Right: Business Insider's hilariously misguided "obituary" of May 2023
To recap, here's just some of what has happened since Business Insider published that metaverse "obituary" not even 12 months ago:
- Roblox, which described itself in its IPO filing as the Metaverse, recently gained 350 million+ monthly active users — more people on that one platform than the USA has citizens.
- Epic Games, led by CEO Tim Sweeney, who has wanted to build the Metaverse since the 90s, reported 100 million monthly active users on Fortnite — and more recently, that Disney now owns nearly 10% of the company in order to build an interoperable universe integrating IP (Marvel, Star Wars, Disney/Pixar movies, etc. ) from the media giant.
- Apple launched the Vision Pro, which includes a partnership to integrate top metaverse platform Rec Room.
- Metaverse platform VRChat passed 100,000 peak concurrent users — up from a peak of 40,000 in 2021.
- Even Meta, which has struggled with its own misguided strategy, saw its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds become a top 10 most popular app on its Quest platform. (Behind Rec Room and VRChat, to be sure, but still.)
Ironically, all this has happened while "AI" was supposed to be the sole leading buzzword in Silicon Valley. But here's the thing:
Buzzwords with little understanding of the underlying technology are destined to disappoint. The Metaverse was declared "dead" by people with a straw man's conception of it, or not even the vaguest notion of how it was originally, painstakingly defined. But after the buzz faded, the platforms and the people who found value in them kept thriving.
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