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- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
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Category: Making the Metaverse
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Above: Decentraland's dynamic world map. The red dots represent the few actual users in-world Decentraland is a very interesting experiment in blockchain-based virtual world creation that I've been following for four years. And while there's a lot that's noteworthy about it, there's one thing it still sorely lacks: A mass market of actual users. According…
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Mainframe Industries recently announced funding for making a massive cloud-native MMO, but the word "Metaverse" is conspicuously absent from that news… even though it sure looks like they're building a Metaverse kind of experience: Mainframe Industries, the startup behind the first cloud-native massively multiplayer online game, today announced it has raised $23 million in new…
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Here's a new interview on Axios with Philip and veteran game industry journalist Stephen Totilo, with some bombshell quotes like these: Of the metaverse, he says: “I think what we've learned — and somewhat with some sadness, given the work that I've done, I would have to agree — is that it's not for everybody,…
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Free Fire is a cross platform online battle royale game which on the surface, is largely dismissed by the Western game industry as yet another knockoff of PUBG and Fortnite. But AR/VR investor Julie Young has been looking much closer for well over a year (months before the current Metaverse buzz reached fever pitch), when…
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The man driving Facebook/Meta's Metaverse development is seriously worried about safety on their now-in-development platform, according to a leaked memo reported by the Financial Times: Andrew Bosworth, who has been steering a $10 billion-a-year budget to build “the metaverse”, warned that virtual reality can often be a “toxic environment” especially for women and minorities, in…
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Above: Dozens among the hundreds of user-made ROBLOX worlds using Disney IP I'm not surprised at all by this announcement, but I'm somewhat surprised that no one at Disney explained to company leadership what a Metaverse actually is: Disney CEO Bob Chapek is preparing the company to blend its physical and digital assets in the…
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Chart via Noah Smiths Substack Here's an essay with an interesting new twist on the Metaverse conversation — or rather, a rebooted twist. Economy journalist Noah Smith argues that a growing Metaverse can grow GDP without necessarily growing production of real life goods. Curiously — based on the chart above that accompanies his thesis —…
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In case you missed it (and I meant to blog this last week, sorry), Rec Room is hiring like crazy, with around 60 open positions. "We're growing a lot," as Rec Room Influencer/Partner Head Shawn Whiting tells me. "Mobile (iOS and Android) is growing very quickly so almost every team is hiring to keep up,"…
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Here's some very interesting survey data from developers at Blind, the anonymous community app for employees, asking users in the high tech sector their opinion of Facebook's shift to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's plan to make a Metaverse capable of holding over a billion users. Taken between October 28 and November 1 by 11,673 verified tech…
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In the Atlantic, longtime Internet activist and scholar Ethan Zuckerman takes textual fisticuffs to Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Metaverse ambitions, going through the long evolution of the technology like an avuncular Bane. ("Ah you think the Metaverse is your ally? You merely adopted the Metaverse. I was born in it, molded by it.") Because Ethan's…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 