That was originally a surprise to Epic. It was just supposed to be a shooter, but then people started socializing in it. Then Epic realized they had a giant social network on their hands.

Isn't this trivially true for any online game though? I played Counter Strike for quite some time with the same group of people. And looking back, It's not like I disliked Counter Strike. But I would have never even played closed to the amount of hours if I didn't have that group of people.

I spent years playing an MMORPG called "Maplestory" where me and my online friends would just sit on virtual chairs and talk to each other.

There was something called the "Free Market" where there were no monsters to kill (so you couldn't die.) Guilds claimed different Free Market rooms as their "guild rooms" and people would just go AFK there. You'd always be able to find friends hanging out and talking in these rooms.

You could spend real-life money on their cash shop, which had cosmetics and small things like virtual chairs or couches to sit on.

You could even buy "friendship rings" that would display animations if the two of you were in close together.

I've been waiting for a single-player version of Maplestory to come out my entire life.

The overall art/gameplay style is lovely, there's not really a single-player offlin equivalent to the platformer-JRPG thing that I'm aware of.

I recently went back and tried to play it again almost a decade later with my partner (who had never played it) and it was not quite what I remembered.

Fantastic game back then though, as well as "Conquer Online" around the 2007-2009 era.

Conquer Online... ugh. I quit when some bug sent my market character to bot jail for no reason. Wish I'd have actually botted instead of wasting years on that game. My friend made a few bucks selling the rest of my characters, at least.

You quit? But what about all the glorious Fast Blade/Scent Sword megaduels with people hopping about the whole screen that went down in Bot Jail.

;^)

This adult stuff sucks, someone send me back to being 10 and clueless so I can relive this again.

RIP the free market. Not the same anymore unfortunately.

Sitting in a lobby chatting on Discord with the team while waiting for someone to come back from a "short" afk is literally half of my hours in CS:GO.

Not even gonna count the amount of time spent just running around Dalaran in World of Warcraft while on voice with guildmates.

I'm not big on Fortnite but iirc they had some events like virtual concerts etc. in game. This signals to me they're more interested in being that "metaverse" than, say, CS:GO.

It's oddly not true for previous attempts at the thing, though - Second Life was not very popular. (I think because originality is too much effort and the client performance was poor)

Also, previous metaverses were only popular among specific demographics, like perverts/furries, or suburban teenage boys.

I in large part owe my adult software career to being an asocial, weird kid who learned Lua around ~9-10 from spending all their free time scripting random things in a 3D environment in Second Life's Lua dialect, LSL.

Really funny feeling, the sort of butterfly effect/unintended consequences.

I think this has been a long-term vision. I distinctly remember reading it in interviews with both Sweeney and Blezsinski from before the release of Unreal; that they had a vision of connecting virtual worlds. You hop into a portal and you're in a completely different game that you were in before. IIRC, Unreal Engine 1 had the capability of assigning an unreal:// URL to a portal.

You may find https://www.matthewball.vc/all/epicprimer1/#section1 an interesting discussion of the interlocking parts of Epic's business plan.

I hang out with my friends every day on Ventrilo voice chat playing Dota. This was just after school. No pandemic driving it. It was a game and anyone who thinks overwise is a headass or trying too hard to be smart.

Vent was your community, playing Dota. There is a place to distinguish between the two. Fortnite having a concert in the game was what made it 'not a game' to me.

lol so if Valve made a good enough voice chat software to replace Vent, it wouldn't qualify as a game anymore?

your community is your friends. there's nothing special about the software. if it wasn't a game they wouldn't touch it.

Wonder if the question is more like "did you meet these friends (eg for the first time) through that game, or were they existing friends beforehand"?

Because, if they're existing friends then yeah... you could all just move to a new place to hang out whenever it's needed. But if you generally met each other through the platform, it's more acting like that Community thing (or at least ways. :)

it was both

it was still a game