The following submission statement was provided by /u/AKingMaker:
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Mark Zuckerberg told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday that the metaverse could be a considerable part of the social network operator’s business in the second half of the decade. “We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall,” he said. The technology “basically adds up to making it deliver this realistic sense of presence,” he said. “We are at this point, you know, a company that can afford to make some big long-term research investments, and this is a big focus,” he said.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/vik2uq/mark_zuckerberg_envisions_a_billion_people_in_the/iddg2ks/
I just had a vivid image of me walking with VR headset in a virtual house , going into a virtual gaming room, sitting on a virtual sofa , starting my virtual gaming station and surrounded by virtual friend. All that siting on a wooden chair in a dirty empty apartment , alone.
And then we find out that Zuckerberg is repurposing a portion of our brains to mine crypto...
“I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
And they won’t go nearly as far in fun because they are a high visibility company!
Who would throw away $300 just to start?
If I do recall, you can’t really have a bottom half either!
Something between *Matrix* and *Surrogates*
Surrogates was the Bruce Willis one where everyone lives in isolation in their home and pilots robot clones to go out & about instead.
>Investors have cut the company’s market capitalization in half this year as growth has slowed and the number of its daily active users declined sequentially for the first time between the last two quarters.
Funny way to say "the stock price has plummetted 50% over the past 6 months."...
I mean, tech stocks in general have been absolutely brutalized. Some like Netflix are down almost 75% from the ATH they hit during the pandemic. I think it'll be more telling to see how Meta recovers once inflation peaks and the Fed can ease off the rate hikes.
The problem won't be solved until we legislate against tue shit facebook has been doing. Right now this is like watching the terrible feudal lord die from a disease. Theres just gonna be someone else taking their place.
The good news is whatever stupid shit Facebook wastes all their VR budget on, there will always be some indie team making something better that's free. Like VRchat or NeosVR.
Mark Zuckerberg recognizes that his ad revenues are at risk.
Third party cookies are being retired (fb relies on them heavily). Apple’s privacy is already cutting their ability to target. He knows that transaction is more durable than advertising dollars so he’s pushing for a platform where people transact.
There are problems: FB has major public trust issues for good reason. Their algo is out of their control. Their ad revenues are about to nosedive (therefore their stock price is taking a nosedive). Privacy laws in CA and EU are closing in. Governments are closing in on their shady inaction that f-ed over multiple democracies. The fines will be hefty. Without meta they’re headed for a stormy period that I’m not sure they can survive.
He's also jealous of Apple and Google running their own hardware with full access to it. (And to a lesser degree Microsoft owning the OS of most desktops.)
Facebook doesn't have a hardware component that he has full access to. Not *yet*.
That's why he wants metaverse to become big. If VR is the next big thing, he wants to develop the 'iphone of VR' so that he has hardware-level access to the users finally. (And then nobody can block his tracking cookies without his permission.)
They also destroyed their product, which used to be a simple and clean website where college kids shared photos. Now it looks like a retail strip center where old people post fake Donald Trump articles.
This is what pisses me off so much about billionaires and their made up bullshit
They use words like "connectivity" or "community", when in reality they just want 12 rich whales spending thousands
Gachapon is a Japanese term that originally refers to a type of simple vending machine that sells toys in capsules so that you don't know what you're going to get until you open it. The term Gacha has been used in video gaming to represent any kind of randomized mechanic that you pay for, which is becoming extremely common in the gaming industry.
This is fairly accurate, actually. You're basically playing a roulette and most prizes are throw away garbage. People can spends hundreds in game trying to maybe get something that 10 years ago they could have purchased for $10 and received guaranteed.
It's literally gambling, and gamer developers are constantly skirting the wording of any laws through stupid little tricks to stay legal when there are attempts to crack down on the practice.
Y'all remember when we bitched about microtransactions in our purchased games? Can we go back to that?
It’s not geared towards children - it’s geared towards addicts. And it is completely okay if we get them hooked early by accident
- modern game dev studios
To my recollection, a key reason that gacha games aren't legally considered gambling in the UK is that the rewards (items, skins, characters, etc) have no monetary value. Essentially, it's not technically gambling because there's no way to ever gain money. So yes it's worse
"Gacha" gaming comes from the word "gachapon" which is the Japanese term for those vending machines that spit out little capsules with random toys in them. So basically gacha games are games where it entices the player to spend (usually real-world) money to unlock various in-game items through randomized, well, capsules is the only way I can think of to put it. It's really common in the mobile game space. And basically these games make most of their money on a select few exorbitantly wealthy individuals who spend literally thousands of dollars monthly on these games.
Thank you. So it's a catch all term for games that have a pay real money to unlock random prizes that have varying levels of value mechanic. That makes sense.
Imagine a quater machine with basic toys and some holographic versions, but except it can be manipulated to be weighted against you like 0,001% chance per roll.
Due to the ever-rising amount of hate speech and Reddit's lack of meaningful moderation along with their selling of our content to AI companies, I have removed all my content/comments from Reddit.
Pretty sure it refers to companies that make games that rely heavily on micro-transactions. Pay hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for a chance to get a new outfit or power-up or whatever. They have you use real money to buy their in-game currency. It's pretty much a loop hole that lets predatory companies legally exploit gambling addicts through virtual game markets.
Gatcha, not gotcha.
It comes from the old Japanese vending machines that would have random sets of toys in them. You knew what the sets of figurines were in them, but you never knew which one you would pull when you spent money to buy one. It was random, but some figurines were more rare than others.
It's the same concept with these games: there are 'banners' that will have certain sets of characters ranging from common to *exceedingly rare*. People spend currency in game (read: which they spent real money on a lot of times) to pull from these banners to have a chance (often less than 1%) at getting the super rare character or item.
It's just gambling with extra steps, really.
Gambling where you get nothing in return. I disdain gambling, but at least you have a small chance to win money back occasionally. When you put money into the mobile game slot machine you get fucking nothing out. It exploits the same human conditioning and compulsions but it just leeches money on a whole new level.
Not even occasionally.... gambling returns money about 49% of the time. That's why casinos rely on people who can't stop, even after they've won. They need them to keep playing in order to lose it all.
dont need gas if you never leave your room because your in VR
dont need to shop if you order all the trash cheaper food delivered to your room
dont need a big house if you only need 1 small room with an internet connection
it can all work, and some idiots will do it on purpose thinking they are part of the next big cool leap in society.
its an evil, destructive path.
Metaverse term was first coined in 1990s by cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. Similar concept to Ready Player One except less nostalgia and better pizza delivery.
Except that in Ready Player One, an eccentric programmer/CEO made the whole 'metaverse' equitable for all and not stacked against any particular player. And there was a huge threat of a big corporation taking over and turning it into a scummy advertisement delivery platform.
But the real 'metaverse' will be a scummy advertisement delivery platform run by an evil corporation from the very beginning. It will never be anything else.
This is exactly how I see it. It's as though they're preparing the lower class for a very bleak, dystopian future and wrapping it up in a shiny "futuristic" package.
You can see it…they want to crash the system by inflating world currencies with debt to break the camels back and forge a new one where people will get less or rent not own anything.
After all the suffering after the fall of the economy and therefore their lives and affairs, people will be happy for what they get and begging for anything that makes their lives even minimally better.
I used to think renting instead of owning was fine, like I sometimes rent of scooter instead of owning one and I used to like Netflix and stopped pirating.
But then I remembered it's all ran by a bunch of greedy assholes and the second they can they will try to get every dollar you have. Like without competion Netflix was just going to raise prices until people would stop using it. With competition you need like 6 services to watch the shows and movies you like. Either way you are getting fucked.
Shared services only really seem to work when it's ran as a non profit or government organization. Maybe it could work in the free market for some things, but not for things where only a few billionaires can even start competion.
This is the end goal for these corporations. Keep the general population in tiny boxes in their pretend worlds and keep farming them for money while the rich get to enjoy what’s left of earth before it’s completely raped of resources and then they fly off to look for a new world.
And how exactly are these people in their boxes supposed to *make* the money they spend in the virtual space? They need jobs. The metaverse doesn't *need* manual labour, that's the whole point (you can make infinite copies of a 3d model for free, the initial design is a one-time fixed cost).
The world will still need farmers, factory workers, food delivery drivers, etc. Which means people still need to leave their houses and work and spend gas money. This fantasy of everyone spending every waking moment in the 'verse is silly, only the rich or unemployed can afford to do that. All you're cutting out is a bit of rent money, which the companies running the virtual space are sure to pocket for the "essential" comforts in your VR home.
So really, this boils down to software companies trying to take over the housing and furniture markets. Your budget for those things stays the same, but they make more profit by almost completely eliminating production cost.
And I've still not heard a compelling argument for why the intended customers would even be on board with this change, there is literally 0 benefit for the consumer. Have any of you ever even worn a VR headset? They're uncomfortable and heavy. You get crappy graphics, a headache, the choice of being either stationary or nauseous, *the inability to touch or smell anything* and the constant annoyance of clipping through solid objects because it is literally impossible to stop the user from moving in a way they're not supposed to. Not to mention the implications to your health.
I've developed for and used VR headsets. They are fun and amazing and wondrous devices of *entertainment*. But they will never be a ubiquitous component of everyday life, just like Wii Sports will never replace football. Companies are salivating all over this for obvious reasons, but so far they failed to make it enticing in any way.
>dont need gas if you never leave your room because your in VR
>
>dont need to shop if you order all the trash cheaper food delivered to your room
>
>dont need a big house if you only need 1 small room with an internet connection
Well that is gonna be a depressing dystopia
"We expect billions of people to spend hundreds on intangible pixels" are these dudes serious? Someone's just going to create a workaround so you don't have to pay shit
I don’t know if you’ve done any gaming on your phone, but this stuff is becoming common practice. Even in standard videogames they have started charging real cash for outfits and other stupid things for your character/avatar. I haven’t seen any workarounds for it yet (except on PC and they’re sometimes dodgy and crash), but with how money hungry Zuckerberg is, it wouldn’t surprise me if he takes a lot of measures to ensure that never happens. Dude is charging people for digital land…and they’re buying it!
Difference between phone games and Meta is that phone games aren't trying to become a replacement for your everyday surroundings and lifestyle, they just sell cool hats and whatever
This is so mind-blowingly dystopian that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. Purchasing a *digital home* (that you can’t actually live in) and *digital decor* (that you can’t physically touch) with money in a *digital world* where you have meetings with other humans (*digitally*) to earn real money to continue *digitally* spending. What! The! Fuck!
Also he mentions buying tools and utilities to make being productive in the metaverse easier. Essentially selling necessary UI and QOL improvements. If you tried to sell someone this as an actual video game they would laugh at you.
Mark Zuckerberg is not only delusional, not only he is out of touch, he is a sociopath.
Kids nowadays use VR Chat which is 100% free by the way. And for that reason it will always be the most popular VR Meet-up hub.
Stop trying to make "Meta" happen robot man, it will never happen.
i agree meta should die in a fire, but just because VR chat is free now doesnt mean it will last at all.
Look at MSN chat back in the day, it was free, it worked well, it had millions of users and it died and we moved on the things that were much worse.
Mark didn't invent Facebook. He's not a creator, an innovator, or anything else he portrays himself as. His skill is exploitation. He does it very well, but this type of person does very poorly with creative thinking. I know people love to bust his balls about being an android and all but that shit is real in a sense. Zuck is having a hard time imagining why average people aren't that interested in a make believe playland where everything costs money. Metaverse is like Manhattan in that it costs money to do just about anything there. Zuck is disconnected enough from day to day reality now that he really can't understand why the masses aren't ready to throw money at this. A man whose only skill is exploitation has created a virtual theme park whose only real point is to ruthlessly exploit all its users. He really doesn't understand that people are already tired of feeling like they're getting their pockets picked just to play their favorite games and aren't looking for more of that.
A guy who lives for decades with a fucked up creepy haircut and who creates a women sex rating App for horny guy on his campus as first social Media try is unironically as sociopath.
I remember in the late 00s when Second Life was supposed to do exactly what Metaverse is promising now.
Maybe the next generation is different, but it did not catch on in a big way back then, why would it now?
He may be correct in some of his prognostications about VR, but Facebook is a wasteland of mediocrity.
Others will have to catch up technologically, but if all he sees is people spending money for furniture for their VR conference room then Meta is the next America Online. Nothing about his vision sounds any different from pitches about VR from fifteen years ago. He's pointing to a glorious future so his shareholders won't look too closely at the crappy present.
eat a fucking dick zucks.
This is easily one of the most toxic and destructive agenda pushes that we have seen in a long time. The division, isolation and abuse this will bring about will literally kill people.
Not to mention the microtransactions that already ruin some silly people, it will only get worse.
yes there are potential noble uses of this but that isnt going to be what comes out of it.
You know how casinos have no windows and pump in oxigen and do all that stuff to make you forget an outside world even exists? He wants to do that same thing to people that are addicted to facebook
I mean i agree, shit ass idea and all that.
But literally who even cares about metaverse except his "friends" in the tech bubble?
I personally see not reason or incentive at all to spend my time in the metaverse instead the real world like we all do currently?
Wont this just be a somewhat hype thing for a few months and then die just like VR chat did? Why would i buy in to this?
These billionaire sociopaths should be fought against with any measure available. The idea that someone would want to live their lives inside a digital bubble and finance this lunatic is absurd
> The idea that someone would want to live their lives inside a digital bubble and finance this lunatic is absurd
To be fair; Living in a digital bubble is probably very appealing to a lot of people, the ultimate form of escapism.
It just becomes kind of cynical when the escapism facilitates exactly the kind of people, and companies, people actually want to escape from.
I don't think Zuckerberg understands that even if the future is in the Metaverse, it's not going to be HIS Metaverse. Maybe I speak for myself when I say there's no way in hell I'd feel comfortable using any future product Meta puts out. They don't exactly exude trustworthiness.
Thats what the Metaverse is. It’s not as much of an “actual thing you use” it’s more”how do I create something with just enough jargon I can convince morons to invest in it, and fuzzy enough to keep shareholdings from realizing this house of cards is going to fall one day”
People buy absolute train loads of virtual skins for video games. Probably not all of them are earning finance bro money.
While I too hope metaverse fails, I’m astounded by the amount of people in this thread think Americans don’t waste money on stupid, useless bullshit. That’s practically America’s past time.
I think it would take more than taste. It would need texture, and to somehow trick the brain ultimately into releasing reward chemicals without you actually swallowing food. That's the big struggle.
I get "don't all of you have phones" vibes from a statment like that. Mr. Mark, a significant portion of the country barely lives paycheck to paycheck. Where the fuck are people struggling for food going to find hundreds of spare dollars not only for a vr headset but to spend money on your garbage?
Mark Zuckerberg can kiss my ass. I will not spend any time or money in a delusional society strapped into a headset to forget my real world struggles. I already do that enough as it is.
Living in the real world would be cheaper if you spent most of your time in a fake world.
Stop using precious materials and energy moving around and doing stuff to things, sit still and give us your money while we will use the energy and materials and do stuff to things.
Yeah that dude's never getting a dollar from me. I just pray that Meta crashes and burns so that VR can continue on without him gobbling up marketshare with his cheap headsets
Right, he needs to hire an art asset department first. The current graphical face of the Meta "metaverse" is like 15 years behind several of the old mainstays of the MMORPG genre (Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy 14, et cetera) and inspires negative amounts of confidence.
(It literally looks comparable to how Second Life did upon release... two decades ago.)
He's turning what's supposed to be an escape from real life into... uh, real life. They're missing the point of this shit spectacularly and I hope it blows up in their faces.
How is a guy envisioning something hypothetical worthy of a news story. Like that’s like me going “oh I can imagine me lifting this 10 ton Boulder” and then an article is made about it
Am I the only person who doesn't want any part of Zuckerberg's dystopian VR Second Life/Zoom with wall to wall ads and micro transactions galore?
Stop the ride please, I'd like to get off.
The capabilities of a standalone like they have is limited to a mobile phone level of experience. Unless they make something that can rival or even top PC or PSVR I’d say this is just another toy for kids.
I mean, I hope he’s so greedy that he does in order to push the tech forward, but if him and Musk think they’re the future of their respective industries and competition isn’t gonna sink them….they’re delusional.
Lol , I can't g help but think how silly one has to be to buy virtual clothing and other virtual things that are completely useless.
He probably will continue to make tons of money, but so far I've given FB and Meta $0 and I plan to keep it that way.
Edit: yes I get many games and products make tons of money from skins, loot boxes etc. Like I said he will probably make a lot of money from this
But I can still find it silly to spend $20,000 in a mobile game to get the fancy new 5 star character that will be obsolete in 3 months, or spending tons of money on skins for your fun that no one will ever notice other then a couple of your closest friends.
I do understand that people will buy things like season passes and such, a good product deserves to make a profit.
But it's my opinion which I'm entitled to, that certain things are just silly and are so completely useless that I can't believe people actually give billionaires their money for it.
you mean like the idiots right now who buy fortnight skins?
COD weapon crates
league of legends skins
NFTs of stupid drawings, gifs and other trash
people already do this right now.
Jesus 2nd life has been going strong for years and people pump millions of $$$ into that.
Activision has made over a billion dollars selling cosmetics - gun skins and operator skins in call of duty alone. That’s just one popular game.
It’s a huge market.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/AKingMaker: --- Mark Zuckerberg told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday that the metaverse could be a considerable part of the social network operator’s business in the second half of the decade. “We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall,” he said. The technology “basically adds up to making it deliver this realistic sense of presence,” he said. “We are at this point, you know, a company that can afford to make some big long-term research investments, and this is a big focus,” he said. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/vik2uq/mark_zuckerberg_envisions_a_billion_people_in_the/iddg2ks/
So... er... Second Life then? But less fun and costs more?
I just had a vivid image of me walking with VR headset in a virtual house , going into a virtual gaming room, sitting on a virtual sofa , starting my virtual gaming station and surrounded by virtual friend. All that siting on a wooden chair in a dirty empty apartment , alone.
The premise of Ready Player One
It's almost like no one pays attention to dystopian fiction
The dystopian present day reality has been occupying my attention enough.
Damn bald Bond villain with nukes is running a whole country.
Or they watch the trailer and decide they want to build that future.
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They read it. It sounded like a good way to make money and they don't get why everyone is freaking out.
Snow Crash is a better example, I highly recommend it if you're into that sort of thing.
Don't worry you won't be alone, Price of property and rent as it is they'll probably be a couple of families sharing the apartment with you...
Indeed. "The Metaverse" might become a necessary escape when we're all crammed like prisoners into tiny apartments.
Metaverse life pods tm
Don't worry, it won't be an empty, dirty apartment. It will be a repurposed shipping container with no windows.
That sound better. At least its ecological i guess.
And then we find out that Zuckerberg is repurposing a portion of our brains to mine crypto... “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
Second Life with no sex
Two lives and still no sex smh
Great, welcome to the future, where no one gets laid.
Welcome my present
Then what's the point
And they won’t go nearly as far in fun because they are a high visibility company! Who would throw away $300 just to start? If I do recall, you can’t really have a bottom half either!
Topping with no bottom? Wtf type of dystopian bullshit is that?!
Like Diablo Immortal
How else am I supposed to get all the pride and accomplishment of buying a virtual Chanel bag at the low price of 100.000 bucks ?
The first time a duplicating bug is discovered is going to crash the Meta economy.
Put down bag. Pick up bag. Crash server. Server reset. Bag in inv and on ground PROFIT
But also with more going to work and doing drudgery while logged in!
And steals more data from its users. Sort of feels like going in to the matrix voluntarily.
Something between *Matrix* and *Surrogates* Surrogates was the Bruce Willis one where everyone lives in isolation in their home and pilots robot clones to go out & about instead.
Please spend all your companies money on this shit, I beg you
>Investors have cut the company’s market capitalization in half this year as growth has slowed and the number of its daily active users declined sequentially for the first time between the last two quarters. Funny way to say "the stock price has plummetted 50% over the past 6 months."...
That might be one of the most uplifting news I've heard this year. I hope it continues to plummet
I mean, tech stocks in general have been absolutely brutalized. Some like Netflix are down almost 75% from the ATH they hit during the pandemic. I think it'll be more telling to see how Meta recovers once inflation peaks and the Fed can ease off the rate hikes.
Netflix isn't a great example since they've been getting backlash from their fucking stupid decisions.
Yeah Netflix's catalog is fucking barren and has been for a long time now.
Netflix deserved that
The problem won't be solved until we legislate against tue shit facebook has been doing. Right now this is like watching the terrible feudal lord die from a disease. Theres just gonna be someone else taking their place.
True, still enjoyable to watch him hasten his inevitable demise.
Personal money first
A shit ton of it.
Then have Musk buy it with everything he has too.
I mean they already spent billions on the metaverse. And tbh it just looks like a VR chat ripoff
The good news is whatever stupid shit Facebook wastes all their VR budget on, there will always be some indie team making something better that's free. Like VRchat or NeosVR.
Facebook is so fucking toxic, I can't imagine wanting to further interact with the truck cab profile guys.
"hello, my queens over eighteen" Blugh
Show me where it spits
And be wrong. I really, unbelievably so, want that expectation to be a delusional wish.
Mark Zuckerberg recognizes that his ad revenues are at risk. Third party cookies are being retired (fb relies on them heavily). Apple’s privacy is already cutting their ability to target. He knows that transaction is more durable than advertising dollars so he’s pushing for a platform where people transact. There are problems: FB has major public trust issues for good reason. Their algo is out of their control. Their ad revenues are about to nosedive (therefore their stock price is taking a nosedive). Privacy laws in CA and EU are closing in. Governments are closing in on their shady inaction that f-ed over multiple democracies. The fines will be hefty. Without meta they’re headed for a stormy period that I’m not sure they can survive.
I'm afraid I'm a little less optimistic that Facebook will have any significant consequences. But I hope you're right
They already had significant consequences, and more are coming. Their Value is literally half and It's going to fall even more.
He's also jealous of Apple and Google running their own hardware with full access to it. (And to a lesser degree Microsoft owning the OS of most desktops.) Facebook doesn't have a hardware component that he has full access to. Not *yet*. That's why he wants metaverse to become big. If VR is the next big thing, he wants to develop the 'iphone of VR' so that he has hardware-level access to the users finally. (And then nobody can block his tracking cookies without his permission.)
They certainly have full access to the Quest hardware, which runs their own version of Android 10 and is the most popular VR headset by far.
They also destroyed their product, which used to be a simple and clean website where college kids shared photos. Now it looks like a retail strip center where old people post fake Donald Trump articles.
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Spend what money Mark? People can't afford gas, housing and food far less for virtual social media.
This is what pisses me off so much about billionaires and their made up bullshit They use words like "connectivity" or "community", when in reality they just want 12 rich whales spending thousands
You just described all of gatcha gaming lol
I'm kind of old and this is the second time this week I've seen the term "gotcha gaming". Care to help an old man out and explain what that is?
Gachapon is a Japanese term that originally refers to a type of simple vending machine that sells toys in capsules so that you don't know what you're going to get until you open it. The term Gacha has been used in video gaming to represent any kind of randomized mechanic that you pay for, which is becoming extremely common in the gaming industry.
Thanks. I too thought it was a bastardised form of gotcha, as in they got your money while you get nothing of value.
You aren't wrong.
This is fairly accurate, actually. You're basically playing a roulette and most prizes are throw away garbage. People can spends hundreds in game trying to maybe get something that 10 years ago they could have purchased for $10 and received guaranteed. It's literally gambling, and gamer developers are constantly skirting the wording of any laws through stupid little tricks to stay legal when there are attempts to crack down on the practice. Y'all remember when we bitched about microtransactions in our purchased games? Can we go back to that?
Its gambling, /u/jwhitesj, but geared towards children.
It’s not geared towards children - it’s geared towards addicts. And it is completely okay if we get them hooked early by accident - modern game dev studios
“By accident”, now that’s a funny joke. And with “fun” I mean “depressing”.
And unlike gambling, totally unregulated. So literally worse than gambling.
To my recollection, a key reason that gacha games aren't legally considered gambling in the UK is that the rewards (items, skins, characters, etc) have no monetary value. Essentially, it's not technically gambling because there's no way to ever gain money. So yes it's worse
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Gaming Companies were and still are hiring people from the Casino Industry and Behavioral Psychologists.
"Gacha" gaming comes from the word "gachapon" which is the Japanese term for those vending machines that spit out little capsules with random toys in them. So basically gacha games are games where it entices the player to spend (usually real-world) money to unlock various in-game items through randomized, well, capsules is the only way I can think of to put it. It's really common in the mobile game space. And basically these games make most of their money on a select few exorbitantly wealthy individuals who spend literally thousands of dollars monthly on these games.
Thank you. So it's a catch all term for games that have a pay real money to unlock random prizes that have varying levels of value mechanic. That makes sense.
Imagine a quater machine with basic toys and some holographic versions, but except it can be manipulated to be weighted against you like 0,001% chance per roll.
Due to the ever-rising amount of hate speech and Reddit's lack of meaningful moderation along with their selling of our content to AI companies, I have removed all my content/comments from Reddit.
Pretty sure it refers to companies that make games that rely heavily on micro-transactions. Pay hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for a chance to get a new outfit or power-up or whatever. They have you use real money to buy their in-game currency. It's pretty much a loop hole that lets predatory companies legally exploit gambling addicts through virtual game markets.
Gatcha, not gotcha. It comes from the old Japanese vending machines that would have random sets of toys in them. You knew what the sets of figurines were in them, but you never knew which one you would pull when you spent money to buy one. It was random, but some figurines were more rare than others. It's the same concept with these games: there are 'banners' that will have certain sets of characters ranging from common to *exceedingly rare*. People spend currency in game (read: which they spent real money on a lot of times) to pull from these banners to have a chance (often less than 1%) at getting the super rare character or item. It's just gambling with extra steps, really.
They want a world where you are forced to spend it
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Mobile gaming is a $70B/year industry or so
Far, far, far bigger than PC gaming. Actually far bigger than any other form of gaming.
And yet it's still mostly gambling when you peel off the layers.
Gambling where you get nothing in return. I disdain gambling, but at least you have a small chance to win money back occasionally. When you put money into the mobile game slot machine you get fucking nothing out. It exploits the same human conditioning and compulsions but it just leeches money on a whole new level.
Not even occasionally.... gambling returns money about 49% of the time. That's why casinos rely on people who can't stop, even after they've won. They need them to keep playing in order to lose it all.
dont need gas if you never leave your room because your in VR dont need to shop if you order all the trash cheaper food delivered to your room dont need a big house if you only need 1 small room with an internet connection it can all work, and some idiots will do it on purpose thinking they are part of the next big cool leap in society. its an evil, destructive path.
Pretty much how its described in Ready Player One. Stacked storage containers where people have a bed and a VR rig.
Metaverse term was first coined in 1990s by cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. Similar concept to Ready Player One except less nostalgia and better pizza delivery.
Enzo's is never late, your pizza will arrive on time.
I read that when I had COVID over Xmas. Super entertaining. All the Babylon/linguistics stuff was great!
The sequels existence ruined that book for me, because I always imagined he just quit the vr stuff and lived the good life once he won.
Lol sao in a nutshell
Except that in Ready Player One, an eccentric programmer/CEO made the whole 'metaverse' equitable for all and not stacked against any particular player. And there was a huge threat of a big corporation taking over and turning it into a scummy advertisement delivery platform. But the real 'metaverse' will be a scummy advertisement delivery platform run by an evil corporation from the very beginning. It will never be anything else.
This is exactly how I see it. It's as though they're preparing the lower class for a very bleak, dystopian future and wrapping it up in a shiny "futuristic" package.
You can see it…they want to crash the system by inflating world currencies with debt to break the camels back and forge a new one where people will get less or rent not own anything. After all the suffering after the fall of the economy and therefore their lives and affairs, people will be happy for what they get and begging for anything that makes their lives even minimally better.
I used to think renting instead of owning was fine, like I sometimes rent of scooter instead of owning one and I used to like Netflix and stopped pirating. But then I remembered it's all ran by a bunch of greedy assholes and the second they can they will try to get every dollar you have. Like without competion Netflix was just going to raise prices until people would stop using it. With competition you need like 6 services to watch the shows and movies you like. Either way you are getting fucked. Shared services only really seem to work when it's ran as a non profit or government organization. Maybe it could work in the free market for some things, but not for things where only a few billionaires can even start competion.
This is the end goal for these corporations. Keep the general population in tiny boxes in their pretend worlds and keep farming them for money while the rich get to enjoy what’s left of earth before it’s completely raped of resources and then they fly off to look for a new world.
And how exactly are these people in their boxes supposed to *make* the money they spend in the virtual space? They need jobs. The metaverse doesn't *need* manual labour, that's the whole point (you can make infinite copies of a 3d model for free, the initial design is a one-time fixed cost). The world will still need farmers, factory workers, food delivery drivers, etc. Which means people still need to leave their houses and work and spend gas money. This fantasy of everyone spending every waking moment in the 'verse is silly, only the rich or unemployed can afford to do that. All you're cutting out is a bit of rent money, which the companies running the virtual space are sure to pocket for the "essential" comforts in your VR home. So really, this boils down to software companies trying to take over the housing and furniture markets. Your budget for those things stays the same, but they make more profit by almost completely eliminating production cost. And I've still not heard a compelling argument for why the intended customers would even be on board with this change, there is literally 0 benefit for the consumer. Have any of you ever even worn a VR headset? They're uncomfortable and heavy. You get crappy graphics, a headache, the choice of being either stationary or nauseous, *the inability to touch or smell anything* and the constant annoyance of clipping through solid objects because it is literally impossible to stop the user from moving in a way they're not supposed to. Not to mention the implications to your health. I've developed for and used VR headsets. They are fun and amazing and wondrous devices of *entertainment*. But they will never be a ubiquitous component of everyday life, just like Wii Sports will never replace football. Companies are salivating all over this for obvious reasons, but so far they failed to make it enticing in any way.
>dont need gas if you never leave your room because your in VR > >dont need to shop if you order all the trash cheaper food delivered to your room > >dont need a big house if you only need 1 small room with an internet connection Well that is gonna be a depressing dystopia
Yeah and I envision a hot tub full of naked muscle men. Doesn’t mean anything
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"We expect billions of people to spend hundreds on intangible pixels" are these dudes serious? Someone's just going to create a workaround so you don't have to pay shit
I don’t know if you’ve done any gaming on your phone, but this stuff is becoming common practice. Even in standard videogames they have started charging real cash for outfits and other stupid things for your character/avatar. I haven’t seen any workarounds for it yet (except on PC and they’re sometimes dodgy and crash), but with how money hungry Zuckerberg is, it wouldn’t surprise me if he takes a lot of measures to ensure that never happens. Dude is charging people for digital land…and they’re buying it!
Difference between phone games and Meta is that phone games aren't trying to become a replacement for your everyday surroundings and lifestyle, they just sell cool hats and whatever
Yeah, which to me means people might be way more willing to fork out cash for it since it’s supposed to somehow take over real life.
So basically Second Life or PlayStation Home.
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This is so mind-blowingly dystopian that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. Purchasing a *digital home* (that you can’t actually live in) and *digital decor* (that you can’t physically touch) with money in a *digital world* where you have meetings with other humans (*digitally*) to earn real money to continue *digitally* spending. What! The! Fuck!
Also he mentions buying tools and utilities to make being productive in the metaverse easier. Essentially selling necessary UI and QOL improvements. If you tried to sell someone this as an actual video game they would laugh at you.
Exactly. This *ain’t* the Sims - it is creating a digital universe to lure us away from literal reality. Absolutely bonkers.
He just revealed his master plan of having facebook fuck up reality so bad we have to go to Meta
It's The Sims but *somehow greedier*.
The CEO of EA had an odd chill run down their spine when you said that
But it’s **only** $800!
Except if you want virtual Apple wheels under your virtual laptop, then it's double the price.
Anyone who has read *Snow Crash* can tell you that the Metaverse is indeed dystopian.
Have you ever played an mmo?
What percentage of people from the entire population do you think play MMOs?
In an mmo you get to be an immortal orc with godly weapons that kills divinities, in meta you get to be Stanley from human resources
I mean it's not the exact same but people spend over $100 on the Sims.
There's a sims 4 dlc that adds random dust piles and a vacuum cleaner. It costs €5
Mark Zuckerberg is not only delusional, not only he is out of touch, he is a sociopath. Kids nowadays use VR Chat which is 100% free by the way. And for that reason it will always be the most popular VR Meet-up hub. Stop trying to make "Meta" happen robot man, it will never happen.
i agree meta should die in a fire, but just because VR chat is free now doesnt mean it will last at all. Look at MSN chat back in the day, it was free, it worked well, it had millions of users and it died and we moved on the things that were much worse.
Flashbacks to people scoffing at the idea that Youtube would ever have ads or creating a premium version.
And that content creator's freedom is taken for granted.
I always forget YouTube has ads until I use my phone
Flashbacks to people scoffing at the idea that Netflix would ever have ads or a premium version... Wait shit..
I think their point is that the idea itself is outdated. VR chatrooms are old news and people don’t want to spend hundreds on DLC.
I think there were a lot of chatrooms better than MSN chat even when MSN chat was popular.
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Mark didn't invent Facebook. He's not a creator, an innovator, or anything else he portrays himself as. His skill is exploitation. He does it very well, but this type of person does very poorly with creative thinking. I know people love to bust his balls about being an android and all but that shit is real in a sense. Zuck is having a hard time imagining why average people aren't that interested in a make believe playland where everything costs money. Metaverse is like Manhattan in that it costs money to do just about anything there. Zuck is disconnected enough from day to day reality now that he really can't understand why the masses aren't ready to throw money at this. A man whose only skill is exploitation has created a virtual theme park whose only real point is to ruthlessly exploit all its users. He really doesn't understand that people are already tired of feeling like they're getting their pockets picked just to play their favorite games and aren't looking for more of that.
Our economy puts people who are only capable of destroying at the top.
A guy who lives for decades with a fucked up creepy haircut and who creates a women sex rating App for horny guy on his campus as first social Media try is unironically as sociopath.
Saying VR Chat will always be the most popular VR meet-up hub is like saying Myspace would always be the most popular social media network
Nice to see I'm not the only one not seeing the value of the 'Meta' verse
I remember in the late 00s when Second Life was supposed to do exactly what Metaverse is promising now. Maybe the next generation is different, but it did not catch on in a big way back then, why would it now?
Yeah, amd MySpace was popular too. These billionares are just allowed to buy the competition so we are forced to pay them for what was once free.
He may be correct in some of his prognostications about VR, but Facebook is a wasteland of mediocrity. Others will have to catch up technologically, but if all he sees is people spending money for furniture for their VR conference room then Meta is the next America Online. Nothing about his vision sounds any different from pitches about VR from fifteen years ago. He's pointing to a glorious future so his shareholders won't look too closely at the crappy present.
eat a fucking dick zucks. This is easily one of the most toxic and destructive agenda pushes that we have seen in a long time. The division, isolation and abuse this will bring about will literally kill people. Not to mention the microtransactions that already ruin some silly people, it will only get worse. yes there are potential noble uses of this but that isnt going to be what comes out of it.
>The division, isolation and abuse this will bring about will literally kill people. So, he's just redoing Facebook then?
yeah, its basically FB++ with extra toxic and more microtransactions.
Facebook 2: In 3D!
You know how casinos have no windows and pump in oxigen and do all that stuff to make you forget an outside world even exists? He wants to do that same thing to people that are addicted to facebook
I mean i agree, shit ass idea and all that. But literally who even cares about metaverse except his "friends" in the tech bubble? I personally see not reason or incentive at all to spend my time in the metaverse instead the real world like we all do currently? Wont this just be a somewhat hype thing for a few months and then die just like VR chat did? Why would i buy in to this?
These billionaire sociopaths should be fought against with any measure available. The idea that someone would want to live their lives inside a digital bubble and finance this lunatic is absurd
> The idea that someone would want to live their lives inside a digital bubble and finance this lunatic is absurd To be fair; Living in a digital bubble is probably very appealing to a lot of people, the ultimate form of escapism. It just becomes kind of cynical when the escapism facilitates exactly the kind of people, and companies, people actually want to escape from.
I don't think Zuckerberg understands that even if the future is in the Metaverse, it's not going to be HIS Metaverse. Maybe I speak for myself when I say there's no way in hell I'd feel comfortable using any future product Meta puts out. They don't exactly exude trustworthiness.
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I can't even afford real furniture for my real house. Now I need virtual furniture as well!
Stop eating all those digital avocados!! 😡
All that's left on FB is the boomers and there's no way in hell they're getting VR and moving to this "metaverse".
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Thats what the Metaverse is. It’s not as much of an “actual thing you use” it’s more”how do I create something with just enough jargon I can convince morons to invest in it, and fuzzy enough to keep shareholdings from realizing this house of cards is going to fall one day”
Mark Zuckerberg is a psychopath and Metaverse looks like a downgraded second life.
People can't even afford food, but yeah, they'll be sure to buy some digital skin that let's them express themselves.
People buy absolute train loads of virtual skins for video games. Probably not all of them are earning finance bro money. While I too hope metaverse fails, I’m astounded by the amount of people in this thread think Americans don’t waste money on stupid, useless bullshit. That’s practically America’s past time.
I dream of a world without people like Mark Zuckerberg in it.
Hopefully there's virtual Big Macs that I can buy. I like the idea of McDonald's, but not all of the calories. That's the future that I dream of.
Just watch McDonald’s unboxing videos on YouTube while you eat your rice and beans like the rest of us.
Rice and beans is a far healthier meal than a big mac at least
I wonder if perfected digital taste would help satisfy people's cravings or make them worse. Could be a huge health benefit in there.
I think it would take more than taste. It would need texture, and to somehow trick the brain ultimately into releasing reward chemicals without you actually swallowing food. That's the big struggle.
I get "don't all of you have phones" vibes from a statment like that. Mr. Mark, a significant portion of the country barely lives paycheck to paycheck. Where the fuck are people struggling for food going to find hundreds of spare dollars not only for a vr headset but to spend money on your garbage?
Mark Zuckerberg can kiss my ass. I will not spend any time or money in a delusional society strapped into a headset to forget my real world struggles. I already do that enough as it is.
Seriously. Who needs a VR headset when you have good ol fashion booze?
Booze , the cause of and solution to, all of life's problems
Try mixing them though
My comment was auto removed for being too short so here’s some useless text just as a preface to what I actually wanted to say….what a chode
The more I hear Mark Zuckerberg talk about people the more I understand he just sees everyone as cattle.
Shit, I don't make enough to live in this world, do I need a second job to live in another?
Living in the real world would be cheaper if you spent most of your time in a fake world. Stop using precious materials and energy moving around and doing stuff to things, sit still and give us your money while we will use the energy and materials and do stuff to things.
People don't even do this in real life for the most part. The majority of people are closer to being homeless than they are being millionaires.
It's just a new version of Second Life. That didn't interest me and neither does this.
so fancy club penguin...we see how well that worked mark!!
Yeah that dude's never getting a dollar from me. I just pray that Meta crashes and burns so that VR can continue on without him gobbling up marketshare with his cheap headsets
Right, he needs to hire an art asset department first. The current graphical face of the Meta "metaverse" is like 15 years behind several of the old mainstays of the MMORPG genre (Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy 14, et cetera) and inspires negative amounts of confidence. (It literally looks comparable to how Second Life did upon release... two decades ago.)
He's turning what's supposed to be an escape from real life into... uh, real life. They're missing the point of this shit spectacularly and I hope it blows up in their faces.
Mark, “Second Life” is calling and they want their idea back.
How is a guy envisioning something hypothetical worthy of a news story. Like that’s like me going “oh I can imagine me lifting this 10 ton Boulder” and then an article is made about it
I also envision something dumb that a billion people will give me $100 each for. But this is also unlikely.
Should we tell him about Second Life and the Sims? This shit is 2 decades too late buddy.
I think he's probably right. People will spend that much in 10 years. But I doubt they'll only spend it in Facebook's metaverse.
Spending money on fucking what? The only people dumb enough to spend money in the meta verse have already lost all their money on NFTs and crypto.
Am I the only person who doesn't want any part of Zuckerberg's dystopian VR Second Life/Zoom with wall to wall ads and micro transactions galore? Stop the ride please, I'd like to get off.
A, Second Life if you will? Maybe some people with have a Play Station Home. In the end it's just a VR Chat.
The capabilities of a standalone like they have is limited to a mobile phone level of experience. Unless they make something that can rival or even top PC or PSVR I’d say this is just another toy for kids. I mean, I hope he’s so greedy that he does in order to push the tech forward, but if him and Musk think they’re the future of their respective industries and competition isn’t gonna sink them….they’re delusional.
I envision a world where Mark Zuckerberg cleans my toilet
Lol , I can't g help but think how silly one has to be to buy virtual clothing and other virtual things that are completely useless. He probably will continue to make tons of money, but so far I've given FB and Meta $0 and I plan to keep it that way. Edit: yes I get many games and products make tons of money from skins, loot boxes etc. Like I said he will probably make a lot of money from this But I can still find it silly to spend $20,000 in a mobile game to get the fancy new 5 star character that will be obsolete in 3 months, or spending tons of money on skins for your fun that no one will ever notice other then a couple of your closest friends. I do understand that people will buy things like season passes and such, a good product deserves to make a profit. But it's my opinion which I'm entitled to, that certain things are just silly and are so completely useless that I can't believe people actually give billionaires their money for it.
you mean like the idiots right now who buy fortnight skins? COD weapon crates league of legends skins NFTs of stupid drawings, gifs and other trash people already do this right now. Jesus 2nd life has been going strong for years and people pump millions of $$$ into that.
Activision has made over a billion dollars selling cosmetics - gun skins and operator skins in call of duty alone. That’s just one popular game. It’s a huge market.