It’s easy to take delight in the schadenfreude of one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world taking L after L—especially when they’re attempting to create something that seems like a ludicrous pipe dream at best and an absolute waste of time, money, and resources at worst.

However, the truth is the metaverse is inevitable. Not only that but, in many ways, it’s already here—and has been here for decades.

Even Neal Stephenson, who first coined the term metaverse in his 1992 book Snow Crash to describe a fictional virtual reality world, has alluded to this. In a tweet from June, he said that when he first came up with the term, he didn’t conceive of the fact that a metaverse might not be through VR—but then came along a video game called Doom.

Stephenson touched on a key component of any successful metaverse that many folks within the web3 (a term used to describe the next evolution of the world wide web) and metaverse space tend to miss: video games—or even just gaming in general.

“It’s not so much that the metaverse is the future of games. The future of the metaverse is games,” Jon Radoff, the writer of the Building the Metaverse blog and founder of metaverse consulting firm Beamable, told The Daily Beast. “Games are going to be what the metaverse is all about.”

What do you think is the future of the metaverse? Will Mark Zuckerberg's vision become reality?

I doubt Mark Zuckerberg’s vision will become a reality because Meta is, at it’s core, more of a media company (like The NY Times) than a tech company (like Intel or Apple). Having the world’s largest publishing platform and some ad tech, however impressive, doesn’t automatically make you the type of tech company that creates the platforms of the future. It’s possible to pivot to that but it seems like it would probably require a huge cultural and philosophical shift, from management on down, and it’s not clear that Meta has the ability or people in place to pull that sort of change off.

Sometimes, new ideas in tech get mocked before they become as accepted as the iPhone. It’s not impossible that Meta is just having hiccups on the way to being a great tech company. But VR isn’t a new idea and my guess is Meta is being mocked today because their their marketing is so far ahead of their talents and we get a buggy Miiverse meets Second Life (soon with legs!) and everyone just thinks it’s funny to watch a cynical, sociopathic company fail at appealing to regular humans.

For the Metaverse to get real traction, it needs to be more focused. A good start would be partnering with a university to create VR classes. Zoom Classes are okay, but Quest classes would be better suited for lab simulations. Imagine being offered an Ivy League level education for half the price and from your own house. VR students would be an easy cash cow, they have to buy their own headset, don’t need seats or food. As AI gets better at grammar and plagiarism checking, we could have a future where bachelor degrees become truly affordable for the first time in a long time.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/thedailybeast:

It’s easy to take delight in the schadenfreude of one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world taking L after L—especially when they’re attempting to create something that seems like a ludicrous pipe dream at best and an absolute waste of time, money, and resources at worst.

However, the truth is the metaverse is inevitable. Not only that but, in many ways, it’s already here—and has been here for decades.

Even Neal Stephenson, who first coined the term metaverse in his 1992 book Snow Crash to describe a fictional virtual reality world, has alluded to this. In a tweet from June, he said that when he first came up with the term, he didn’t conceive of the fact that a metaverse might not be through VR—but then came along a video game called Doom.

Stephenson touched on a key component of any successful metaverse that many folks within the web3 (a term used to describe the next evolution of the world wide web) and metaverse space tend to miss: video games—or even just gaming in general.

“It’s not so much that the metaverse is the future of games. The future of the metaverse is games,” Jon Radoff, the writer of the Building the Metaverse blog and founder of metaverse consulting firm Beamable, told The Daily Beast. “Games are going to be what the metaverse is all about.”

What do you think is the future of the metaverse? Will Mark Zuckerberg's vision become reality?

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y6epha/the_metaverse_is_inevitablebut_not_how_mark/isoqnhf/

The thing about the metaverse is that the whole idea was inspired by the pre-smartphone internet. It made sense when the net was a separate place that you went to from your home or office PC, but that’s not really what the net is these days.

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I don’t want to defend meta but everybody says yeah meta is in bad shape because the stock fell 60% but pretty much ever stock fell 60% in the last year. That’s bs.

Consider that we are living in a metaverse right now. It's pretty good, isn't it, except that we can't easily wake-up or upgrade ourselves. What's being proposed is a metaverse within the metaverse.

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