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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Originally published on my Patreon Kelly Stonelake is a 15 year veteran of Facebook/Meta, who recently filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging a series of highly serious charges around sexual assault, denied promotions, and a culture of discrimination. While her lawsuit has been covered elsewhere, her last role at Meta included Director of Product…
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Ex-Meta Director Helps Confirm What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds: "No One Loved the Product": As I wrote back in March, a former Meta developer speaking on condition of anonymity described a workforce for Horizon who were mostly disinterested in virtual worlds or even VR. Kelly Stonelake, speaking on the record with me, is able…
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Stars Reach, Raph Koster's highly ambitious upcoming galaxy sandbox MMORPG, had its successful Kickstarter a few months ago, but longtime virtual world developer Matt Daly writes that a thriving player community has emerged — even before the crowdfunder. Groups are already evolving and building in fascinating ways: Stars Reach keeps subverting my preconceived notions of…
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Seemingly everyone in tech is talking about a huge ruling in the long-running Epic Games v. Apple dispute: [J]udge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just ruled that, effective immediately, Apple is no longer allowed to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and blocks the company from restricting how developers can point users to where they can…
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Horizon Worlds Pivoted to Compete With VRChat Around 2019 (Unsuccessfully), Says Senior Meta Veteran
I keep learning more about how Meta, one of the most powerful and profitable companies in human history, has been unable to grow its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds. Part of that story is told in my book (plug!), while another part of the story I wrote about here, in which Meta leadership decided to develop…
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Here's some new Roblox stats which caught my eye: Roblox reached 82.9 million daily active users in 2024 with 80% of those playing the popular game on mobile devices, according to Roblox's annual report. PC was the second most popular platform at just 17%, followed by consoles at 3%. Emphasis mine! Lately the company has been…
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I've asked this before, but here I go again: What's the point of prompt-based world building, when we already have many multiple 3D building tools which are user-friendly, feature-rich, and, well, fun? This point must be repeated, since Meta is currently promising we can build faster and smarter with GenAI Tools in Meta Horizon Worlds:…
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Quark Multiplayer is a new networking engine showing off the ability to deploy worlds/experiences with thousands (and thousands) of concurrent users in the same space. Coming soon to an SDK for Unity and Unreal, you can apply for Early Access here. It's a project from new-ish UK start-up MetaGravity, I'm not too familiar with the…
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Originally published on my Patreon HELIX is an upcoming metaverse platform powered by Unreal 5 that I've been tracking for quite awhile, and the folks at developer Hypersonic Laboratories just sent me this video showing off its many features. Some highlights that jumped out at me: You can build a map as large as Manhattan.…
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Here's a fun interview I did recently with Legal4Tech, a podcast/news site exploring the regulatory issues around technology, especially from an European Union perspective. My favorite highlight is getting into the question, "Is the Metaverse meant to replace reality?" Because my answer is, roughly, No, it's meant to replace the toxic crap on TikTok, X,…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 