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- 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!
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Category: Making the Metaverse
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Venture capitalist and metaverse expert Matthew Ball has a new must-read (and Tolstoy-length) essay on Apple's relationship to the metaverse's future (spoiler: It can totally control it), but this particular passage punched my eyeball: Roblox’s platform is full of happy users and talented creators. But few of these creators are making money. Although Roblox has…
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Protip: It's not a great idea to announce "X in virtual worlds is the future of Y" before checking to see if there are instances of Y successfully happening without X. For instance: "Live performances in virtual worlds are the future of music concerts." It's part of that future, we can safely say, but as…
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Fortnite! It's the future of live music, as many say (I even said so here!). It sure seemed that way when artists like Travis Scott and Marshmellow brought in millions to experience "only in a virtual world"-type shows — not to mention lots of revenue for themselves. But thing is, Travis Scott's show as a…
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Here's a great Twitter thread: Second Life/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale challenging people to name a virtual world besides Second Life that enables collaborative dynamic creation of "interesting things" while users inhabit the same space as avatars. Based on his follow-ups, "interesting things" means it must enable complex scripting/interaction and 3D objects. So not just…
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IMVU just announced the availability of VCOIN, an Ethereum-based digital currency for use in its virtual world with 7 million active users — and, by design, for buying and selling goods and services in the real world, too. From the announcement: Available now for the IMVU desktop, mobile web, and web platforms, VCOIN is seamlessly…
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2021 starts with an ending of some kind, as briefly mentioned at the tail end of a New Year announcement on from Second Life management: Another noteworthy development for the new year is that Linden Lab has new owners! As announced in mid-2020, an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager signed an agreement…
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One last look back at 2020 before it finally rots away like the leprous corpse it is, reviewing my predictions for the year I made on December 31, 2019: Magic Leap will fold. Not exactly, but there were massive layoffs last April, impelled in great part by metaverse hubris, but the company has since pivoted…
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With the tagline "The Metaverse begins", 3D graphics giant just open beta launched Omniverse. Integrated with Unreal, Unity and a host of other industry standard development tools, I guess the best way to describe it is a metaverse for enterprise-level developers: Omniverse aims for universal interoperability across different applications and 3D ecosystem vendors. It provides…
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Image via Manticore's blog, comparing Core's creator-company revenue split to Roblox's split CEO of Manticore Frederic Descamps just announced a new monetization structure for people who develop games on Core, its new Unreal-based, Epic-funded user-generated game development platform, and it reads very much like a direct attack on Roblox. Because while Roblox has shown seriously…
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Interesting comment from Luther Weymann, a veteran tech exec who plays and thinks a lot about Second Life, apparently responding to Katharine Berry (former teen SLer who's now an engineer at Google) and her observation: "Second Life feels to me like it has stagnated, and I do not know whether you could fix that without…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 