Why did the metaverse die? Because Silicon Valley doesn’t understand the concept of fun

☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 25 points –
fastcompany.com
17

I've always seen it as "they tried to monetize a platform before they had a platform that anyone wanted to use"

Basically, the thing was made from the start to have a bunch of ways to make money, but that didn't actually put a lot of effort into thinking on what would make it fun it attractive to users.

They're so used to monetizing that they don't realize they need something to monetize before they can start monetizing.

This is such a great example of how capitalism warps people's minds so that they're no longer able to even conceive of doing an activity for the sake of enjoyment, everything has to be some sort of a hussle or a grind to them:

Nowhere has this clash been more apparent than in the efforts of crypto peddlers to promote play-to-earn games, in which players are incentivized with cryptocurrency rewards. Last year, Reddit cofounder, venture capitalist and play-to-earn evangelist Alexis Ohanian predicted that by 2027, “ninety percent of people will not play a game unless they are being valued properly for that time,” a position he restated in May of this year. “The ‘play-to-earn’ model in gaming lets players earn rewards that have real-world value just for playing,” he wrote.

I've literally never heard a single person bring that idea up. Acting like it's somehow a widely held belief because that dude said so is idiotic.

Must be living a sheltered life to have never heard of the grind culture.

Hustle culture, sure. Side hustles, sure. The concept that a game company should pay me to play their game, nope.

The point there isn't the specific mechanic, but the fact that people who've been pushing ideas like NFTs in games look at everything as some sort of a hustle. Any activity has to have some monetizing component or they don't see value in it. So, when people like that try to make games, they fail to comprehend the core concept of what a game is leading to hilarious results the article talks about.

The new demo looked pretty insane. After watching it I was like ah fuck thats gonna be the future

The new demo for what? I have no idea what you are talking about. I'd like to think I know a bit about metaverses as a VR enthusiast.

I would presume they're referring to the videos of Quest 3's passthrough capabilities

my favorite part of that video is when he says (paraphrasing):

this is like a video call, and that's cool.. but we can do so much more.. like, we can ... have meetings

such vision :)

I laughed when lex was like wow it doesn't even feel awkward that I'm right in face and zuc said nah it does

Yeah that is real impressive, I thought we would be years away from the realistic meta avatars becoming usable on actual hardware. I don't really understand what's so metaversey about this though, Apple showed off the same concept with no ties to the idea of metaverses.

EDIT: I watched a bit more and hearing Mark's ideas of the metaverse he wants honestly sounds very similar to the plans and sdk's for the Apple Vision Pro. I don't know if this is truly what the future will be, but it seems exciting.