I’m on Yahoo Finance Talking About Defining the Metaverse & Meta’s Failed Assumptions About It

The metaverse “is a vast, virtual world with highly customizable avatars [and] user-generated content,” Author of ‘Making a Metaverse That Matters’ Wagner James Au says. “It’s like Roblox or Fortnite or VRChat… but bigger.” pic.twitter.com/YjbwEl68aU

— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) April 4, 2023

Yahoo Finance has a new story, “Metaverse: ‘Assuming you need a VR headset is just repeating Meta’s assumptions,’ author says” that I’m somewhat biased about liking, because well, I’m the author. It’s taken from a panel from a few hours ago (watch a clip above), where we get into the definition of the Metaverse, its use cases, and related topics.

“The last 2 years of Metaverse hype has been driven by people who didn’t really read Snow Crash,” I argue. “But the real metaverse developers have been using Snow Crash as a direct reference for the last 30 years.”

In preparation for this segment, the Yahoo producers sent me some questions beforehand, some of which we covered but much that we didn’t:

VR headsets are not necessary for the Metaverse — that’s a flawed assumption Meta made because they didn’t read Snow Crash carefully/at all. Most users of existing metaverse platforms do so on mobile, consoles, and PCs. 

• Based on the metaverse examples we have now (Roblox, Fortnite), how is it different from regular video games?

Metaverse platforms are by definition integrated with the real world economy, i.e. the average grass roots user can make money from content they create in them, and they are massive virtual worlds where millions of people can participate in the same shared space — those are two of the key differences.

It’s a highly unproven revenue model with several notable failures. None of the metaverse platforms based on virtual real estate like Decentraland and The Sandbox have mass user growth or a thriving creative economy. Fundamentally metaverse real estate requires artificial scarcity, while the leading metaverse platforms (Roblox and Fortnite) are built on abundant and cheap virtual real estate.

VR and AR are now and will forever be niche but important devices for the Metaverse. Several factors will prevent them from being mass adopted that can’t be overcome, since they are social and biological.

• Will regular people with office jobs, customer service jobs, etc really be working in the metaverse?

Yes, but to a limited extent. We’ve seen some success with using metaverse platforms for virtual conferences, but in all likelihood those will remain “special occasion” use cases.

Both are part of the future. At the moment we’re in the “peak of inflated expectations” period of AI, just as we were with the Metaverse in 2020-2022. But as the buzz settles down, AI and the Metaverse will evolve side by side — in fact, a key use case of generative AI *is* the Metaverse.

Hope you enjoy the watch! I actually feel cringe watching myself on video so you’ll have watch on your own.