Technology The 'Metaverse' in Gaming Discussion

I figured might as well broach the subject since it's coming up more and more now with AR and VR stuff and not just from Facebook rebranding itself. But we've had folks like Bobby Kotick, formerly of Activision, babbling about the potential of the 'Metaverse' and others from Microsoft and Facebook and the like gibbering about it.

So to spark off discussion, here's an article presenting contrary opinions regarding the Metaverse, specifically from Ken Kutaragi who invented the Playstation:

Business Insider said:

"Being in the real world is very important, but the metaverse is about making quasi-real in the virtual world, and I can't see the point of doing it," Kutaragi said.

"You would rather be a polished avatar instead of your real self? That's essentially no different from anonymous message board sites," he added.

Kutaragi said the VR and AR headsets associated with metaverse technology are a sticking point. "Headsets would isolate you from the real world, and I can't agree with that," he said, adding: "Headsets are simply annoying."

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It also covers comments from Phili Libin, the Soviet born CEO of the Silicon Valley tech company Evernote who has stated the hype around the 'Metaverse' reminds him of the Soviet-era propaganda he grew up with.

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Meanwhile with all of the press about the Microsoft purchase of Activision, the development of a 'Metaverse' is apparently being brought up A LOT.

Yahoo News said:

By my colleague Stephen Totilo's count, Nadella used the word "metaverse" at least five times in his conference call discussing the deal. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick mentioned the metaverse four times, while Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer used the term twice.

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There's going to be a lot of different metaverses in a lot of different contexts.

Some will be in games, some will be in VR, and some (in several years from now) will be in AR.

Game-type metaverses will be things like Roblox, Fortnite, or GTA Online. Games like that will become more common and eventually deeper. Realistically, though, its old news; Second Life did that a long time ago.

VR-type metaverses will be like the above, but in VR.

Whether Game-type or VR-type are more important will dependent on how fast VR develops.

AR-type metaverses will start to really shine once AR glasses become a viable and semi-common product. Once that happens expect Pokemon-go type stuff to become more common. Additionally, imagine virtual add space. AR-type will probably be the weirdest.

The metaverse will never be too important unless we develop full-dive VR though. Full-dive VR would be just as civilization-changing as interplanetary teleportation or practical, everyday transhumanist/cyborg implants, maybe even human-level intelligence sentient AI.

Hey, as long as Zuck and the other Silicon valley assholes pull all the normie casuals that infested the internet into this web 3.0 nonsense(2.0 btw was basically DoA.)I am happy, if they are stuck in a stupid corpo version of Second Life the SJWs and other nitwits that infested all my favorite forums when Facebook and Twatter became a thing will fuck off and we will have normality.
The internet is too fucking easy!

It seems nobody is able to coherently explain to me what exactly the metaverse is supposed to be. Ask 20 different people and you get 20 different answers. Is it Facebook with VR? Is it being able to play Call of Duty as your WoW character?

Val the Moofia Boss said:

It seems nobody is able to coherently explain to me what exactly the metaverse is supposed to be. Ask 20 different people and you get 20 different answers. Is it Facebook with VR? Is it being able to play Call of Duty as your WoW character?

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VR facebook I think.

I do kinda agree with the PS inventor, the headsets in themselves are something that isn't selling too well even to tech savvy gamers who already own decent PC rigs, how the hell do they think they are going to sell such an expensive, distracting piece of hardware (that gives random people headaches or motion sickness while at it) to the average bored mom on FB and get her to use it often?

Val the Moofia Boss said:

It seems nobody is able to coherently explain to me what exactly the metaverse is supposed to be. Ask 20 different people and you get 20 different answers. Is it Facebook with VR? Is it being able to play Call of Duty as your WoW character?

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Its about rebranding FB with a new brand that will essentially mean "we throw shit at the wall and maybe a piece or two will stick" rather than being synonymous with their social media site, and peddling the VR headsets producers of which they have bought out (Oculus).
Their flagship launch product will be FB integrated VR chat - which is not a new thing, there is dedicated software for that that random nerds use, by the way vtubers kinda evolved out of that stuff, but they are going to market it to non-nerds, yeah, let's see how that works out.

There is also another problem i see with the idea of mass adoption of VR games - the current hardware is kinda limited in the complexity and capability of controls, and that in turn means the kinds of games that can be used with this stuff cannot be too complex. Looking at the current state of VR games, i'm not convinced to get special hardware for them.

So basically pie in the sky buffet tailored to boost the company's stock price and con investors into putting more money into a 'growth' stock.

Agent23 said:

So basically pie in the sky buffet tailored to boost the company's stock price and con investors into putting more money into a 'growth' stock.

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Kinda, they may kinda believe that it will work. However, there is considerable chance this will end just like Google Plus or Google Stadia, which also were ambitious plans by a big tech company to expand into a different sector of big tech that they have little to no institutional experience with.

Marduk said:

Kinda, they may kinda believe that it will work. However, there is considerable chance this will end just like Google Plus or Google Stadia, which also were ambitious plans by a big tech company to expand into a different sector of big tech that they have little to no institutional experience with.

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Google Plus was actually a pretty nice alternative to Facebook, IMHO, one of the few products that make me legit sad it is gone.

Stadia is, IMHO 'ahead of its time' in the sense that a lot of triple A garbage companies want something like it.

On the one hand, streaming actually lets you play a game on almost any device, on the other, and this is probably their main motivator for trying, it makes piracy nearly impossible unless there is a source code leak.

Val the Moofia Boss said:

It seems nobody is able to coherently explain to me what exactly the metaverse is supposed to be. Ask 20 different people and you get 20 different answers. Is it Facebook with VR? Is it being able to play Call of Duty as your WoW character?

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There isn't any singular view because every company hopes to "control" the metaverse themselves.

Marduk said:

Its about rebranding FB with a new brand that will essentially mean "we throw shit at the wall and maybe a piece or two will stick" rather than being synonymous with their social media site, and peddling the VR headsets producers of which they have bought out (Oculus).
Their flagship launch product will be FB integrated VR chat - which is not a new thing, there is dedicated software for that that random nerds use, by the way vtubers kinda evolved out of that stuff, but they are going to market it to non-nerds, yeah, let's see how that works out.

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Officially Facebook is raising their employee count by 20%, and all those new employees are going into Metaverse projects; they are a lot more serious about the Metaverse than Google was about Stadia.

Agent23 said:

Stadia is, IMHO 'ahead of its time' in the sense that a lot of triple A garbage companies want something like it.

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Google was almost never gonna beat Nvidia, Microsoft, or Amazon at Streaming.

I think Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's GamePass will eventually both grow into viable services. Whether Amazon can create a service that can meaningful compete with GamePass is the question.

Agent23 said:

Google Plus was actually a pretty nice alternative to Facebook, IMHO, one of the few products that make me legit sad it is gone.

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I didn't like how it basically forced you to tie your real identity into your Youtube account, making it impossible to post videos anonymously.

Terthna said:

I didn't like how it basically forced you to tie your real identity into your Youtube account, making it impossible to post videos anonymously.

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Connecting those two was a bad idea, also what real identity?
Multiple gmial/google accounts were and still are a thing, and they didn't even require you to use a phone for Gmail once upon a time.
Also they relented and removed the connection, IIRC.

Overall the experience on Plus was imho better, in particular, the circles functionality and the overall design were nice.

Most of that userbase went to a place called MeWe, with the rigtwingers going to Minds.

Agent23 said:

Connecting those two was a bad idea, also what real identity?
Multiple gmial/google accounts were and still are a thing, and they didn't even require you to use a phone for Gmail once upon a time.
Also they relented and removed the connection, IIRC.

Overall the experience on Plus was imho better, in particular, the circles functionality and the overall design were nice.

Most of that userbase went to a place called MeWe, with the rigtwingers going to Minds.

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Early on, one of the rules was that you had to use your real name for your Google+ account; then they changed it to letting you use pseudonyms, but only if you could prove that you were know by said pseudonyms in the media, or on other platforms. It wasn't until July of 2014 that they completely abandoned their attempts to force people to use their real names, a little over half a year after they started trying to force integration with Youtube.

If you opened your account sometime after they gave up trying push all that nonsense, I could see how your opinion of the service might be more positive than my own; but those early years burned a lot of bridges.

Terthna said:

Google Plus Deleting Accounts En Masse: No Clear Answers

A number of Google+ accounts have been deleted in the last 24 hours as the new social network struggles with real name policy.

www.zdnet.com

Early on, one of the rules was that you had to use your real name for your Google+ account; then they changed it to letting you use pseudonyms, but only if you could prove that you were know by said pseudonyms in the media, or on other platforms. It wasn't until July of 2014 that they completely abandoned their attempts to force people to use their real names, a little over half a year after they started trying to force integration with Youtube.

If you opened your account sometime after they gave up trying push all that nonsense, I could see how your opinion of the service might be more positive than my own; but those early years burned a lot of bridges.

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My google account was opened when I created my first g-mail account, IIRC, which was fairly early on when Google began offering that service and they hadn't gobbled up YT yet.
I don't even think that ever had my real name or credentials, period.

As to G+, well I don't recall when I started using it, but I had no problem changing my name to whatever I wanted, so maybe it was after 2014, or maybe it just 'inherited' stuff from my gmail since it was created prior to Google doing other nonsense.

In any case, G+ was a good idea, which they botched for purely non-technical reasons, putting retards like Zunker at the healm didn't help things, either.
I think they just wanted to sideways promote him to a post in Siberia.


Google loves to do that, IMHO.

I suppose it should be expected... VR leads to Increase of Insurance Home Contents Claims.

The Register said:

Despite Facebook – sorry, "Meta" – throwing its weight behind the "metaverse", figures from Brit insurance giant Aviva suggest a virtual-reality headset is far from a necessary purchase if you like having nice things.

The insurer reckons home contents claims involving nerd goggles were up 31 per cent last year, commonly because someone punched their lovely 4K TV or cleared the mantelpiece of ornaments while enthralled by a VR game. Such claims have risen 68 per cent since 2016.

Aviva UK property claims director Kelly Whittington said: "As new games and gadgets become popular, we often see this playing through in the claims made by our customers. In the past we've seen similar trends involving consoles with handsets, fitness games and even the likes of rogue fidget spinners."

The average payout for accidental damage in 2021 was around £650, the insurer said, and usually due to TVs broken in the height of VR passion. One chap called up Aviva because he hurled a controller at the tube after a zombie jumpscare, but a kid was also said to have smashed two designer figurines on a mantelpiece performing a swiping move in a game.

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It does touch upon what i think is the biggest obstacle for VR based software. Control interface. They have the same limitation that stops consoles from having more complex games, forces clumsy interface menus on console games that they do have, and generally it is a pain in the ass. To make full use of the potential of VR, something equal, and preferably better than mouse/keyboard is needed. Its a minimum requirement for VR to be more than a gimmick and to blow up in gaming, the computing power and software to handle this are already there, but without right controls games like this cannot be played properly and need to be dumbed down to what controls can support. That the current controls, in addition to similar limitations, require moving and swinging limbs widely while having blocked sight of the surroundings just asks for a whole another kind of problems. Other than straight out of sci-fi cybernetic interfaces there is no great solution to the interface problem.

John Carmack resigned from Meta/Facebook.

As you may know, John Carmack left id Software in 2013 due to their failure to support Oculus VR and became Oculus VR's Chief Technology Officer. In 2014 Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook and despite promises to not require a Facebook account for using future VR offerings, Facebook eventually reneged. Regardless Facebook began releasing VR headsets in 2016 and as John Carmack states, with the latest VR Headset model, the Meta Oculus Quest 2 which was released in the Fall of 2020, he is happy with the product.

His issues were apparently with Meta's culture itself, stating it operates at half-efficiency and that his strategic goals didn't align with Mark Zuckerbergs and furthermore despite having such a high position and thus voice, didn't feel he could move or influence things for the better.



John Carmack will now be focusing on his own startup Keen Technologies, an Artificial General Intelligence company and leaving his decade in the VR world behind... for now.

He basically confirmed what pretty much everyone else already knew or suspected: Meta has a terrible culture that results in terrible employee efficiency, requiring ridiculous amounts of resources to get things done.

ParadiseLost said:

He basically confirmed what pretty much everyone else already knew or suspected: Meta has a terrible culture that results in terrible employee efficiency, requiring ridiculous amounts of resources to get things done.

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The Fish rots from the head, and a lot of these so called Tech Entrepreneurs with measly sites succeeding and astronomical company valuations have been flying too high.

Their shitty little sites are neither essential nor a big enough technical breakthrough to warrant the amount of ego stroking some blowhards like Musk have been engaging in.

Zuck is far from the only valuations-drunk tech asshole, Marc Benioff is probably an even bigger piece of activist shit than he is.
Oh, well, the Market and the Investors will inevitably punish him for misallocating money into bullshit pet projects.

Facebook isn't unreasonably valued right now. It has a P/E ratio of 11.39, which is fair for how its performing right now.

Tesla, though overvalued, is generally impressive in that breaking into the auto oligopoly shouldn't have been possible at all.