4 ms·

> and even if they could this whole Metaverse thing is likely to stay in the videogame's realm for a very long time There are already concerts with paid ticket

by derefr 4y ago

> and even if they could this whole Metaverse thing is likely to stay in the videogame's realm for a very long time There are already concerts with paid tickets going on in platforms like Fortnite, that just happen to be able to act as multi-user VR environments, even though that wasn't their designed purpose. The demand is real. I don't see it as much of a bet that "people are already creating these events, and want to build professional services around doing so; these people would appreciate a platform to run such events on that won't be shut down/go unmaintained in two years just because the game that the platform was built for ceases to be relevant; and people who pay to attend these events are willing to download a client to consume the content they paid for." That just seems to be a series of common-sense facts to me. Whether Facebook can actually end up as the platform of choice for hosting said events is entirely non-obvious. But, if nothing else, they do have connections, channel partners, global scale to deploy reliable infrastructure that can be trusted to not buckle under event load, etc. It's up in the air how much things like "the aesthetics of the experience" really matter, compared to those. How much does a band care about the aesthetics of the venue?

hedora 4y ago
Second Life has been doing this for over a decade. I see no reason to expect Meta to do a better job, and see every reason for people to assume they’ve done a maliciously-bad job, given their reputation.
- hbn 4y ago
  It'll be worse than Second Life because they'll censor anything that isn't brand-friendly to Facebook (and there is certainly a lot of stuff like that on SL - it's a lot of the reason people play it!)
stephc_int13 4y ago
Would you trust Meta with a new social platform? Do you think your friends will? If they can execute (I believe they can't) and if the Metaverse is the next huge thing that some are predicting (I think their vision is too dependent on VR/AR magically becoming practical) They still have a huge reputation issue; they are already bleeding users on FB and Insta. They need a miracle.
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  Have privacy geeks who keep saying "no one would trust FB with X" ever looked at the numbers? I keep seeing this sentiment around Meta and VR, yet guess which VR company has like >70% market share. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1222146/xr-headset-shipment-share-worldwide-by-brand/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1222146/xr-headset-shipm...
  - stephc_int13 4y ago
    I'd like to see numbers. I mean, engagement, not market share, total time spent by users with the headset on. My intuition is that 90% of that "market share" is collecting dust.
    - BbzzbB 4y ago
      Sounds like you just believe whatever you want then, no? How is 80% of sales in Q4 not a pretty good indicator that people do, in fact, "trust Meta with a new X" (or at least don't care enough)? As for that new intuition, what good reason is there to believe Oculus headsets are so vastly underused after-purchase compared to competitors? And what has that to do with Meta's reputational issues?
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        > How is 80% of sales in Q4 not a pretty good indicator that people do Because everybody I know who's bought a VR headset (any brand) lets it collect dust after a month, and I don't think that's a fluke. Buying a VR headset is not using a VR headset.
        BbzzbB 4y ago
        My point was with regards to the common insinuation that people (i.e. consumers) will not be using Facebook products because of the company's reputation issues, which I think has never showed up in the underlying numbers. Through all the scandals whether it's political weaponization by users and advertisers, privacy issues or else, their userbases never stopped growing ever larger whether it's FB+Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and now VR. There was a single (recovered) QoQ decline in global active users in it's history, seemingly unrelated to any scandal. The company sure has reputational issues, but as much as people hate it (I have my own deep issues with it), it's not stopping the larger masses of people from using their products. In fact, >85% of humans (ex-China) with an Internet connection to their apps and >70% of VR headset purchasers. Whether VR is a fad, people who buy headset find long-lived utility from them or the push is a good/bad bet for $META is unrelated to what I meant to say, which is their reputation is not stopping them from currently dominating the VR space (non-premium only so far, but maybe with Cambria). Doesn't seem reasonable to think the 7-8 digits of current VR enthusiasts are less morally principled then the 9-10 figure masses would be.
simiones 4y ago
> There are already concerts with paid tickets going on in platforms like Fortnite, that just happen to be able to act as multi-user VR environments, even though that wasn't their designed purpose. The demand is real. You have that the other way around. Fortnite was able to host a concert because people like to play Fortnite. There is no demand for VR concerts, there is perhaps some demand for concerts in already-populated online spaces. People aren't flocking to Fortnite because of the concerts. People who play Fortnite are flocking to these concerts when they happen in their game.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  > There is no demand for VR concerts, there is perhaps some demand for concerts in already-populated online spaces. Megan Thee Stallion, Billie Eilish, and the Foo Fighters are all releasing VR concerts this year. My wife, who has never played Fortnite, attended several VR concerts over the past few years. Given how popular listening to music is on services like Youtube, I believe it is short-sighted to fail to see the appeal of an immersive 3D-audio VR experience for music fans.
  - JeremyNT 4y ago
    Foo fighters also released 29 tracks for Rock Band, which was really popular for a couple of years. New toys are fun to play with, for a bit. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to stick around or have much long term relevance.
    - awinder 4y ago
      They’re not only fun to play with, but when someone needs to purchase cachet for a new toy and they come to you to chat about it, cha-ching.
paganel 4y ago
You’re confirming OP’s point, this is a video-game thingie. I personally don’t know anyone who plays or cares about Fortnite, I’m a man in my early 40s with little to no friends who work in the IT industry.
pessimizer 4y ago
> There are already concerts with paid tickets going on in platforms like Fortnite, that just happen to be able to act as multi-user VR environments, even though that wasn't their designed purpose. The demand is real. There's no demand to watch computer animated concerts through heavy glasses in Fortnite coming from people who don't already spend a bunch of time playing Fortnite. This is an add-on to Fortnite, not anything that anybody really wants to do for its own sake. What's the point of watching a computer animated "concert" in VR anyway? Who would get any joy out of that?
- Karunamon 4y ago
  Ask the 12.3 million who watched Travis Scott have a concert in Fortnite [1] There is no way to convey this without being a little bit of a jerk, but I think your take demonstrates being out of touch, in the "no wireless, less space than a nomad, lame, also Dropbox is just some tooling around rsync" sense that HN tends to get sometimes. This is enough of a phenomenon that other mainstream artists are starting to get into it, which means there are enough people getting joy out of it for it to have a market of its own. I think you ignore the metaverse (the concept, not Facebook's janky implementation) at your own peril. The next generation is growing up with virtual concerts, and in many cases virtual artists. [1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/travis-scott-fortnite-record-viewers-live-1234589033/ https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/travis-scott-fortnite-...
  - forchune3 4y ago
    ok so a bunch of ppl were playing fornite in april 2020. that doesnt mean that people want to watch vr concerts
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      On the contrary, more than 12 million people watched the concert live. That's time spent in going to the VR concert, not playing a competitive shooter. Are you suggesting that all of them did something they had no desire to do?
  - 4y ago

by derefr 4y ago

hedora 4y ago

Second Life has been doing this for over a decade. I see no reason to expect Meta to do a better job, and see every reason for people to assume they’ve done a maliciously-bad job, given their reputation.

hbn 4y ago
It'll be worse than Second Life because they'll censor anything that isn't brand-friendly to Facebook (and there is certainly a lot of stuff like that on SL - it's a lot of the reason people play it!)

stephc_int13 4y ago

Would you trust Meta with a new social platform? Do you think your friends will? If they can execute (I believe they can't) and if the Metaverse is the next huge thing that some are predicting (I think their vision is too dependent on VR/AR magically becoming practical) They still have a huge reputation issue; they are already bleeding users on FB and Insta. They need a miracle.

BbzzbB 4y ago
Have privacy geeks who keep saying "no one would trust FB with X" ever looked at the numbers? I keep seeing this sentiment around Meta and VR, yet guess which VR company has like >70% market share. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1222146/xr-headset-shipment-share-worldwide-by-brand/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1222146/xr-headset-shipm...
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  I'd like to see numbers. I mean, engagement, not market share, total time spent by users with the headset on. My intuition is that 90% of that "market share" is collecting dust.
  - BbzzbB 4y ago
    Sounds like you just believe whatever you want then, no? How is 80% of sales in Q4 not a pretty good indicator that people do, in fact, "trust Meta with a new X" (or at least don't care enough)? As for that new intuition, what good reason is there to believe Oculus headsets are so vastly underused after-purchase compared to competitors? And what has that to do with Meta's reputational issues?
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      > How is 80% of sales in Q4 not a pretty good indicator that people do Because everybody I know who's bought a VR headset (any brand) lets it collect dust after a month, and I don't think that's a fluke. Buying a VR headset is not using a VR headset.
      - BbzzbB 4y ago
        My point was with regards to the common insinuation that people (i.e. consumers) will not be using Facebook products because of the company's reputation issues, which I think has never showed up in the underlying numbers. Through all the scandals whether it's political weaponization by users and advertisers, privacy issues or else, their userbases never stopped growing ever larger whether it's FB+Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and now VR. There was a single (recovered) QoQ decline in global active users in it's history, seemingly unrelated to any scandal. The company sure has reputational issues, but as much as people hate it (I have my own deep issues with it), it's not stopping the larger masses of people from using their products. In fact, >85% of humans (ex-China) with an Internet connection to their apps and >70% of VR headset purchasers. Whether VR is a fad, people who buy headset find long-lived utility from them or the push is a good/bad bet for $META is unrelated to what I meant to say, which is their reputation is not stopping them from currently dominating the VR space (non-premium only so far, but maybe with Cambria). Doesn't seem reasonable to think the 7-8 digits of current VR enthusiasts are less morally principled then the 9-10 figure masses would be.

simiones 4y ago

> There are already concerts with paid tickets going on in platforms like Fortnite, that just happen to be able to act as multi-user VR environments, even though that wasn't their designed purpose. The demand is real. You have that the other way around. Fortnite was able to host a concert because people like to play Fortnite. There is no demand for VR concerts, there is perhaps some demand for concerts in already-populated online spaces. People aren't flocking to Fortnite because of the concerts. People who play Fortnite are flocking to these concerts when they happen in their game.

strix_varius 4y ago
> There is no demand for VR concerts, there is perhaps some demand for concerts in already-populated online spaces. Megan Thee Stallion, Billie Eilish, and the Foo Fighters are all releasing VR concerts this year. My wife, who has never played Fortnite, attended several VR concerts over the past few years. Given how popular listening to music is on services like Youtube, I believe it is short-sighted to fail to see the appeal of an immersive 3D-audio VR experience for music fans.
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  Foo fighters also released 29 tracks for Rock Band, which was really popular for a couple of years. New toys are fun to play with, for a bit. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to stick around or have much long term relevance.
  - awinder 4y ago
    They’re not only fun to play with, but when someone needs to purchase cachet for a new toy and they come to you to chat about it, cha-ching.

paganel 4y ago

You’re confirming OP’s point, this is a video-game thingie. I personally don’t know anyone who plays or cares about Fortnite, I’m a man in my early 40s with little to no friends who work in the IT industry.

pessimizer 4y ago

> There are already concerts with paid tickets going on in platforms like Fortnite, that just happen to be able to act as multi-user VR environments, even though that wasn't their designed purpose. The demand is real. There's no demand to watch computer animated concerts through heavy glasses in Fortnite coming from people who don't already spend a bunch of time playing Fortnite. This is an add-on to Fortnite, not anything that anybody really wants to do for its own sake. What's the point of watching a computer animated "concert" in VR anyway? Who would get any joy out of that?

Karunamon 4y ago
Ask the 12.3 million who watched Travis Scott have a concert in Fortnite [1] There is no way to convey this without being a little bit of a jerk, but I think your take demonstrates being out of touch, in the "no wireless, less space than a nomad, lame, also Dropbox is just some tooling around rsync" sense that HN tends to get sometimes. This is enough of a phenomenon that other mainstream artists are starting to get into it, which means there are enough people getting joy out of it for it to have a market of its own. I think you ignore the metaverse (the concept, not Facebook's janky implementation) at your own peril. The next generation is growing up with virtual concerts, and in many cases virtual artists. [1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/travis-scott-fortnite-record-viewers-live-1234589033/ https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/travis-scott-fortnite-...
- forchune3 4y ago
  ok so a bunch of ppl were playing fornite in april 2020. that doesnt mean that people want to watch vr concerts
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    On the contrary, more than 12 million people watched the concert live. That's time spent in going to the VR concert, not playing a competitive shooter. Are you suggesting that all of them did something they had no desire to do?
- 4y ago