Perfect version afterward inverseto hear tech heads like Mark Zuckerberg talk about it, marriage to social media, entertainment and—most excitingly—meeting in a pristine virtual space. Long foretold in Neal Stephenson’s Snow accident, which is where the online world offers more experiences than the physical world. But while Stephenson’s metaverse is part of an apocalyptic future, modern inventors have promised a digital utopia.
Unfortunately, so far, the metaverse they’ve built has lived up to those expectations as well as a Craigslist apartment rented based solely on the photos. Zuckerberg’s World Horizon, messy and weirdmay have been most thrilling when Meta informed users that the footer for their avatar was “Coming soon.” The hardware required to access such virtual worlds—usually headsets like Meta’s Quest Pro—can be expensive and cumbersome, and when you get there, it will. no party.
None of this is lost to the people who actually build the digital world. In a survey released today by Game Developers Conference organizers, a whopping 45% of them said “the metaverse concept will never deliver on its promise.” . It’s the most common answer to the question of which company or platform is “best positioned to deliver on the promise of the metaverse concept” and is a sign that the industry is putting its trust in it. the long-term potential of the role-playing genre. Virtual World. “Those trying to sell it don’t know what it is,” wrote one respondent, “and neither do consumers.”
The survey released by GDC precedes its annual event in late March, which comes after a difficult 2022 for super inverse propagandists. Not only is there skepticism about who is building these worlds and for what purpose, but many potential metaverse residents do not believe that there are any over there over there. Meta lost money and laid off workers last year, and even proto-metaverse worlds like Minecraft and Roblox are now low on the game developers’ expected success list.
Not for lack of effort. Some developers are still interested in releasing AR/VR games on platforms like Meta Quest and PlayStation VR2. Of those polled, 36% listed Meta Quest as the platform they look forward to releasing their next game on. For PS VR2, that number is 18%.
Belief in the metaverse, as the survey put it, lies with Epic Games. While nearly half of respondents said their promise would never be fulfilled, 14% thought that if any platform wanted to do so it was the company’s fault. fortress. Meanwhile, only 7 percent thought Horizon Worlds was successful; Same with Minecraft. Five percent think Roblox can do it.
fortress has earned that confidence over the years thanks to Epic arranging events like world concerts featuring artists like Marshmello, Travis Scottand Ariana Grande. No longer just a place for players to compete, it is a space where everyone can enjoy other forms of entertainment together. But Fortnite not the first game to offer virtual community, not even the second or third. “Metaverse needs to admit that it is reinventing the wheel,” said one respondent, pointing to Linden Lab’s 20-year-old virtual world, Second Life. “And then identify why people lose interest in the wheel the first few times.”
“[The metaverse] already exists and is sustainable,” wrote another developer. “It is simply being resold as a new concept by corporations trying to profit from it.” (In Meta’s case, its pivot to ‘verse has been attach profits plummeted and growth remained flat.)
The Metaverse could one day see its true potential realized, but it likely won’t be as Zuckerberg, or even Stephenson, imagined. For the metaverse to be a true alternative reality, it needs to be built by its users. “Any version of it that only exists in the hands of a corporation as an advertising platform, virtual workstation, or virtual real estate marketplace will eventually fail,” one developer wrote. “It needs to be built on things that users really care about.”
