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Comment by wudangmonk | Hacker News Reader

Step 1. Build at least 1 decent mmo. Have an off-game hub where people can interact and show off stuff they collected in said mmo.

Step 2. Keep adding more games and activities, boom! Metaverse.

Facebook went all in with VR and social interactions but who cares about any of that when you give users no reason to use it. You need the GAMES first otherwise why would people want to be in a glorified version of a zoom meeting?. This stuff is obvious and yet they keep wasting billions on this cart with no horse in sight.

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I always think about Fortnite, witch besides the game has concerts and film festivals. Fortnite creative I think is about building things on your island. You can make and share your own games and Now they have "unreal engine light" (Unreal Engine for Fortnite) so making custom games/experiences is becoming a thing.

Tim Sweeny talked about building the Metaverse from a game at the last Game Development Conference. He talked about it not being linked to one company, but I'm not sure where it was going.[1] (8 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ84b-v1DE

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/23/23652928/tim-sweeney-inte...

My partner plays, and there is a lot of voice chat that makes it social...

> You need the GAMES first

You probably need porn first. Porn drives tech adoption from VCRs to the Internet. I know VR porn is out there.

Afterward you can worry about games and other "no, I didn't just buy this for porn" material.

I disagree. If porn gets to be too big of a use-case too early it'll drive away other use cases. OnlyFans was not originally for porn, but if you hear someone has an OF, you assume it's to consume or publish porn. That's mainly because an early investment came from the owner of a porn site.

Porn definitely helps a platform's adoption and growth, but it needs to be an "oh by the way", and not the feature.

Meta has the same problem Nintendo has, only they really know how to develop for their platform properly. But UNLIKE Nintendo they don't have a massive hoard of IP and seasoned game design experience to draw from.

Also just in general game developers have yet to fully exploit VR. Most VR games are either one off experiences or 2D games projected to a headset.

Don't get me wrong some creative stuff has been done. Stuff like beat saber, superhot and even VR Chat make use of the VR space, but most VR games just feel very clunky and don't have much replay value.

It's a very once and a while it's fun arcade experience packed into a console price tag.

This is essentially Tim Sweeney's plan to evolve Fortnite into the metaverse.

It's also the described metaverse evolution in Ready Player One, which is six years older than Fornite. It felt like an obvious and pre-existing idea when Ready Player One was published, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear about older incarnations.

Tron? Not quite the same, in that Flynn didn't enter voluntarily and it's explicitly unexpected for a human to enter, but the merger of games with a virtual world is there.

unfortunately, Facebook had proved that people don't want MMO, they want Facebook and another social media.

Is the metaverse for games then?

No, it is PC replacement. Without 'P' - no disk drives, etc.

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