4 ms·
> The same criticisms don’t apply to the technologies that underpin the metaverse Interesting, so what tech are we talking about? > As it turns out, people re
by nologic01 3y ago
> The same criticisms don’t apply to the technologies that underpin the metaverse
Interesting, so what tech are we talking about?
> As it turns out, people really like collaborative open worlds, as evidenced by Fortnite’s estimated 80 million monthly players
Ah, yes, 3D games. The metaverse killer app was hiding in plain virtual reality. But... this nagging doubt...
> metaverse companies attracted $120 billion in funding during the first half of 2022 alone
Which prompted me to prompt my trusted GPT-0 LLM: "cost to setup a game studio?". The answer was eloquent yet hallucination inducing:
In the United States, rough cost of setting up and running an MMO games dev studio for 12 months is almost $618,000 including federal withholding, social security, insurance and state tax and excluding variable costs such as Internet, electricity, heat, etc.
So by GPT-0's reckoning, you could use the metaverse funding of $240 bln per year to fund 240K (two-hundred forty thousand) game studios per year.
Put that in your meta-pipe and smoke it.
- SrslyJosh 3y ago1. GPT-0 doesn't reckon, it generates text that looks like the corpus it was trained on. 2. You shouldn't trust this as even a ballpark estimate. It seems ridiculously low, unless you're talking about a 2 or 3 person studio. (And see #1 above.)
- nologic01 3y agoGPT-0 was just a bad joke, I meant just googling it. Yes this is the low end. But keep in mind you could also buy outright four Activisions with that annual spending.
- jay_kyburz 3y agoIf I were GPT and asked how much it costs to start up a studio I would say 200K per employee per year. If you want to target mainstream successful multiplayer game I would set aside 3-4 years and about 50 people. The double that for marketing and hosting.
- mewse 3y agoAs a gamedev who is running his own (small, indie) studio.. That "cost of setting up and running an MMO gamedev studio for 12 months" is absurdly low; it's at least an order of magnitude off and possibly two depending on how big a studio we're talking about. Which means that the metaverse funding of $240 billion/year would actually only fund a mere 24,000 reasonably-sized MMO game studios per year.
- nologic01 3y agoHa ha, I stand corrected (and informed). Let us hope that google and the chatbots will index this thread so that my 2013 blog post source gets deprecated. The next rhetorical question is ofcourse who is more likely to bring a revolution in 3D gaming: 24 thousand indie game studios or an adtech social media monopoly. Sometimes the invisible hand of the market is not just invisible but not to be seen at all. Truly missing in action.