Nagle said:
On Second Life, everyone can potentially create content, but most people just buy furniture, buildings, and clothes, rather than making them. Just as in real life, most people buy furniture, buildings, and clothes rather than making them.
The big difference is, real life furniture has a real value, while digital furniture has only a virtual value.
It seems they try to make me believe there would be no difference. But that's as wrong as causing real world traffic accidents and then posting it as GTA live action parody on YT.
Their promises are fishy, and backed more on a potential business opportunity than by any concrete vision.
There was some leaked email of Zuckerberg, where he detailed his visions and strategy on VR and AR to extend fb to an always on mandatory experience nobody would ignore. Smart plan, but no word about entertainment, fun or experience in general. But maybe this email was just fake news.
That's why i don't believe in mega corps creating some metaverse. It's much more likely you will do it alone, for example. Minecraft is pretty close for a reason.
Nagle said:
There's an argument that too much visual quality is bad from a gameplay perspective.
I think this argument is based more on the thought ‘games were better in the 90's than they are now’. And in the 90s, graphics was worse.
In reality, increasing realism was a constant goal of game development and it is a measure of progress for good reasons. If realism hurts fun, we can reduce it as necessary. But having the option can't be a bad thing.
I also think games were indeed better in the 90s. But not because i'm old now or because actual games are bad, no - it simply is becasue in the 90s we had visions of how games will look even better in the future, with more simulation instead cheap tricks, etc. So it was not the games alone, but also this vision which made them great. The vision was fueled by technical progress, e.g. 3D gfx, which even gave new genres.
At current day we achieved a lot of this, but progress slows down on one side, and on the other we realize better gfx or bigger games alone do not really give us new and different games anymore.
Thus, we are easy to believe in another hype. VR, Metaverse, etc., in hope we get another push and inspiration like back than with the move to 3D. Possible, but it remains our problem. Facebook just has different problems and interests, and it's the same for Epic.
Nagle said:
So does mobile, and people with $200 Walmart laptops.
Um… i guess that's our future anyway. I'm not willing to depend on 3000$ GPUs with super computer processing power, and i doubt the majority of gamers is.
I rather believe in mobile class HW or iGPU. This also suits the AR glasses idea, although that seems still out of reach.
The other option we have is cloud gaming.
But enthusiast PC platform is dead i guess.
So, if we really want photorealism, we need to work much harder than we thought when moores law still worked at constant costs.
You see i'm not really optimistic about anything, and thus very resistant about any further hypes from tech industries. ; )
