RIP the Metaverse

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Nearly 30 years later and people still can't agree on the definition of metaverse.

Apple Is Stepping Into the Metaverse. Will Anyone Care?

Interest in the futuristic, immersive digital world is fading just as Apple plans to debut a virtual reality device.

www.nytimes.com

With this particular thing, I have to think that Apple has been working and spending money on this for a long time, was basically surprised by the collapse of interest in VR, and thinks they might be able to just brute-force a resurgence.

They might succeed small-scale, among Apple fans who will buy anything they make, but for everyone else?

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

At $3500 a pop (minimum) I don't think it's going to get much take-up.

 

[Free]

Apparently some folk are pretty gung ho on the metaverse's future.



I'd say it also has the potential to drain value from a whole lot of companies.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Apparently some folk are pretty gung ho on the metaverse's future.



I'd say it also has the potential to drain value from a whole lot of companies.

good old McKinsey! they mostly made their names by being the "bad cop" for employers who just used them to justify what they wanted to do anyway...

5 trillion by 2030 is a bit optimistic.... also, it's not really new created value if those purchases would have happened anyway...

 

[Sid]

Why not 5 gazillion?
Buy your shares now. Only $9.95 each*. Unlimited supplies. Contact Sid on these forums or Sid Nagy on the other ones.



* Prices guarantied until the value of the shares decreases.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

The way interest rates have been going... by 2030 that $5 trillion might buy enough fancy drinks from Starbucks for a small family.

 

[Free]

The whittling down of Meta's metaverse continues.

Meta's flagship metaverse service leaves VR behind

The company asserts it will continue to make VR headsets, though.

arstechnica.com

Meta announced today that it will divorce its Horizon Worlds social and gaming service—once promoted as the company’s first major step into the metaverse—from its Quest VR headset platform and digital store.

The company says it is now “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.”

Exclusively mobile. We've been here before.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

FUD. The metaverse is the future. It is inevitable. Those who don't get on board and embrace it are Luddites who will be left behind.

 

[Noodles]

Facebook has this weird cross promotion where you need to log into a worlds... world?... to unlock some of their little custom avatar chat emotes.

It even shows you the emotr, it already exists, it uses your custom avatar, but you can't use it unless you log into some specific world.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Wow. I saw one report that claims Meta has whizzed away $50 billion on this turkey.

Can that be right?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Wow. I saw one report that claims Meta has whizzed away $50 billion on this turkey.

Can that be right?

I don't know off the top of my head if that's the exact figure but yes, it was tens of billions of dollars, just freaking incinerated.

Sucker-berg changed the name of his company to make it synonymous with this disaster, that's how thoroughly and yet baselessly confident he was in it.

 

[Noodles]

Wow. I saw one report that claims Meta has whizzed away $50 billion on this turkey.

Can that be right?

I wonder how much LL has spent on SL over the past 20+ years.

Edit: I asked ChatGPT. It says best estimate, LL has invested like $1.2 Billion in SL. But we don't know because its a private company. That was a number LL gave at some point, fairly recently, apparenrly.

I also then got into a conversation with it about Facebook pissing away so much trying to make the same thing and oh man, ChatGPT is REALLY trying to defend Favebook on this one, even after being called out on it. It keeps pushing that its "so much more" with hardware and blah blah blah, trying to make an iPhone Moment.

Which is true, but at the core, its the same idea, and this 23 year old platform lives on after investing comparatively nothing.

Also ChatGPt says Facebook has lost $80 billion, not $50 billion.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Edit: I asked ChatGPT. It says best estimate, LL has invested like $1.2 Billion in SL. But we don't know because its a private company. That was a number LL gave at some point, fairly recently, apparenrly.

The source for that seems to be the link below. That article has a bunch of interesting tidbits in it.

Linden Lab has spent $1.3B building Second Life and paid $1.1B to creators (updated)

 

[Erich Templar]

SL's unique selling point was that it allowed its residents to build the world themselves, and even to make money out of it. No modern company would ever allow its users that amount of freedom. That's why Meta was doomed from the start. We'll never see another SL.

 

[Noodles]

SL's unique selling point was that it allowed its residents to build the world themselves, and even to make money out of it. No modern company would ever allow its users that amount of freedom. That's why Meta was doomed from the start. We'll never see another SL.

I think Roblocks has ways for users to make Robucks, and Fortnite recently added the ability for custom maps to sell cosmetics for Vbucks, but I don't think either has a way to turn those back into real currency.

The Fortnite thing is not universal either, you don't get custom cosmetica you cannuse anywhere, just the one map.

Also, the other reason Meta was doomed is its incredibly sterile/PG and linked to your real world account.

 

[Noodles]