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
-
Here we go with another "leaked" Meta/Reality Labs memo from CTO / Zuckerberg right-hand-man Andrew Bosworth, though unlike last week's happy jazz hands, this one has a more dire angle: 2025: The Year of Greatness … We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on…
-
Linden Lab just started publishing new ads on YouTube for Second Life, one of which you watch here. ("It represents one variation of many that are being tested", the company tells me.) Screengrabs of it throughout this post. It's part of a new and aggressive marketing campaign for Second Life — basically the first one…
-
Frooxius, lead developer of Resonite, the crowdfunded metaverse platform with 10,000+ active users, recently revealed his new vision for a single shard virtual world grid. Unlike, say, Second Life, where the grid are sims interconnected in a way that resembles the real world, the Resonite approach will be much more brain-melting: "It's a bit like…
-
Originally published on my Patreon Courtesy Tyche Shepherd, Second Life's unofficial (but highly qualified) demographer, here's a chart of SL activity since the mobile app was made free to play in mid-November. She shared these peak concurrency numbers — i.e. how many people are logged in the most during a given period — after I…
-
Recently saw a Reddit rant about a VRChat avatar with a hilariously ridiculous number of triangles (above), and had to laugh in recognition at the title: "Friends joining with these half a million polygon avies are literally ruining the experience (not only for me)! This is outrageously stupid and unnecessary!" Maybe unnecessary, but also inevitable,…
-
In case you missed it over the Thanksgiving holiday rush last week, Roblox is now actively promoting sales of its virtual currency Robux via its website as opposed to making the same purchase on mobile or console. This is highly significant, because up until recently, companies like Apple and Google would delist Roblox for doing something…
-
SL image by Alsatian Kidd, who also has thoughts on the election When I briefly noted that Philip Rosedale had endorsed Harris/Walz during a recent YouTube livestream (watch below), some reader comments were somewhat surprising: Like Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner with family, politics really should not be discussed, and it really has no place in…
-
This report brought to you by the Virtual Worlds Museum, now creating digital hubs across many virtual worlds. Contact the Museum team here to get involved! It's been almost exactly a year since the launch of Resonite, the free-to-play virtual world/metaverse platform that was spun out from a prior project (read about its history here)…
-
Courtesy the eagle eye and video capture skills of Rhiannon from Avacon, here's Zuckerberg at this week's MetaConnect announcing "improved" avatars and HTML-like building blocks for the Metaverse, which he calls… "primitives". Someone should write a book about this one sentence! RE "improved" avatars, the problem isn't Horizon World's avatar graphics quality, but their fundamental…
-
Above: InTrance and LAGurlz, creators of Starving Artists, a game approaching half a billion visits If you accept the common Valley wisdom, the Metaverse is “dead”. As recently as 2022, tech conferences and startup pitch decks were awash with the term, first coined in Snow Crash; now, you scarcely see it anywhere, as if wholly supplanted…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 