Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: Blockchain
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Check out our latest wing of the Virtual Worlds Museum ™, this one devoted to Blockchain Worlds, i.e. virtual worlds integrated on some significant level with crypto/blockchain, or what's often called web3. This is very much a work in progress, and we're looking to add other web3 virtual worlds beyond the twenty or so we're…
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Originally publisher on my Patreon A recent Linden Lab job posting has causes some community grumbling (as here) because of how it might be interpreted: We’re looking for seasoned BizOps Director to architect and build our operational framework from the ground up. Initially operating as an individual contributor, with the potential to build and lead…
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In case you missed Matt Ball's prediction, here's the teaser trailer to OVERDARE, an upcoming mobile-forward metaverse platform from Krafton, the South Korean-based publisher of PUBG Battlegrounds. From the announcement: The project represents a bold, new frontier in mobile-based interactive platforms for user-generated content where users are free to express themselves creatively. Built on Unreal…
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The Metaverse is very much not dead, but while debunking random hit-and-run diatribes to that effect, I'm in the weird position of also wondering how (or even if) the 600 million+ active users across various metaverse platforms can (or should) somehow be seamlessly unified. Which paradoxically, means debating the approach taken by Metaverse-as-a-Service-startup Lamin1, co-founded…
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Nostr is a new-ish social network project and if I’m being honest, I haven’t thought about it much at all except vaguely as that obscure thing Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is backing. But when Philip Rosedale was telling me about FairShare, he mentioned Nostr as "[the other] thing I'm most excited about right now as…
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Richard Bartle, the game industry's most respected expert on virtual worlds and the virtual economies in them, was recently invited to speak at a UK cryptocurrency conference about the immense challenges of integrating NFTs and blockchain into a virtual world (to put it diplomatically). He recently posted on social media what happened next, and…
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You might have seen recent claims that Decentraland, the metaverse platform which raised USD $25 million in Ethereum sales of virtual land to fund its development, only has active users in the dozens. That’s not quite true, game industry analyst and designer Lars Doucet tells me, citing his recent report for research firm Naavik —…
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In case you missed MTV's Video Music Awards last weekend, BLACKPINK won the Best Metaverse Performance prize for a show the KPOP group put on in PUBG Mobile, a metaverse platform with 30 million daily active players, while Snoop and Eminem performed in Otherside, a new NFT-driven metaverse platform launched last April. Despite a heavy…
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Yesterday I mentioned that "nearly all" metaverse platforms built around web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. I qualified it that way because I recently found out about a possible exception: Upland, the mixed reality real estate acquisition game (and the first customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service), sells NFTs…
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Above screengrab taken from the Axie Growth Data spreadsheet When we last checked in with Axie Infinity, widely touted as the model of "play-to-earn", NFT/blockchain-based games, it had dropped from 1.3 million daily active users in April to under 600,000 in June. That's a huge drop, but 600K DAU is still quite impressive, ranking it…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 