Economy

To be honest, I’ve always thought that the open marketplace “economy” monetization model in metaverse spaces is actually a huge anti-feature.

It’s why so many of them feel like abandoned malls. People don’t like being sold to and giving your creators tools to try to nickel and dime people for every interaction with their products creates a bad and unpleasant experience for your users, so they leave, then there’s nobody to sell to so your creators leave.

Your creators would have stuck around to create art for the sake of creating art, but now that their art could theoretically be profitable and isn’t they don’t want to stay any more.

It’s one of the things I actually love about Second Life, you boot it up and it’s this eternal haunted mall, just emptiness and the hull of commerce around you as far as the eye can see. Nobody was enjoying this, they all just thought they could make some money.

A vibrant VR platform lets you play with the bowling balls and drink the beer and you don’t have to pay some idiot $1.75 to do that.

A dead VR platform gives you nothing to do without productizing it, and most real human beings go “fuck this” and bail, because that’s the kind of platform that appeals to speculators and capital and not, y’know, people.

On the other hand, Roblox is printing money right now and Second Life made enough money on a virtual speculative land rush bubble that they created that they could sit on their hands for a decade, so maybe I should shut the hell up.