More like… meta-worse

This has been a busy week for a plethora of reasons. A veritable plethora. What a great word. Plethora. While I have been busy with my plethoras, I have also seen a plethora of news recently about the metaverse.

And I want it to stop.

There are lots of people on the hype train for the metaverse and I am not one of them. Actually that is not true. I am probably one of the biggest fans of seeing a metaverse. I tried to pitch stuff to AAA executives a decade ago about the value of players buying and selling to each other and the general reaction was “You cannot sell used bread outside of a bakery.” I nodded and smiled but inside I was either weeping or screaming.

There are a lot of people in the process of building a metaverse, or raising money to build a metaverse, or talking in bigly terms about the value of a metaverse. I want to drill down into what the metaverse is, and if you agree maybe you will smash some social buttons for me and share my big thinkiness with your friends and family.

So what is the metaverse?

If you read popular science fiction, the metaverse is a connected set of worlds owned by different people where players can get junk in world A and carry it into world B. Kind of like going to the mall. You can buy a fancy hat in the fancy hat store, and still get to wear it into the fancy ice cream store. Most content today does not do that. You go to the fancy hat store and buy a fancy hat, you do not get to go to the fancy ice cream store and show off your fancy hat. You can just buy the fancy ice cream and talk about your fancy hat. You probably cannot show a picture you have uploaded of your fancy hat, because most businesses understand TOP  in user generated content. Warning: Please do not look that up on your work machine.

My thesis is that the metaverse generally evolves in a way for virtual world creators to make and sell stuff to people directly. This is important because everyone who wants to build the metaverse is touting this as a part of the sales pitch. You Will Make Money Fast.

The problem here is that most companies chasing this dream today are not actually virtual world creators. The vast majority of them are Spotify.

Do not get me wrong, I use Spotify. Its ads are less invasive than YouTube on The Googles. I hope they offer me six months free sometime to agree to sign up. I do not feel like their “one month free” or “three months free” user incentives are enough—I am willing to watch GEICO ads until they are that desperate for my business.

So metaverse companies are raising venture capital. That means they are doing venture-scale planning which requires mass-market success and billions upon billions of dollars. A founder has got to get paid, right? We do not have enough Zuckerbergs out there for the average venture capitalist’s liking. Certainly not in their existing portfolios, which is why they keep writing checks.

A lot of content creators believe that creating the metaverse is a means to get themselves paid. A lot of people building the metaverse right now are probably saying that and talking about the democratization of content. In truth, they need you to believe that in order to get their application to join the 0.1%. They will use your love of Neal Stephenson’s Snowtrash to beat this point home. Yes, I am being mean to an okay book. Yes, I am also linking it with an affiliate code.

The problem with people raising money to build a metaverse is that they are all going to wind up needing stuff to sell and most of their money is earmarked for other things. There will be some companies that make good-enough tools, and good-enough plumbing, but it is going to cost a lot of money. Some of them will make some neat stuff. Some of them will wind up being a second second life.

My belief is that the best metaverse we could possibly get will be one that comes from a bunch of creators who build connectivity and contracts between their own worlds, one at a time. There are great connectivity tools out there. There is sufficient billing and data storage infrastructure.

Heck, there are even common enough 3d engines that people are using to support sharing object formats between them.

The bleak history of platform-as-something-something-future has not led us to a brighter and rosier future for content creators. Generally it means that the old regime of gatekeepers has a new cohort of gatekeepers to add to the pile of fee collectors between Joe Consumer and Jenny Creator.

Almost everything being announced about the metaverse today is being said by people who are just sticking out their hand and bundling services together because they are friendlier with the average venture capitalist than most content creators.

And this is why I think we are not going to get the metaverse. We will get the meta-worse.

The only reason I am not despairing is that I spent a bunch of money in Fortnite.

Fortnite has been slowly building systems and technology season over season. They added cars. They added airplanes. They added boats. I have marvelled at seeing them building an MMO, isolated system by isolated system, on customer’s dimes without anyone saying anything about it.

They have great brand partners and are helping people make money through their game store and their platform.

Heck, the newest person in line is even going so far as to say that if he is going to take his place with his hand out for a share of money, he is at least going to take out one of the incumbents who wants way more money!

I wear my Free Fortnite hat every day at work. It is among my prized possessions. I think it is awesome that they gave out schwag for the lawsuit of the decade. Tim Sweeny is Person of the Year for me, every year at this point, while he is doing things that massively increase the potential value of being a creator. I think that helping reduce friction for content creators is noble. Of course, I also think that billionaires paying to go to space is noble, so you can probably discount my sense of what is cool by your own filters.

I hope we get a metaverse someday. I am skeptical the current crop of companies chasing this are going to be successful. I believe that the metaverse will emerge from the necessity of exerting margin pressure by IP holders, not by the need to get to an IPO to increase the ROI for investors into venture funds based on the flavor of the month of high tech buzzwords.

Thank you for reading along! I hope my opinion on the future of the metaverse is as interesting as it is entertaining. How often do you see a once and future founder shitting on investment strategies for stuff he wants to get paid to build? If I gave you the lols with my salt bae vibe, you should totes adorbs it on your socials. Thanks. Hashtag gratitude.