite it being one of the cheapest on the market? When's the last time you used a Portal? Facebook has just as many stinkers, despite many smart people working the company.
muskmusk 5y ago
Amen :) The metaverse is poorly communicated. Revolutions start at level 1, but communication sometimes start at level 25. level 1 for smart phones: Read email/chat while waiting for the bus level 25 for smart phones: A large economy with global behemoth corporations built on the premise that everyone has computers in their pockets Level 1 for metaverse: You can now work from your couch/porch/beachhouse/bustop as you don't need your screens Level 25 for metaverse: Everything running in 2d on computers now gets translated to 3d in the metaverse, a new set of global behemoth corporations. Massive implications for code, data and anything big or complicated (think structural blueprints) Whether revolutions succeed or not is decided by teens and twenty-somethings, not the 30+ crowd (parents dont get it, not now, not ever) The real challenge here is creating hardware that is cheap and good enough that teens can and will buy it, just like with the smart phone revolution, if you get 90% penetration with the teens then the rest of the world will follow. Quest2 costs about the same as one decent screen. I am not a business analyst, but from where I am sitting it seems like they've at least got traction.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  I am surprised to find that a small shade for my laptop screen made out of some illustration board evidently qualifies it as a "metaverse" device, because I sure do get a lot of work done out in the park.
silvestrov 5y ago
Past performance is no guarantee of future results They were successful with one thing. Now they are talking about something else. Why shouldn't "MetaVerse" be compared to the insane optimism of AI in the 1980'ies? Something that seemed just around the corner, but never arrived. It's like Thorium reactors: half the people think it's the next great thing, the other half thinks it will never come into production.
- polio 5y ago
  Have you used a Quest 2?
- pram 5y ago
  Successful with a huge asterisk, considering Fortnite was completely dead until they tacked on the Battlegrounds clone.
  - redisman 5y ago
    I don’t understand why would that be an asterisk. Anyway they have the multiplayer game with the biggest reach (Fortnite) and they develop the premier game engine Unreal. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in a good position to make a play in this space.
    - pram 5y ago
      Because it's infant level analysis, Epic doesn't have a unique competitive advantage because they have one popular game. I know a company that has a very popular game (Minecraft) and they develop the premier game API DirectX. They also have a pretty popular game console, AR glasses, a well known operating system, etc. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in a good position to make a play in this space.
      - redisman 5y ago
        Sure, MS is also in a good position(?)
- 5y ago
dada78641 5y ago
> One thing that you can always bet on: Things change. Change is not inevitable. Every change has to justify its own existence. Look at your computer. You're likely using a keyboard and a mouse. How long have they existed with no fundamental change to how they operate? Sure, there are other devices for interacting with computers, and smartphones are totally different beasts altogether, but nothing has supplanted the basic keyboard and mouse setup for desktop computers because they work perfectly well and there isn't really much you can improve about them. Everything else that has been designed is only for niche use. The promise here is that the Metaverse will be the next evolution of the internet, rather than just an expensive toy for a few rich people. It's supposed to be better than the internet, and so much so that we'll all want to be part of it. It's completely irrational to shrug and turn off your brain and say it's pointless to reason about claims like this because it's "inevitable" because things "change" all the time.
civilized 5y ago
Substitute "blood tests" for "internet" here and you've got what a lot of people said about Theranos in 2014. Big wigs with lots of money can't be wrong!
betwixthewires 5y ago
> I'm not sure I'd write them off as a bunch of idiots quite yet. If you look at the really disruptive innovations in technology, the vast majority of them were not made by incumbents. The iPhone is the shining example against me here, but the examples for me are Netflix, Facebook, bitcoin, heck, the internet itself. Incumbents expend efforts entrenching their positions, protecting their products they're already invested in, preventing disruption. It's baked onto the game fundamentally. And to be a little cynical, I'd argue that an incumbent claiming to be a disruptor is not being honest with you more than likely. It is a wise thing to bet against incumbents promising to disrupt their own industry because more often than not you'd be right.

Animats 5y ago

Epic Tim Sweeney has been talking up a technically reasonable vision of the Metaverse for several years now. But Epic hasn't shipped much. You can load new game maps into Fortnite. That's about it. Unreal Engine 5 doesn't have much in the way of support for a world where users can change almost everything. It's still based on a model where you do massive optimization during build time.

xornox 5y ago

Exactly. Things are changing and it is not a bad thing if corporates try to be a change. Probably they fail, but even trying is better than doing nothing.

harwoodleon 5y ago
Here’s a thought: maybe corporates will change and may even become obsolete.
- imiric 5y ago
  I can think of endless scenarios of how this plays out, and that is not one of them. Corporations rule us today and will only continue to grow larger and more powerful. There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms. See the futile fight for privacy some of us still care about as an example. We, the technologists, are complicit or directly benefit financially from this change. Governments are slowly catching up, pretending to control the monster they've let loose on their citizens, but are really in symbiosis with corporations, so nothing will change there. This Metaverse thing is not something to laugh about or dismiss. It will happen one way or the other. And all of it makes me want to pick up gardening and go live in a mountain shed away from it all. We've all read the sci-fi books or seen the movies to know how this plays out, yet are actively working towards that future. I have no words to describe it but mass insanity. I'm trying really hard to think about the positive aspects of this, but I'm coming up short. Will the future be more convenient? Sure. Will this help some people live out a better life in the real world? Probably. But the vast majority will be mindlessly plugged into this thing, isolated from meatspace, at the direct benefit of the corporations that produced the experience. There won't be a big war between man and machine. The Matrix will be built by humans, machines will help us do it, and we'll all want a taste of that juicy steak we saw in that ad. What are we doing...?
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    > There's not a thing any individual or even a group of people can do about it because the vast majority of people either don't care or embrace it with open arms. I don't think history supports this prediction. We've been through several cycles of of this over the past few hundred years already -- the rise of powerful corporatocracy, followed by the people ultimately getting sick of that and knocking corporate power back. I see no reason to expect that pattern won't continue to repeat as we move into the future.

emodendroket 5y ago

I find it hard to see much of a serious case for NFTs, but I mostly agree with what you're saying. Even if it is a "schadenfreude generator," Amazon's attempts at having third-party sales on their site with "zshops" were a laughing stock until they weren't.

redisman 5y ago
We’re seeing only the first iteration of NFTs. Gaming can be interesting. Like if WoW had some unique Legendaries in NFT form I think that would be interesting and lucrative. I’m not sure if the incentive is there for existing games because you’re giving away control of the economy. But for upstarts they can use this as a way to get players to try their game instead since you could maybe sell some of the items for real money one day
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  What on earth does the NFT part add here? WoW can add unique, auctionable items at any time using their existing tech. It's already a centralised platform, so decentrilisation doesn't add much...
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    That's really my question with almost everything related to crypto, "what is decentralization actually adding here?" It's cool, I guess, but it's wasteful.
    - input_sh 5y ago
      The only argument I've heard is the ability to transfer items between games, but that leads me to more questions than answers. Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one? Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks? Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique! Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings.

TapWaterBandit 5y ago

Yea, the major problem with this take by the OP author is it assumes that a cynical attitude and some questionable analogies means there is nothing new left to invent in how we use the internet. This seems extremely dubious to me and also shows a severe lack of humility. There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason). It may end up being BS but dismissing it out of hand seems extremely foolish.

worrycue 5y ago
> There are many very smart people at these companies and Mark Zuckerberg has consistently shown himself to be a canny and innovative founder (even if you dislike him for whatever reason). There is good reason to be skeptical given the long list of failures and Zuck hasn't shown why his take would be different yet - to my knowledge. In the words of Morpheus from the Matrix, "Show me."
bombcar 5y ago
John Carmack has shown himself capable of repeatedly making good video games, and even when not the greatest still technologically amazing. Mark has shown that he successfully didn’t destroy a MySpace clone that prints money. Other than that what has he done besides buy already large companies?
Jasper_ 5y ago
Have you heard of Facebook Gaming? It's a streaming platform, like Twitch. Launched in 2007. Nobody uses it. Did you buy an HTC First, the infamous "Facebook Phone" that was so universally panned, they couldn't even ship out their first production run of phones, despite it being one of the cheapest on the market? When's the last time you used a Portal? Facebook has just as many stinkers, despite many smart people working the company.

muskmusk 5y ago

Amen :) The metaverse is poorly communicated. Revolutions start at level 1, but communication sometimes start at level 25. level 1 for smart phones: Read email/chat while waiting for the bus level 25 for smart phones: A large economy with global behemoth corporations built on the premise that everyone has computers in their pockets Level 1 for metaverse: You can now work from your couch/porch/beachhouse/bustop as you don't need your screens Level 25 for metaverse: Everything running in 2d on computers now gets translated to 3d in the metaverse, a new set of global behemoth corporations. Massive implications for code, data and anything big or complicated (think structural blueprints) Whether revolutions succeed or not is decided by teens and twenty-somethings, not the 30+ crowd (parents dont get it, not now, not ever) The real challenge here is creating hardware that is cheap and good enough that teens can and will buy it, just like with the smart phone revolution, if you get 90% penetration with the teens then the rest of the world will follow. Quest2 costs about the same as one decent screen. I am not a business analyst, but from where I am sitting it seems like they've at least got traction.

egypturnash 5y ago
I am surprised to find that a small shade for my laptop screen made out of some illustration board evidently qualifies it as a "metaverse" device, because I sure do get a lot of work done out in the park.

silvestrov 5y ago

Past performance is no guarantee of future results They were successful with one thing. Now they are talking about something else. Why shouldn't "MetaVerse" be compared to the insane optimism of AI in the 1980'ies? Something that seemed just around the corner, but never arrived. It's like Thorium reactors: half the people think it's the next great thing, the other half thinks it will never come into production.

polio 5y ago
Have you used a Quest 2?
pram 5y ago
Successful with a huge asterisk, considering Fortnite was completely dead until they tacked on the Battlegrounds clone.
- redisman 5y ago
  I don’t understand why would that be an asterisk. Anyway they have the multiplayer game with the biggest reach (Fortnite) and they develop the premier game engine Unreal. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in a good position to make a play in this space.
  - pram 5y ago
    Because it's infant level analysis, Epic doesn't have a unique competitive advantage because they have one popular game. I know a company that has a very popular game (Minecraft) and they develop the premier game API DirectX. They also have a pretty popular game console, AR glasses, a well known operating system, etc. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in a good position to make a play in this space.
    - redisman 5y ago
      Sure, MS is also in a good position(?)
5y ago

dada78641 5y ago

> One thing that you can always bet on: Things change. Change is not inevitable. Every change has to justify its own existence. Look at your computer. You're likely using a keyboard and a mouse. How long have they existed with no fundamental change to how they operate? Sure, there are other devices for interacting with computers, and smartphones are totally different beasts altogether, but nothing has supplanted the basic keyboard and mouse setup for desktop computers because they work perfectly well and there isn't really much you can improve about them. Everything else that has been designed is only for niche use. The promise here is that the Metaverse will be the next evolution of the internet, rather than just an expensive toy for a few rich people. It's supposed to be better than the internet, and so much so that we'll all want to be part of it. It's completely irrational to shrug and turn off your brain and say it's pointless to reason about claims like this because it's "inevitable" because things "change" all the time.

civilized 5y ago

Substitute "blood tests" for "internet" here and you've got what a lot of people said about Theranos in 2014. Big wigs with lots of money can't be wrong!

betwixthewires 5y ago

> I'm not sure I'd write them off as a bunch of idiots quite yet. If you look at the really disruptive innovations in technology, the vast majority of them were not made by incumbents. The iPhone is the shining example against me here, but the examples for me are Netflix, Facebook, bitcoin, heck, the internet itself. Incumbents expend efforts entrenching their positions, protecting their products they're already invested in, preventing disruption. It's baked onto the game fundamentally. And to be a little cynical, I'd argue that an incumbent claiming to be a disruptor is not being honest with you more than likely. It is a wise thing to bet against incumbents promising to disrupt their own industry because more often than not you'd be right.