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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

I predict the Metaverse will fail, and fail early. It will be Google Plus, but worse.

No one I personally know cares about Metaverse, including young people and Facebook users.

The 'metaverse' in terms that there will absolutely be a VR cyber/world/land/facebook/sims2/second life experience. Will it be what FB wants it to be (they want to cash in), probably not but this is 100% coming. Looks at every immersive games (WOW, Second Life, etc...) in the past, even if its just that it will be hugely lucrative and successful.

We already have video games for that.

Metaverse is like a video game with WAY more money and reach.

Eh, not really. Video game design is hard. You won't succeed trying to make social media into a video game. People like to point to things like Ready Player One, but honestly both the book and the movie's depiction of the game were stupid. They would not work. That's not how games work.

"You won't succeed trying to make social media into a video game"

The comment that tells me facebook is on to something.

shrug. Let's check back in 5 years.

> Metaverse is like a video game with WAY more money and reach.

Metaverse is like a video game, except every time you play you are forced to have an awkward family and high school reunion (both at the same time).

Does Facebook really have the infrastructure in place to host the metaverse? Are they buying up the best gaming firms, have extensive enterprise architecture experience?

Look at Microsoft. My bet is on big enterprise/cloud tech + video game companies.

No they don't. At all. That is why I related it to people selling real estate on the Moon when moon landings were yet feasible. They are clearing trying to associate the brand Metaverse with Facebook right now, and hoping they can fill in the backend when they (possibly) have the capability to. They are trying to steal brand recognition for vaporware right now. Playing the long game.

That makes sense/get your arguments now. Had similar thoughts.

Another analogy would be the infamous Segway marketing failure. Here [1] is an article from 2015, drawing an analogy between the Segway failure and a different failed VR project (Google Glass).

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-technol...

It seems like they also don't have users' trust, which is well deserved. And like a person standing in your bedroom IRL feels more invasive than online tracking, user tracking in VR will feel more invasive than on a website.

Anecdotally, of my ~5 game programming friends, all with 15+ years experience, 4 did a stint at Facebook.

But all 4 left pretty quickly. They all described the experience as good for their bank account but bad for their mental health. That's saying a lot coming from game devs.

Their vision of the metaverse is so boring they could just take OpenSimulator and cut half the features. I don't doubt their ability to host.

And if they're basing it on VR they don't have to scale very fast either.

I can name plenty of immersive games that were bombs.

I agree. It doesn't carry anything intrinsically interesting. You'd have far more luck porting VR into an existing popular game that is fun and making it more of a social hang out scene. You'll struggle greatly trying to make it a mainstream social media platform. Imagine a social media player that you could only log into from your computer at home.

that's until you get accessible haptic feedback devices and realistic comfortable VR

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