> I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the metaverse concept...
If they had, is there even a compelling product there? For me, the definitive analysis here is Dan Olson's[1] (though in the context of decentraland). Doing a metaverse in VR is contradictory to having users walk from place to place (because a huge chunk of your users will get motion sick). Having a metaverse where you have to walk from place to place is contradictory to metaverse as a productivity tool (because walking from place to place is a lot slower than clicking a button).
VR has some compelling standalone experiences, but the user is generally constrained to staying still or moving around a small, fixed area. Maybe a VR meeting is more compelling than Zoom, but is it worth the extra cost and effort of donning a VR headset?
Likewise a large open world where you can, potentially, do anything is compelling (see Minecraft), but is it a space where you would want to do something productive? In Minecraft the inefficiency of walking around and working with individual blocks is half the point - it's what makes it fun - but it's not an efficient way to build or design or shop or even consume "content" if you value your time.
So what's left? The metaverse itself as entertainment? Maybe. But it's not going to be the next iPhone. At best you're aiming for the ubiquity of World of Warcraft.
What is it about computer people that they see a flood of open, free, engaging material about computers, and think, "I should put up an artificial road block so that fewer people read my writing".
I think they could have had moderate success with a cleaned up, somewhat ‘moderated’ version of Second Life given they have the hardware and largest installed base for VR, but instead it was these disparate ‘worlds’ of varying quality that felt disjointed and lonely.
It’s a bummer because they did a good job on the 3D authoring tools - much better than Google in their various VR paint options over the years.
This is so close to validating my expectations that I'm almost skeptical of its veracity. I'm a regular Quest player, but I couldn't tell you how to launch Horizons if you held a gun to my head.
The leaders of corporate initiatives like this often tell themselves that they are building an ecosystem. They also seem convinced that an ecosystem will manifest from a highly curated, centrally developed silo that they have total control over. I guess it sort of worked for Facebook back in the day, but they were surfing on a lot of good will when it happened (and look at it now).
Things that are much closer to a metaverse than Horizons will ever be:
- Minecraft (Bedrock)
- VRChat
- Any popular multiplayer game that includes a free level editor
- The open web