Making a Metaverse That Matters

CHAPTER 12Future Paths

It is foolhardy to forecast with any great confidence the next great leap in the Metaverse's evolution. Even in retrospect, its progress up to now is remarkably unpredictable:

Minecraft was conceived by a handful of indie developers in Sweden, a ridiculously blocky-looking sandbox game that no major game publisher would ever possibly create.

Roblox floundered for years as an also-ran virtual world for kids, dwarfed by much larger platforms.

Fortnite seemed at first like a knock-off of an already popular online combat game subgenre inspired by a cult Japanese novel/movie.

VRChat was written off at launch as a cesspool for hit-and-run video streamers.

Yet together these unlikely products have amassed an aggregate user base larger than the entire population of the United States.

It is also the case that none of them made their first strides into the market with loud and open proclamations to become the Metaverse, but instead marketed themselves as fun games and social spaces. The best contender to become the primary model of The Metaverse (capital T, capital M) may not call itself that now, and maybe never will, even after satisfying all the requirements laid out in Chapter 1.

That said, my strongest suspicion is that this epochal leap is taking shape as I write these words in 2023.

As a thought experiment, consider just four plausible near-future scenarios:

Garena Free Fire: Largely ignored by the Western game industry as yet another knockoff of PUBG and ...