Decentraland concurrent user count link: [1] 252 right now.

Sominium Space concurrent user count link: [2] 25 right now.

Yes, the user counts really are that tiny. Both have been live for more than a year, so it's not that they're new.

Somebody just paid almost a million dollars for a plot of land in Decentraland. Sotheby's has an outlet there. But nobody goes there.

The real metaverses are Roblox (about 1.8 million concurrent users today), Second Life (about 50,000) and VRChat (about 17,000). Maybe IMVU, but haven't found numbers for them. Fortnite is even bigger, but is more game than metaverse. The big ambitions outlined by Epic's CEO have not yet materialized.

[1] https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/

[2] https://somniumspace.com/parcel/4326?elv=0

Nvidia has Omniverse

Roblox hit a $58B market cap in June

Unity has VR chat

And there are a zillion startups/indie games that claim to be "The Metaverse". Of course, for the metaverse to be successful, we need a common protocol, not walled gardens - but this is deep topic, and I don't want to type it all.

Media is moving to the metaverse - Fortnite concerts, Roblox concerts, Porter Robinson's virtual event, Tomorrowland, Lost Lands (couchlands)

Enterprise is moving to the metaverse - Microsoft/Epic games partnership for global 3D info (can't remember the name), Nvidia's Omniverse, just go google search "digital twins"

Rocket League, Fortnite, and Roblox are partnering with big brands

The metaverse is taking shape before our eyes. What we're missing is a common interop format, and the leading contenders are USD (Pixar, Nvidia) and gltf (Epic Games, Mozilla).

I'm building a business for the metaverse at the moment, and there is something real if you look past the hype. The problem is that it doesn't quite look like the metaverse of _Ready Player One_ or _Snowcrash_. So it's easy for people to dream in the wrong direction. As you might expect, much of this is pretty incremental progress, but that doesn't make as great of a narrative, and the conclusion of the available incremental progress is monumental - but there's a ton of work to be done.

I love talking about this stuff. If you want to work with us, or just trade thoughts, feel free to reach out to me about it.

I will say I think it's a bit of an antipattern to get too stuck to a particular fictional representation of something. It doesn't seem to be too common, but it tends to blind people to the real possibilites because they're too busy trying to jam it in a mold created by someone 30 years ago. Kinda reminds me of what I call the BOAC fallacy: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916 although it's not the same. Just because someone wrote about it in a particular fun story doesn't mean that it's going to end up that way, and I'd bet it won't.

Most fictional universes tend to ignore business fragmentation, which takes us to...

"What we're missing is a common interop format"

Perhaps it's my own limitations, but I can't even dream of what a "common interop format" would look like, or more importantly, why any player would agree to use it anytime soon. There's a lot of business case studies as to why everyone will be happy to agree to an "interop standard" of their own control and let other people's content into their walled garden, to be subject to the constraints of their walled garden, but will not do anything to let content out of their own walled garden, the net effect being no interop. This smells of Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL/etc. all over again.

Unless you just mean simple avatar interop, although the lowest common denominator is going to be pretty low for a while. Roblox probably runs entire gaming worlds with the resources an Unreal 4 avatar designed for a high-end computer could demand.

I believe a counterexample to ignoring that fragmentation is Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, which I have not read, but I believe there is no single AR "metaverse" in that, but the technology is used for all sorts of things; you can opt in to the "fantasy" "metaverse", or the sci-fi one, or the Victorian England one, etc etc.

at_19, sorry for the rebuke and the sarcasm.

That being said.

Metaverses are great.

I think there is an underpinning philosophical element to these discussion around aggregate universes that needs to be addressed.

My particular disdain is targeted at Fortnite.

Some of my disdain can be summarized via the Folding Ideas essay [1].

My disdain may or not be intrinsically linked to the ideals of capitalism, for which I think there is a larger discussion to be had. I believe, by all interpretation, Fortnite is a vehicle solely for capitalist ideals and doesn't allow room for alternative economic models (including capitalist synergies).

This, in concert with its branding (a childrens' game) is problematic for me.

Fortnite, in its essence, is an anarcho-capitalist model. The literal goal of any drop is zero sum by nature. Kill everyone else -> read kill as not literally kill, but subsume their resources and remove players so that one dominant entity can capture resources.

Part of the core gameplay is leveraging resources "enemies" have already obtained, mechanical efficiency, and coordination (if not solo-queued) against "the others".

The game, by its mechanics, is troublesome to me. This is not to mention the pure pay-to-win psychological manifest of their online store (which the video essay details). In short, the community forms their opinions based on the amount of capital a player had -> allowing the player to purchase skin-du-jour and enable a perception of higher status. The logic follows that a player with a newer and rarer skin *must* be more talented and mechanically efficient.

That is the summary of my angst whenever this subject is brought up. I'm not convinced that the thrust of any multi-m/b/illion dollar company when talking about the "multiverse" is anything other than a shallow ideological vector aligning with their checkbook.

I am convinced in the Minecraft and Roblox arguments as they have incredible creative power, systemically, although the same argument can be applied selectively. They are not adversarial by nature, however mini-games do exist within their ethos that push this ideology.

I think that it's frustrating to see any backing without challenging the long-term psychological effects of seeking mechanically derivative ideologies of one, possibly reductive (in implementation, not practice), line of economic philosophy.

I genuinely hope that covers the groundwork.

Once again, I'm sorry your comment caught my ire.

I suppose, personally, that I am jaded to the argument at its core, and very passionate about how those vectors are exposed.

To leave with you with some substance:

My ideal "Metaverse" is one unbounded by isolated cultural norms, and may actually be present in our lives today. I can see nothing good coming from an Epic Metaverse, but I see indie hackers using 3-d printing and free STL files making amazing robots. I see people designing in FOSS for those particular files that they can't find online. I see people developing completely OSS games in FOSS game engines so that someone might have entertainment free of charge. Maybe they will morph their own game? The metaverse is already here, and pushing shared brain farms is not something which I will back down from.

I am increasingly defensive as this argument arises because I see no implementation in which capitalist capture (the system which enables creators and both isolates them to that system) can have any real benefit as a shared experience. It's possible but not beneficial.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. There's only so much I can fit here, but I'm happy to expand if you need more context.

1: https://youtu.be/dPHPNgIihR0

He recently launched an ETF ($META) that indexes to "Metaverse" companies (Roblox, Unity, etc.).

I have always been pretty cynical about his takes and usage of "Metaverse." There's a lot of hand-waving and ted-talky grandstanding to make the "Metaverse" concept seem like something new, exciting and inevitable. But using "Metaverse" seems overly complicated, its just describing a large, centralized online community which isn't a new concept. World of Warcraft or Minecraft may have been the peak of the "Metaverse" so far, so it seems disingenuous to treat the "Metaverse" as something new and novel.

Kinda've stream of consciousness from me - but all this really seems like is someone with a consultant background applying frameworks and buzzwords to concepts that felt childish and unserious for so long (WoW, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc.), but now people are realizing that these companies and games can spit out serious cash, so they love someone who can package it together nicely through these frameworks and thought pieces. Boomers love this!

https://twitter.com/ballmatthew

Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite are close in various ways, and many apps have the feature set but are missing the user base.

I think you're right.[1]

[1] https://www.matthewball.vc/all/forwardtothemetaverseprimer