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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When we talk about user-generated content on metaverse platforms, it's important to focus not just on 3D models and scripted experiences in-world, but metaverse content created for external consumption — for instance, quite prominently, for social media/streaming video platforms. With VRChat, for instance, in compiling a list of YouTube channels focused on that platform, there's…
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I've been wanting to make this announcement for months, and now I finally can, through this scoop from Dean Takahashi on VentureBeat: For a guy who was an embedded journalist inside the virtual world of Second Life, this whole metaverse thing is a ride around the merry-go-round again. And so Wagner James Au, who previously wrote a book…
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Valid question from reader "Mitch", responding to my post last week pointing out the tiny weekly active users of blockchain-based metaverse platforms: What qualifies an active weekly user in this chart? The Sandbox is still in Alpha. I joined to check it out, I thought it had potential, and then I uninstalled it and I'm…
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Writing about the Metaverse increasingly becomes (sorry) meta: [30 years ago] Neal Stephenson was just about to publish “Snow Crash,” the book that literally defined the Metaverse and in the process inspired a generation of technologists. I’m from a generation of technologists inspired by Neal as well — the slightly later 1999-era “Cryptonomicon” reading group.…
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As comparison data to that chart on blockchain-based metaverse platforms from yesterday, here's VRChat's daily peak concurrency on Steam since 2017. (Via SteamDB.) Important qualifier: This is not a full reflection of user activity on VRChat, since it doesn't count people logging in via the Quest headset/store. After a brief spike in late 2017/early 2018…
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Update, 6/10: In a conversation with Axie Infinity's developer on Twitter, Arcane Research amended its report of Axie Infinity usage, saying it's much more than initially suggested in this infographic; Sky Maven COO Aleksander Leonard Larsen claims current usage is 588K DAU / 1.5M MAU. Read this post for more details. Many crypto enthusiasts insist that…
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I missed this Yahoo! News article from last week but I can't let this claim pass: “People have kind of lost interest in the metaverse, because characters look like cartoons with no legs,” Marc Petit, Epic Games’ VP and general manager of Unreal Engine, told Yahoo Finance. “I mean, who wants to be that? This…
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Longtime reader Martin K. has a pretty excellent rant responding to Meta's vision for the Metaverse from its global exec Nick Clegg. And while I might recommend taking some of it with some dashes of sodium, Martin hits pretty hard: Maybe the most interesting aspects of that essay are the things that Meta is doing…
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As a good compare and contrast with Meta's questionable vision for the Metaverse, here's a long weekend read — a Financial Times Q&A with Epic Games' Tim Sweeney. Who might disagree, but I totally think this is his nice way of saying "WTF is Meta even thinking?": [Meta's vision is] in many ways broader than…
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There’s a new long essay on Meta’s vision for the Metaverse from Nick Clegg, formerly a UK politician and now President of Global Affairs at Meta. (He was the company’s point person when Facebook and Instagram’s many failings were brought under harsh public scrutiny.) Given his position at the social media giant, Clegg’s essay has…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 