Calling MMORPGs "metaverse" doesn't make them work any better

Once upon a time, at the end of the last millennium, I and many others had high hopes for the future of virtual worlds. They had unlimited potential, they are not just games, but real places where we can have a better and better virtual life. With great success like World of Warcraft, hope, excitement and attention have grown over the years. For me, the climax of it all was the day before Warhammer Online was launched. WAR not only taught us less success than what syringes offered, but it also taught us that many of the things we had hoped for were not really there. After that, the MMORPG sound was gradually reduced to a few "WoW clones". The number of players has dropped, interest has dropped and once I had to delete "MMORPG" from my blog title because no one cares anymore.

Let's go to 2022, and a lot of people are too young to remember 2008, or did not participate in the MMORPG at the time. And suddenly we realized that Mark Zuckerberg is changing his company name from Facebook to Meta and that investment funds are spending millions of dollars on virtual real estate. The integration of virtual worlds is a promising new earth with blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies, and social networks are full of virtual life in the meta world, with people believing we can live better.

You cheated on me one day in embarrassment. Cheat on me twice, shame on you. When the MMORPG bubble bursts and then bursts, the growing meta-space bubble is very popular with anyone, just like me. And the arguments used are the next big thing to convince people. The mistake is the same: it seems that people do not live in the virtual world, they visit from time to time. In the real world, real estate is worth it because people are forced to live somewhere and space is limited. In virtual worlds, space is unlimited and people do not need space constantly because they can only go beyond the world. Therefore, virtual worlds always seem inanimate, because the number of parallel users is certainly much lower than that of ordinary users. (Except for launch day, but the servers are not working yet.)

Virtual shopping malls are essentially smaller than real malls. You may be able to "try on" virtual clothes for your avatar, but just because your clothes look beautiful on your avatar does not mean you are looking for a real version of your home. Practical shopping, you can not jump into the dining room when you are hungry. It's hard to get friends there and talk to them when they may be in another meta world or when they may be out of session.

Like everything related to cryptocurrency, this is part of the "biggest fool" investment theory: it does not matter if the things you are investing are worth a real price or you can find a bigger fool to sell them. at a higher price for a dream. . It works quite well in a world of low inflation and excess money. However, there are strong indications that the period of low inflation is over. Inflation and higher interest rates are forcing people to reconsider where their true value is, which is bad for speculative fantasy investments. The meta-world created by Mark Zuckerberg will eventually pass from a better virtual world in which we all live to a more beautiful form of Facebook.

Tobold Block