Its funny, because Ready Player One is a hagiography to the '00s-era MMOs (that largely sucked, were impossible to maintain, and have completely fallen out of fashion in the last ten years). And now we've got these companies coming in and saying "What if literally everything was an MMO? Like, every waking hour you were in this mediocre open game world powered by NEETs and digital gold farmers?"

Like making any piece of media worth spending time with is really fucking hard! But no, we're gonna do an Intellectual Property Museum again.

I think we did crest a point at which there was simply too much content, and now we're seeing a downsizing of sorts. But the old IP is too valuable to just throw away, and nobody knows how to do the old Disney "put this shit in the vault for five or ten years to let it recapitalize via nostalgia" trick anymore.

So the new solution is to create "All The Things World", maintain the superabundance of old properties, and just pack them into a Content As Service model where you can sample it a la carte in the most generic manner possible.

I think corporations are desperately trying to capture a prior form of the internet where there was a lot of creativity bouncing around because people were making stuff for fun rather than money or notoriety. They're trying to reinvent second life, but make it private.

They all believe they can create a second layer to the internet, a sub internet. It reminds me of how public spaces don't exist anymore in real life, but every now and then a private company will set up a little park or shops somewhere. But it's not really real. You get kicked out after 10pm, or it's just for residents, or it'll have its own private security. They want a metaverse that's like a mandatory private enclosed internet.

Frankly the peak Metaverse product has already been invented - VRChat. Just like RP1 everyone uses avatars that are based on some IP, there's potential for boundless creativity which means there's a few really cool things and a lot of crap, you can even code minigames in it like the server I used to frequent which had jets you could flight sim around in.

Every corpo that wants their own meta project is starting well behind the power curve of "look how you want, be in any world you can imagine", and is doomed to failure unless they get serious AAA money behind themselves and develop something compelling on its own - but you can't do that without the promise of a return on investment, which there won't be until the metaverse gets big, which won't happen until there's AAA developers working in it, and on and on.