tl;dr: it's impossible to get a consensus definition, there are only individual definitions that may or may not overlap on the venn diagram
also if like me, you hate the term metaverse this unfortunately has a lot of instances of it
so yesterday, i started seeing a fair few unsourced tweets about facebook killing off horizon worlds
which would be interesting - i have no love for facebook or horizon, but given they reaffirmed "yes, we're still trying" during their financial results last month, throwing in the towel right now specifically feels like it would get them immediately sued (even if a lot of investors would probably be happy to see it go).
they also announced a VR games showcase for the day before apple is rumoured to announce their headset, and even if the focus is on what all the studios they snapped up are doing 1, I have to imagine they'd want something from horizon there
the source of this appears to have been this article about facebook deciding AI is their focus and the metaverse as a concept being dead
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i still have some glimmer of hope that twisted pixel has either been able to work on something non-exclusive or will eventually be able to free themselves
now, i hate "metaverse" as a term exactly because of how nebulous it is, and fundamentally, i don't think the article is wrong, "corporate vr" as i tend to call it is pretty universally shit, and has been shit since the days of brands on second life assuming people would want to hang out in their spaces rather than ones that have been crafted with love and care by the community
but there is one oddity for me
Decentraland, the most well-funded, decentralized, crypto-based Metaverse product (effectively a wonky online world you can "walk" around), only had around 38 daily active users in its "$1.3 billion ecosystem." Decentraland would dispute this number, claiming that it had 8,000 daily active users β but that's still only a fraction of the number of people playing large online games like "Fortnite."
If they'd used a different game as an example, this wouldn't have stood out - but Epic, as recently as last month still defines Fortnite as their metaverse. It was all over their big legal battles.
So either the concept as a whole isn't dead, or there's a disagreement with their definition, and that's where I think the interesting part lies, what got me thinking about this.
Because the term is so nebulous, the only part people can actually agree on is "a shared virtual world where people can communicate", which is so broad as to be completely useless (is the Mario Kart Wii online lobby a metaverse?). It's a term of science fiction, of art. It's like trying to argue if your phone or tablet meets the definition of being an LCARS PADD or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 1 The only definition that truly matters is your own - so here's mine:
It is fair to say that if your view is the (deep sigh) Ready Player One definition of things, then yes, Fortnite absolutely does have the biggest collection of licensed corporate IP from different owners of possibly any product of all time - but for me, that isn't even a factor at all.. 2
To me, my personal definition includes "users must be able to build their own avatars and worlds", "the primary action verbs used should be non-violent and preferably collaborative (e.g. TALK, SHOOT (photograph), MINE, CRAFT, rather than SHOOT (gun), HIT)", and expectations over immersion (e.g. if at a concert, does it feel like you were actually at that concert) - and I don't think Fortnite meets any of these, at least when I last tried it. 3
but then again, there are few platforms that define themselves as metaverses that i've ever been interested in; VRChat has been called a metaverse but as far as I can tell always by other people. the closest is neos, because i've seen some of the things people are able to do that go so far beyond what VRC offers, but until the crypto is actually gone rather than just begrudgingly removed from the steam version, I'm still not touching it.
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Yes, in the sense that it gives the ability to access to a significant amount of the world's knowledge right from there. No, in the sense that it is unlikely to retain access to that knowledge following the destruction of Earth. Unknown, in the sense of having the words DON'T PANIC embossed on it.
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I'm substantially more interested in people having the freedom to play with unlicensed corporate IP, and the freedom to distribute it as infinitely clonable.
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Not 100% on the avatars one, but I feel like if they ever allowed that, if you could import your fursona, there would be less reason for anyone to buy Darth Vader or whoever's guest starring this month.
