Interest in the much-hyped metaverse has dropped sharply since its peak in January 2022. Not everyone, however, has given up on the vision of an interconnected and interoperable virtual world. The key to this vision of an “open metaverse” is that users own and control their data and digital assets.
What is the metaverse and who still believes in it? Those two questions have become more difficult to answer in the past year. But for Ryan Gill, founder and CEO of Crucible, a hotbed for the “open metaverse,” the most viable future is a truly open and interconnected virtual world.
The metaverse has faced skepticism since interest peaked in January 2022. Since those halcyon days when Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, attention has shifted away from the term “metaverse” to hotter technologies, notably artificial intelligence (AI).
Interest in the Metaverse Near Its All-time Low
Meanwhile, Facebook and other tech companies have instituted user policies that threaten privacy even more than some forms of government crackdown, Gill believes.
According to Google Trends, the world’s leading interest aggregator, global interest in the “metaverse” is almost as low as it was before the Meta rebrand when the term was isolated in the crypto sphere.
Gill, however, is puzzled by the term’s steady fallout. “The media hype cycles come and go,” he said.
“The metaverse has had more than one. But today, there are 300 million players in user-generated worlds like Roblox or Minecraft, and these experiences are the emerging metaverse. So saying he’s dead is just the media that needs a narrative.”
Gill is not wrong about the popularity of the metaverse. As of July 2023, Minecraft, the game where players build and craft using 3D blocks, has over 140 million users. Numbers comparable to the populations of Japan, Russia, and Mexico.
Roblox, which allows gamers to create games to play and share with others, has more than 67.3 million daily active users, not far behind the numbers in the UK, France, and Thailand.
The obvious question, though, is whether games like Minecraft and Roblox are the emerging metaverse, and what the finished product looks like, as there’s a risk that massively multiplayer online games will simply get a rebrand.
Metaverse Should Mean Interoperability
For Gill, a truly interconnected and interoperable virtual world is what many in the industry call an “open metaverse”. A 3D analog to the blank slate of the world wide web. Gill continued:
“It’s what happens when worlds connect, in the same way that the Internet is made of websites. The metaverse is the internet created by game developers. Open Metaverse is the natural extension of this shift towards more immersive online experiences.”
To achieve this, the intensive effort is focused on ensuring that 3D assets and experiences work across different virtual worlds, Gill explained. “For example, I’d like my avatar to look and act the same no matter what world I’m in,” he said.
Central to that vision is the Blockchain, where transactions, digital assets, and entire worlds can become part of the decentralized public realm.
Decentralized metaverses like Decentraland and The Sandbox are proof that the concept can work, even if they struggle to maintain a large user base, Gill believes. In his view, corporate regulation can be even more insidious than repressive government policies.
By Audy Castaneda
