Stupid paywall
Here's the free part:
The metaverse is in the midst of a real estate meltdown. Sales volumes and average prices for virtual land have plunged this year, part of a broader slide in crypto and non-fungible token prices.
Soaring interest in virtual property spawned an industry that mirrors traditional commercial real estate—buyers develop land by adding virtual storefronts, and then sell or rent it to companies looking to set up shop as a marketing strategy or to sell things like clothing for online avatars. Investors who bought at the peak are now sitting on land that has tumbled in value. Meanwhile the real-world economic downturn could weigh on brands’ appetite for spending on building out their metaverse presence.
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/xmYT6R5raD.jpg
the consequences of people who weren't online in the 2000s, using it in the 2020s
I just instinctively feel like everyone in this type of shit is either a boomer or a zoomer
I've never made the connection that both boomers and zoomers have never experienced the web pre-web 2.0 until now.
What would you consider web 2.0? Everything congealing into a handful of social media sites?
This is just Second Life with more investor money. First as tragedy, then as farce...
An online role-playing life-simulator in the mid 2000s. Parodied on the Office where Dwight plays it just to roleplay as the same thing he does in his real life. Many investors bought advertisement space aka real estate in that game, for example Coca Cola bought an island. The hype was unwarranted and the game died out. The game is mostly filled with sexual roleplayers nowadays from what I have heard.
That early era of internet ads when nobody knew how worthless they were was amazing. I remember the guy who had a website with a million pixels where each pixel cost $1 to advertise on, he got fukken early retirement money even though nobody had any reason to visit his site to see the ads in the first place.
FOMO is a powerful drug lol, thats why every game company is putting it into their games.
The game is mostly filled with sexual roleplayers nowadays from what I have heard
back then it was more than just sexual roleplayers - it had gambling too.
Not really surprised to hear it's full of sexual roleplayers when a lot of the ads for it were sexual
Are you telling me these tulips I bought are in fact not worth the same as a large manorial estate?
the only reason real estate works is because all humans have to exist somewhere and keep some of the stuff they need to survive, like shelter and underwear and peanut butter. having somewhere to exist is compulsory.
nobody needs virtual space to sleep or keep their virtual potato chips. like "oh no, my default virtual apartment is depressing. sucks i have to sit here with a VR headset on for 12 hours."
someone above said it's all boomers and zoomers that got roped into this because they missed pre-web 2.0. i never thought of it like that, but no shit. the dotcom crash was instructive. i worked in IT at the time and watching all these huge piles of money change hands over hype was incredible. like mark cuban becoming stupid rich because he owned "broadcast.com" which Yahoo! thought was worth $5.7 billion for unknown reasons, apparently even to yahoo because it was shuttered like 2 years later.
Another aspect that nobody seems to consider with these 12 hour a day VR sessions is the fact that VR is really uncomfortable for a lot of people. Half the streamers I watch take some kind of medication before doing a 3 hour stream in VR and even then, if the game does something weird, they might just end early because they feel so sick that they have to stop. These are the people using VR the most heavily beyond people that focus exclusively on VR stuff and if they're struggling to make it a few hours even with medication, how the fuck is most of the population going to just shove one on and not all collectively vomit several times a day?
You say VR is flawed by making people nauseous. I say VR opens up a whole new innovative field of marketing anti-nausea pharmaceuticals to consumers.
Are you really a gamer if you don't keep a bottle of Dramamine eXtreme next to your VR set?
There's also the part where real land is naturally scarce, whereas virtual "land" can be practically infinite.
The only reason to get in on "virtual real estate" is if you foresee a lot of people wanting to use that artificially limited virtual world. But when the landlording starts before anyone even uses it, people can see that and just go to some other "metaverse".
like mark cuban becoming stupid rich because he owned “broadcast.com” which Yahoo! thought was worth $5.7 billion for unknown reasons, apparently even to yahoo because it was shuttered like 2 years later.
I loved that skewering. mark Cuban is such a pointless asshole, so of course his role in media is to be a genius business man.
The whole point behind investing in land is that they aren't making any more of it.
This is just...stupidity. Yeah, I get what Facebook's "Metaverse" is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a replacement for reality, where we can send the proles to live out their lives and they can't harm us in the real world. An environment where 100% of everything is under the control of the worst people in society. Dissidence is simply coded out of the simulation. Wait until we get locked in pods because they think it costs too much in energy to let us roam free. Heck, in Europe they're already mandating people sweat or freeze to "do our best to aid Ukraine". They'll say, "put on your VR headset and live a better life than you ever could outdoors!" and there's no way out, because the pod bay door won't open. Insect-based protein meals arrive through a slot, like how prisons feed inmates who are in the hole.
lmao why would anyone "lease" a digital space when they could just make their own? Unless you're leasing space on your server (ie charging money for an actual service) that digital space is worthless.
capitalism is fun because the profit incentive makes no distinction between worthwhile production and con artistry
This whole concept is built on the idea/hope that people will want to interact with a virtual world in identical ways to how they interact with the real world.
But the problem is of course that unless you are bought into the idea of a "Second Life"(Which of course already exists), this is all unnecessary and inconvenient bullshit, theres literally no reason to simulate a limited amount of land for a limited amount of businesses to inhabit and pay rents for people to simulatedly go into and browse, just have a website, moron. The enthusiastic userbase for this already have a 20 year old ecosystem in place, trying to distance yourself from Second Life is probably more counter productive than associating yourself with the concept at this point.
Someone posted an interview with a metaverse evangelist on here a while back and the guy basically had no answer for why this is a practical desirable concept, his only examples of actual industry usage of this sort of modeling tech is modeling airports and offices to be able to predict architectural challenges and shit like that, and even he said that it would be pointless for the average person to be able to go to a virtual scale replica of the Chicago airport.
Edit: Also assuming you'd want this to succeed even then the rollout they are doing is putting the cart before the horse, buying real real estate in a freshly built city is a pretty safe bet cause at some point someone is gonna need to live there, or somewhere in the city, they are bound to the physical location where they live. People don't have to be anywhere in a virtual world, first you need to give them a reason to be there, and 500 investor dickheads telling you to join their virtual city so they can make money from you is not a good way to do that.
This kinda shit needs a serious long term investment in getting a userbase invested into the free parts of the world before you can monetize it, you cant just have a bunch of assholes all buying up land and then waiting for monetization to start, cause each one of these guys obviously knows that if they sit on their ass and let "someone else" do the work, they'll have profited on an investment they just let sit there instead of making a smaller profit from developing something for it.
The only two ways I have seen the metaverse been advertised so far is abstract corporate garbage that just kinda wants you to think it is "cool", and investor shitheads trying to convince you that you can make money from it. They should at least try to make a reason for a normal consumer to join in outside of "yo this virtual computer magic is rather cool innit".
I guess also probably some of the idea is that people will be both investor and consumer at the same time, but that just flat out doesnt happen. Theres an example in the folding ideas crypto video of one of the crypto "play to earn" games models where the economy started going fucking bananas cause the only people who played were either people who were literally employed to play the game for a "boss", or the bosses who were there to make the maximum amount of profit and spend the minimum amount of currency, and the people employed dont have any money of their own inside the game. So you'll have 1000 assholes who have spent money on an investment property, and now you have to convince these guys who are here to make a profit that they should put more of their money into the ecosystem, in order to make profit for other guys, its a pure dead end.
I mean nowadays most (maybe all) construction projects are being modelled before construction in 3D CAD software that's actually specialized for that sort of thing anyways, that's just state of the art already. And if a customer pays enough, you can already model every single book in a bookcase (or whatever details you want) just so the client can walk around the building in VR and feel the vibes I guess. No "Metaverse" needed for that.
A lot of the "cool" level of advertising is banking on the average person not understanding basic VR and AR. The technology only kind of exists right now, VR headsets are glorified motion controllers, plus they're heavy, bulky, and almost no one has them outside of enthusiasts. A lot of Meta's advertising revolves around seamless AR hologram type things and VR environments that are indistinct from reality. Nothing on that level quite exists yet, but investors with more money than brain cells don't need to know that. It's all hope and empty promises about half-realized technology eventually becoming necessary.
A lot of comparisons are made to the dot com bust, where there wasn't yet a good valuation on pumping money into websites. It's also similar to the late 00s rush to make everything a phone app on the pretense smartphones would be ubiquitous, which actually did unfortunately become true.
Maybe I'm getting old but I can't see VR becoming ubiquitous at the same level unless something very strange happens
