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.