I mean, this is definitely going to be a disaster but I think the title and article here are a little misleading. The author implies that Warner Brothers is spearheading (and paying for) this venture, but I just read through the buzzword salad of a press release and it barely mentions them. The project is driven by an independent company that licensed the ready player one IP from WB. The whole thing very carefully avoids any details about money changing hands, but my guess is either that WB is getting paid, or they've negotiated a cut of any theoretical future profits. Of course, the chances of there ever being profits are slim to none, but I'd say at worst they're net $0 on the deal, and at best they actually made some money by getting paid up front. They might suffer some reputation damage if it becomes a real catastrophe, but as the author of the article mentioned they are billions in debt, so its probably a risk they're happy to take.
Ready Player One sounds, on the surface, like a searing critique of corporate capitalist bullshit, but in the end the actual upshot in the novel and movie is "We need kinder, gentler billionaires to be our feudal overlords".
People don't associate Fortnite with that due to the main game being just pvp instanced deathmatches. But it is, by far, the most comprehensive example of what a corporate * metaverse would look like, specially now that they have their creative mode or whatever it's called.
*I know something like VR Chat or your favorite MMO with housing is closer to what people would want or imagine the metaverse to be, but that's not what the buzzword is for the suits.
Funny thing is, a real life Metaverse has existed for over 20 years. The term Metaverse comes from a book called Snow Crash. The game Second Life was designed explicitly to be the Metaverse envisioned in Snow Crash, complete with it's own economy tied to real life money (as in, if you made enough money in-game, you could cash it out for real-world USD). Companies used to build headquarters in the game world similar to how some do in Fortnite now, even going so far as to hold actual real world business meetings in-game as a form of teleconferencing. After a few high-profile events where live TV broadcasts of in-game events got swarmed by flying dicks, the media lost interest in the game, and companies abandoned the game and moved on to more business-oriented solutions.
Yeah I remember when Second life houses were sold for $1M usd. It was crazy and all years before other virtual marketplaces took off. It was ahead of its time and is now dead.
When I hear about concerts, and hotels reproducing their entire layout inside of Fortnite, I can actually respect the comparison. Of course, I've also seen many advertised attempts at "maid cafes" within the residential districts of FFXIV, so there's multiple people trying it - Fortnite is just the most well known.
If you take the Ready Player One's example of a metaverse, that is, one where people get to cosplay their favorite famous media properties, I don't think it's a wrong assessment.
Otherwise I would say VRChat is a much more honestly realized version of that.
"372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" is a podcast where Mike Nelson (MST3K, Rifftrax) and Conor Lastoka (Rifftrax) read and review books they're "pretty sure they're going to hate". RP1 is the first book & source of the podcast title, since it's 372 pages. It's like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for books and it is hilarious, I highly recommend.
It's easily the worst book I've read, and I only finished because of the unintentional hilarity of it all. In a story ostensibly about how evil media mega corporations are, the author wrote a hail corporateove love letter to top selling franchises without realizing the irony.
There was potential in it being a self parody, although in a way the whe situation is funnier because he was so earnest.
I spent my first audible credit on that book. I hadn’t seen the movie…still haven’t. But it was narrated by Wil Wheaton, and I knew him from reddit. He did a good job. That’s all I have to say about it.
NFTs for just art I'm not sure what's going go happen, but NFTs are never going to go away when they represent an actual useful digital thing like a concert ticket.
The tech and industry just needs to further mature.
I haven't read the book, but the movie was crap too. It was just a slide show of '80s and '90s references that completely failed to capture what made those good, or even understand them.
Not even going to joke about this, but I am really hoping nobody there gets the bright idea to make a Barbie blockchain or NFT or anything like that.
Speaking of "Ready Player One", the author Ernest Cline also wrote literally the absolute worst, grossest, most misogynistic poem I've ever had the displeasure of reading in my life. Now you'll have to read it too to make sure the "Reqdyverse" never succeed and thus, zero possibility of Barbie blockchain.