Since Facebook changed its name to Meta and announced the formal and comprehensive transformation of the metaverse, the fire of the metacosm has become more and more prosperous, and under the current crazy hype atmosphere, it seems that any project can be touched: meta-universe dating, meta-universe buying, meta-universe shopping, meta-universe home... It's almost the meta-universe to heaven. All kinds of projects are running forward, afraid that they will not climb the wind outlet for the first time and successfully take off.
Looking at the current "meta-cosmic circle", the behavior of busy encircling money, forcibly pulling people, and hanging sheep's heads to sell dog meat abounds. As a result, some real early users and developers are not happy, they are no longer willing to be forced by capital to make leeks, and they have stood up and rebelled.
No, the prototype of the metaverse has not yet been seen, and the anti-phagocytosis has come first.
| meta-universe has not yet arrived, harassment, discrimination, and harm first
Last month, Horizon Worlds, a large-scale open virtual social world that Meta had high hopes for, officially opened for public beta in North America. Originally, most players were full of expectations for this, and they did not hesitate to spend a lot of money to buy the latest Oculus headset to find out. But in the past month since the public beta, Horizon Worlds has not only not had a word of mouth, but has also fallen into a series of negative experiences.
Image from Meta's website
First of all, since the public beta, a number of female users have submitted reports to Meta, saying that they have suffered different degrees of harassment and verbal insults from strange players during the experience. Some female players said that when they walked in the square of Horizon in a virtual avatar, they encountered a bunch of male players who coaxed her and surrounded her to tease her. Some female players said that during the experience, a strange male player tried to get close to her and make indecent gestures, and when she yelled to stop, the strange player just shrugged and told her, "This is the metaverse, don't take it so seriously." ”
Bloomberg reporter Parmy Olson also encountered many unpleasant experiences in the process of experiencing horizon. For example, suddenly a stranger suddenly approached and spoke in her ear, someone frantically took pictures of her without her permission, and someone kept saying dirty words and deliberately coughing that they were the new crown virus. Parmy Olson said that while Meta's metaverse world is novel, she also experiences it with feelings of tension and discomfort.
Image taken from Bloomberg
Racial discrimination has also taken place within the metaverse. Because avatars are a realistic projection of the player, a black player said that during the experience, he clearly heard discriminatory remarks from the crowd, but because he was in the virtual square, he could not determine which player sent it.
Physical and verbal harassment on the internet is inherently a vexing problem, and the real voices of players in horizon worlds, combined with the immersive feel of VR, make the whole thing worse. According to statistics, many players have developed uncomfortable feelings during the experience, and in order to avoid this feeling, they have used "safe mode" during the experience to isolate the surrounding sounds and hide themselves, temporarily escaping the metaverse world that Meta wants to build.
In addition, there are concerns about child hazards in the metaversic universe that has not yet been regulated. Although the Meta official said that it only opened the access rights of Horizon Worlds to users over the age of 18 in North America, due to the lack of strict access verification, many measured people reported that they encountered a large number of children during the experience. Since the procedure does not currently have rules for minors, there are some uncontrollable factors that are harmful to children's growth, including violence, swear language, pornography and so on.
In addition to Horizon Worlds, the same situation exists in other similar metaverse games. For example, in the well-known virtual community game VRchat, a large number of teenagers make friends and party inside every day. But according to a recent record of interactions in VRChat games by Callum Hood, the research director at the Center for Anti-Digital Hate, he recorded more than 100 incidents of problems in an 11-hour period, including a large number of underage users.
Although most metaverse programs currently have channels for reporting violations, the recording of audio data and the cumbersome reporting process make such reports often empty. It is said that the Internet is not an extralegal place, but there is obviously no law enforcement department in the metaverse.
"I don't want my kids to enter the metaverse until I see a safe mechanism." A parent told the Silicon Star people.
| NFT's scythe swing too fast, game developers and players join forces to fight back
In addition to the concerns and concerns of women and parents about the metaverse world, NFTs, as another major form of the current metaverse, are also being challenged on the road to a large-scale entry into the game industry.
The characteristics of NFT are inseparable, irreplaceable, and unique, so that they have a natural fit with the game. For example, NFTs can record the player's game status and achievements, save the list of items obtained in the game, and also allow cross-platform transfer of in-game assets. For gaming platforms, NFTs are a huge business opportunity, so recently game developers have announced their entry into NFTs.
On December 8, Ubisoft, a world-renowned game developer, announced on its official website the launch of its own NFT platform Ubisoft Quartz (Ubisoft Quartz), where players can purchase NFT items called "Digit" and use it first in Ubisoft's AAA game Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.
Ubisoft said that Digit is released in specific batches, and each batch will contain in-game decoration items with a unique serial number, and players can freely price and buy and sell in the future, which has a high collection value. In order to ensure that the purchase of Div is an ecosystem user, Ubisoft also requires players to reach the XP level of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint at level 5 (about 600 hours of play) before it can be redeemed.
Originally, Ubisoft was going to use this to test the waters of the market, double harvest players and NFT enthusiasts, but unexpectedly, NFT fans are not cold to Divgit, and this news has been strongly resisted by players once it was issued. Players believe that NFTs are a huge scam for manufacturers to build false scarcity, and encouraging players to use "collection value" as a pretext to encourage players to krypton gold is too degrading. After all, in a few years, this game is not hot, what is the meaning of these such ordinary game props, this is not clear to cut people and leeks?
Since the release of Ubisoft Quartz, Ubisoft's various platforms have had a large number of player messages to boycott. And Ubisoft's practice of hiding tens of thousands of dislikes under Youtube's official promotional video has attracted a lot of scolding in the comment area.
Comments section under the Ubisoft Quartz trailer on youtube
And Ubisoft isn't the only gaming company to roll over on NFTs. Last month, GSC Game World, developer of Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl, also announced that it would add NFTs to the game, saying that players would become the first "meta-humans" to appear in the game to incarnate game NPCs. However, immediately after the news was released, a large number of players objected, and people quickly gathered on Twitter and Reddit to boycott the GSC's NFT game plan.
Under the strong opposition of players, Stalker 2 once again posted an article explaining its own NFT plan, saying that it would not affect any game experience, but players still did not buy it and attacked it. Just an hour after the tweet was posted, Stalker 2 removed the tweet and compromised with players, saying that it would cancel all NFT-related content in the game.
In fact, not only players, but also game developers are disgusted by this "forced NFT" behavior. It is understood that many developers within Ubisoft are strongly skeptical about the use of NFTs, especially the team that developed Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. The developers say they "don't see value and future in the program," arguing that the practice will lead to a loss of players and re-bottom the game they've painstakingly improved. In fact, due to the addition of the NFT, the reputation of "Breakpoint" is indeed declining rapidly.
According to The Verge, according to an annual survey of game developers conference attendees, nearly 70 percent of respondents said they were not interested in NFT game development, noting that they may have scams, false inducements, and environmental pollution problems at this stage. In October last year, Steam, the world's largest PC gaming platform, issued new regulations prohibiting all NFT or cryptocurrency-related game content from being launched and running on the platform, which was appreciated and supported by a large number of players.
Obviously, in the current game industry, whoever announces the entry into the NFT is on the opposite side of the mass players. Players may be able to accept game makers exploring the test meta-universe, but they can't accept the scythe family of capital on their necks so quickly.
| want to use the new pot of the meta-universe to hold the old wine, the overturning car is always caught off guard
In the previous popular science articles on the metacosm, the silicon star people have summarized the six characteristics of the metacosm that the metacosm needs to have continuity, real-time, compatibility, economic attributes, connectivity and creativity, and have also made simple metacosm judgments with "Animal Forest Friends", "Minecraft", Roblox and so on as examples.
However, due to the fact that the metacosm involves too many underlying technologies, including VR/AR, artificial intelligence, blockchain, Internet of Things, etc., some projects are now related to these technical fields, and they are running to say that they are metacosms, as if rubbing on this wave of heat, financing can explode, and stock prices can soar. But the bubble that blows up quickly will eventually burst quickly.
Taking Roblox, known as the "first stock in the metaverse", as an example, since Facebook changed its name to Meta, Roblox's stock price has been pushed up by more than $140 per share under the rising heat of the metacosm, and the market value is close to 100 billion US dollars. Under the recent downward pressure on the US stock market, in just over a month, its stock price has fallen by more than half, smoothing out the gains for the whole of last year.
Roblox stock chart
The previously popular meta-universe "speculation fever" has also begun to gradually return to rationality. In November, a piece of virtual land in decentraland, a virtual game platform, was sold for about $2.43 million (about 14 million yuan). Less than a month later, on Sandbox, a similar platform, a virtual piece of land was sold for $4.3 million (about 27.39 million yuan).
Fueled by the speculation group, the value of the digital currencies MANA and SAND in Decentraland and Sandbox also soared to about $6 and $8 respectively. And what does land that catches up with Silicon Valley look like? It's about the same length.
The image is from Benzinga and the copyright belongs to the original author
But recently, the popularity of both platforms has begun to drop significantly, and the price of MANA and SAND has also fallen by more than 50% in two months. The domestic same type of speculation platform Rainbow Universe has also quickly overturned. In mid-December, the transfer price of the virtual real estate project on the rainbow universe once exceeded 100,000 yuan, and now the highest price project does not exceed 10,000 yuan.
In addition, for many VR/AR and game projects that have come out with meta-universe shells to make a lot of money again, the market has also learned to polish their eyes and not buy it. Virtual idols, virtual stores, AR games, AR shopping and other things that have long existed and passed, were intended to re-emerge to usher in the "second spring", but virtual products of luxury goods such as Wal-Mart virtual supermarkets and Gucci have been ridiculed by the group, and the response to these projects has been flat after launch. After all, users are not all stupid people with more money, and the basic ability to see the essence through the phenomenon is still there.
The image comes from the internet
After a few months of barbaric growth, regulators in various countries, including the United States, China, and Europe, have also recently spoken out to warn investors of the speculation of the metacosm, and require some projects to pay attention to factual evidence and rationality when advertising themselves as metacosm.
There is no doubt that the metacosm is an exciting picture and future. But it must be admitted that there are still many technical difficulties and regulatory dilemmas to overcome on the road to the metaverse. Not everyone can be the creator of the metaverse, nor can the oasis world be turned into reality by shouting slogans.
In recent years, we have seen too many examples of conceptual hype because they are too radical, too fanatical, and finally flourish and decline, hoping that the metaverse will not be next. The pace is slower, the walk is more solid, a little less hype, a little more sincerity, maybe the metaverse can come quickly.