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: Making the Metaverse
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https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Yahoo Finance has a new story, “Metaverse: ‘Assuming you need a VR headset is just repeating Meta’s assumptions,’ author says” that I’m somewhat biased about liking, because well, I’m the author. It’s taken from a panel from a few hours ago (watch a clip above), where we get into the definition of the Metaverse,…
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In my personal narrative for the evolution of the Metaverse, I'd arrange the historical timeline roughly (and very simply) this way: Metaverse zero point, 1992-1996: Snow Crash published; VRML and several very early metaverse platforms launched, including Active Worlds and Cybertown. Metaverse 1.0, 2003-2008: Second Life launched, along with a number of other metaverse-aspirational virtual…
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In case you missed it, Tim Sweeney laid out his vision for the Metaverse last week after his company Epic unleashed a number of metaverse platform-related announcements — watch above at around 1 hour in: Let’s take a long term look at what we see here. And the core of it is some very real…
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Fortnite in recent years has been the least metaverse-ish of the leading metaverse platforms. While interviewing insiders for my book, my strong sense is that Epic hadn’t originally anticipated outside brands considering the platform as a real world application platform, and assumed it would be more akin to a standard modding mode for gamers. And…
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Interesting Axios story illustrates just how much Silicon Valley has shifted its interest and investment into Generative AI startups like OpenAI and Midjourney, away from metaverse platforms and related technology: According to PitchBook data compiled by Axios Media Deals' Tim Baysinger, through March 16, 2022, companies that played in the metaverse or web3 space had…
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Above: Frontlines' Daily Active User rate via RoMonitor Stats Last week I described Frontlines, a Roblox game experience with newly updated AAA-level graphics and gameplay, as an amazing breakthrough in metaverse platform technology; I even said it showed how Roblox could be a competitor against Steam itself. That's still true, but here's a somewhat important…
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A key question I tangle with in my upcoming book is what I call the Metaverse Age Cliff. It's very impressive that a metaverse platform like Roblox has 250 million+ active users, but will those users go away when they're no longer impressionable pre-teens and teens, in search of platforms with better graphics and functionality?…
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Above: From my January compilation of 800+ metaverse job openings Mitch Wagner has a good article on Fierce Electronics that helps separate metaverse hype from metaverse reality, and naturally I have much to say on that topic: So the metaverse is dead, right? Wrong. The hype bubble has collapsed. But the metaverse is growing. “Metaverse…
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Courtesy the team at Naver, the South Korean company behind ZEPETO, here's some recent user numbers for the mobile metaverse platform that I compiled for my upcoming book: Monthly active users: 15M – 20M. User-created items sold on the platform daily: 1.5 million. Top markets by usage: China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, USA, France, Saudi…
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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…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 