I got a Quest 3 recently and getting into VR has been pretty fun. It's further convinced me that this is definitely the direction that entertainment will take eventually, though I don't know if too many people really are arguing against that.

VR naturally got me thinking about the 'metaverse' again, but I have some differing thoughts this time. Similarly to that remark I made about free speech a bit ago, I now think the notion of some entirely decentralized network where our little avatars can roam from host to host on different platforms and all generally work interoperably is a nice thought and all, but is not really that necessary or particularly likely.

Basically "modern gaming ecosystem but in VR" is perfectly robust as-is, and large platform owners like Roblox and Fortnite aren't particularly interested in giving up any ownership to users. That is to say, there'll probably be applications focused on socializing and party games, like some mixture of Discord and Tabletop Simulator. But more "hardcore" games will be their own dedicated programs, just like it is currently. These sorts of games typically want control over lower level game logic, and that's not something that can be nicely wrapped up. The current UGC system for Fortnite already has this exact problem, the same as every platform - custom gamemodes can only tweak things so far.

Maybe there would be a more persistent sense of a "character" you want to portray across these games, especially the more immersive and "reality-like" that VR becomes, but practically that wouldn't translate across all games equally. Particularly competitive games can't just enable whatever crazy avatar proportions or hairstyles in the interest of gameplay.

There's a stronger argument for this persistent avatar across social games, but I'm not sure how much "platform hopping" would occur in actuality. As it is currently, social groups are often pretty strongly fragmented across games. Any one of these social platforms would provide a solid breadth of stuff to do, and ultimately the deciding factor of how much people move around is where their friends are, I imagine that there would not be that much movement between social platforms. This leads me to believe that the blockchain implementations championed by a certain demographic just wouldn't have much application. There is some argument for them if high interoperability were a major priority, but again I don't find that nearly as likely as extending the status quo. Ironically platform providers themselves ARE the ones that play a large role in preventing these from having application, even as plenty of them love the idea of such technology (because it's profitable).

Anyhow, VR's cool and I want to see more cool stuff come from it in the future