Why virtual worlds died

http://iteratingfun.com/post/50274986215/reasons-virtual-worlds-died

by hkyeti • 13 years ago

39 45 13 years ago

iteratingfun.com

zapf• 13 years ago

Nothing new here.

hkyeti6• 13 years ago

Hey, there's an expanded section at the bottom, maybe some new ideas in there..

azakai2• 13 years ago

> Virtual worlds don’t have explicit goals. [..] They aren’t games.

> Great technology doesn’t mean a great user experience.

Of course, but IMO the real missed opportunity was that the one virtual world with real traction - Second Life - just made most kinds of games impossible because of technological limitations. The client-server model they chose made it impossible to play responsive games in Second Life.

Imagine if it were possible to enter a SL region and jump right into a platform game or an FPS. Yes, virtual worlds are not games, but they could have incorporated and enabled games.

Instead, Second Life focused on showing how much it was "not a game", and never even tried to address the technological limitations that prevented games from running on it.

I agree with the post on the reasons virtual worlds failed. But it could easily have been otherwise - allowing games would have grown the entire virtual worlds market.

hkyeti6• 13 years ago

Agree better performing games would have made SL more interesting. But I doubt it would have turned it into a big success. Why go to a place to play games when I can just play the games directly.

Personally I think that the "separate games with common avatar and spanning community" is a better way to go.

Side note - A couple other players also tried that:

Blue Mars had better technology and 3d graphics, and ability to make some pretty impressive games, but it never really caught on, mostly because the virtual world itself never took off and retained the players.

Raph Koster's Metaplace tried that approach on the web, building games into an avatar community, and players also didn't really warm to it.

doctorpangloss• 13 years ago

> Why go to a place to play games when I can just play the games directly.

Both StarCrafts and WarCraft 3 had excellent custom game/scenario engines. Three leading game genres, MOBA, Tower Defense and Tug of War, got started as scenarios for these games.

There is a lot of demand for a place to play games, especially if the tools are right.

rubinelli• 13 years ago

> separate games with common avatar and spanning community

You described Club Penguin: http://mashable.com/2011/12/13/club-penguin-disney/

I'm not sure the common avatar is a prequisite, though. Steam doesn't have one, but Valve tries to build its social aspects into the games as deep as possible.

azakai2• 13 years ago

> Why go to a place to play games when I can just play the games directly.

Any new game will require you to set up a user account, download or install something, learn the controls, and so forth. A game inside of Second Life would decrease each of these problems if not remove them entirely. That's the potential.

Yes, it has been tried multiple times (in addition to the ones you mentioned, I founded a startup called Syntensity in that field), and always failed.

I think the problem is gaining initial momentum. Second Life had that, no one else did. But Second Life squandered it.

jared314• 13 years ago

It almost sounds like you are describing the Reboot[0] cartoon series.

[0] http://www.hulu.com/reboot

iterationx• 13 years ago

The Internet conquered Time and Space. Want continue a chat with someone from another continent in real time or have your messages stored and retrieved over a period of years? No problem. But now with time and space conquered we decide we want to add time and space... Hmm... So do I have to walk over to his avatar? And chat? I would like to see someone solve this conundrum and make it compelling. I find it an interesting problem to ponder.

hkyeti6• 13 years ago

I never got the walking bit in virtual worlds.

Maybe for exploring, but if the main thing you wanted to do was to talk with people, why not let you jump straight to them.

It's interesting that arguably the world that got the most traction, IMVU, eschews movement and only lets you jump to predefined spots, which lets people stand or sit next to each other faster..

VLM• 13 years ago

I would extend your remarks with the observation that the worlds most successful online bookstore looks more like a superspammy point of sale system or superspammy order entry system, rather than a virtual 3-d world with virtual grep-less bookshelves and a virtual check out line with a virtual cash register staffed by a virtual teen slacker. Peapod is also a good example.

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

Very good point. This brings some ideas for the alternative representations of the VR...

kybernetikos2• 13 years ago

I think that this is the core of it. Virtual worlds were always going to struggle because the abstract space that is the internet, where people cluster around concepts and you're never more than one step from anyone else who is connected is just much, much less limiting than dimensional space.

There is only one thing that dimensional space is good for, and that is for serendipity. When you can talk to anyone, you talk only to those you already know you want to talk to. When you're located in a point in space, you talk and interact with others that happen to be near that point in space. This is why the few areas that virtual reality does seem to be useful is for meeting new people, or for activities where limiting yourself is the whole point -i.e. games.

sbov• 13 years ago

I must be misinterpreting this - how have virtual worlds died? Every MMO is a virtual world, there's still millions who play them, and they're still releasing more and more.

hkyeti6• 13 years ago

MMOs and their variants are going strong, this post is referring to the non game worlds like SL, IMVU, Lively, There.com etc

potatolicious• 13 years ago

They're still releasing more and more, but the profitability is highly suspect. To be somewhat simplistic, the only profitable MMOs are WoW and a small smattering of niche MMOs like Eve Online.

Every attempt to unseat WoW from its throne has failed miserably - most recently the incredibly big budget SWTOR that fell with a big fat splat in the mud.

Even more niche MMOs are having trouble succeeding financially. APB, Star Trek Online, the Final Fantasy MMOs, all were commercial failures (big ones at that).

The game industry as a whole is a pretty risky investment overall (big-budget AAA-titles fail routinely and spectacularly), MMOs are even a notch above. Sometimes I wonder why they keep getting funded - EA poured a reported $200 million into SWTOR before watching it fail.

warfangle• 13 years ago

If you try to take the addiction formula of a game that's been honed over a decade and re-implement it imperfectly, of course you won't be able to unseat the king.

rorrr2• 13 years ago

Minecraft made $240-250M in 2012 alone. It made $33M between Jan 2011 and Apr 2011.

It still sells amazingly well.

http://d1y0oqfyli6x95.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013...

Keep in mind, that's a game developed essentially by one guy.

AJ007• 13 years ago

- Just because virtual worlds didn't results in a multi-billion dollar IPO doesn't mean they failed.

- The sequel to LucasFilm's original Habitat still is alive and running online, 18 years later.

My two cents, in virtual worlds the users are the product. The more mass market they become, the more the less interesting the average user becomes. Unlike social networks, people visit virtual worlds to meet new people. In some regards, more could be learned from PlentyofFish than Facebook.

lmm• 13 years ago

The virtual world was never a good idea; the whole concept arose from a bad analogy made by nontechnical people. I'm not sure it's even worth looking for anything good to come out of them; my impression is that what success Second Life enjoyed (and let's face it, when we talk about virtual worlds we basically mean second life) came not from its virtual world status per se but by giving certain subculutres a place to roleplay. Just let the concept die and get on with producing things people actually want.

abecedarius• 13 years ago

I wouldn't classify Chip Morningstar, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson as nontechnical people.

kybernetikos2• 13 years ago

"I started hearing about people that connected home computers distantly via telephone, and because, fortunately, I knew absolutely nothing about computers, I was able to smoosh that all together and get this vague vision of my arena, which I then need a really hot name for. Dataspace didn’t work, and infospace didn’t work. Cyberspace. It sounded like it meant something, or it might mean something, but as I stared at it in red Sharpie on a yellow legal pad, my whole delight was that I knew that it meant absolutely nothing." -William Gibson

wildgift• 13 years ago

I tried second life a couple times, and just didn't get into it. Either it was totally boring, or way too kinky. Often, both. I designed a couple objects. It was exciting at first, but got tedious, and I lost interest. The idea of making a simple gambling game kind of got me interested again, because greed is often a good motivator, but I had so little interest in those games to start with, that my idea just seemed crappy after a day.

I'm kind of feeling the same way about tablets.

zimbatm• 13 years ago

> Give people a blank piece of paper and ask them to “have fun!” A few might get excited and start writing a poem or sketch a masterpiece. But most will be annoyed, grow bored and give up.

Here we get explained how minecraft is a failure.

hkyeti6• 13 years ago

Lego is very fun (well I think so), but an app to just play lego isn't going to do as well as a lego app with game mechanic and goals to accomplish.

Minecraft has some simple mechanics. You can collect stuff. You craft stuff. You have to survive. That makes it fun to get into. And yes the creativity and community builds on that to achieve some amazing things which amplifies the fun, and at that point you can ignore the survival/goal part of it. It's quite a bit different from a virtual world like Second Life.

iosnoob2• 13 years ago

I think also minecraft abstracts the detail, allowing you to use more imagination.

specialist2• 13 years ago

Exactly.

Expectation wise virtual reality is like artificial intelligence. Whatever AI solved just became "computation", while the mythical "real AI" was always just past the horizon.

During the early years, VR was 3D immersive MMO dungeon (MUD) environment. VR caves and head mounted displays aren't common place. But I'd say in most other ways, the vision for VR has been largely realized.

In the mid 90s, I worked on a blacksun (Snowcrash) inspired virtual world kinda thing. We tried to divine a collaboratively built world that would then be used as the scenes to host other games. Not too different from SecondLife. It sucked.

At no time did any one come close to conceiving something as simple and awesome as Minecraft.

stratagerm2• 13 years ago

A large proportion of Minecraft players are kids. I've written about this in The Minecraft Generation: A distinct demographic cohort. [1] This will be the first generation of children to grow up with a lot of experience in virtual worlds.

[1] http://gamegenus.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-minecraft-generati...

pekk• 13 years ago

Not really, plenty of kids have grown up on WoW or EverQuest or LPMUD or whatever before this, not to mention so many other games. I don't see how Minecraft is revolutionary in this respect.

vacri• 13 years ago

Minecraft has some very specific goals. Just because there is no overarching goal doesn't mean there are none. "Don't die at night", "don't starve" are two very clear ones that drive you to developing the area. Then you can build things if you're inclined to do so.

The people who design and build giant amazing things in Minecraft are analagous to the poets and sketchers in the blank-paper example.

dasil003• 13 years ago

The technology was just premature. Of course fantasy worlds ala the cyberspace of science fiction are something people will be interested in. The problem is that we are nowhere near the technology to make a virtual world that is 1/10th as compelling as the real world.

So for now we are stuck with purpose-built networked games and applications that enhance reality rather than replace it. I don't see the next step happening until either a major breakthrough in computing power and/or AI. Assuming we can find a new hockeystick from the current plateau, I expect virtual worlds with the addictiveness of heroine are inevitable.

I will be an old man and yell at the kids to get off my lawn.

nazgulnarsil2• 13 years ago

Horrible timing, virtual worlds are about to make a major comeback as the oculus rift makes them compelling again. Just wandering around a static environment with the oculus is more fun than the best AAA titles on traditional consoles.

hkyeti6• 13 years ago

Would be even more fun as a game.

Would love to play a next gen game like Watch Dogs on a VR headset. But if it was just walking around in the Watch Dogs world, less interesting.

JamesArgo• 13 years ago

Second Life is adding support. This may make it actually useful for collaboration. I also sometimes wonder what programming with Oculus rift would be like. A screen as tall as ones entire field of view, multiple monitors without the multiple monitors, a bit of a sensory deprivation effect to help with concentration--it might be pretty cool

nazgulnarsil2• 13 years ago

I love the videos where people interact with the settings from within the environment they're virtually standing in. Very much a 'Matrix' moment.

jpalomaki• 13 years ago

Back in the days most so called "virtual worlds" I tried looked pretty ugly and were hard to navigate compared to FPS games from same era.

DanBC• 13 years ago

VRML was pretty clunky and my connection was lousy.

It'd be interesting to see what people could do with it now. Unfortunately, VRML seems to have been taken out of a few browsers.

What's the modern equivalent of VRML?

laumars• 13 years ago

There isn't as such, but there is things like WebGL which is more akin to the traditional style of programming 3D graphics (eg turing complete C-derived language rather than an XML-styled markup language).

I used to love VRML though. In fact back in the 90s I built a whole web site in VRML. Sadly it's problems ran much deeper than bandwidth and it's syntax. VRML suffered from the same issues that HTML did back then; every client rendered the document slightly differently. Plus VRML was a victim of being too premature as back in the 90s a hardware 3D accelerator was a thing of luxury - rather than now when even the modest onboard chipsets are relatively powerful. So most PCs just didn't have the horsepower to really take advantage of the 3D websites.

The weird thing is, despite it's problems - of which were many - I actually do miss VRML. It was fun and felt really futuristic. And while I don't want to take anything away from the developers who port cool demos to WebGL, the whole concept of virtual worlds has lost the same magic as it had in the 90s when people were building such things with no idea where the journey would take them (I guess like the decade before when I first got into micro computers and had no idea where that journey would lead me).

specialist2• 13 years ago

I wrote a VRML browser. Super fun.

VRML the language is still a superior scene / object graph language. The event model was almost the correct answer for describing interaction and has yet to be surpassed.

ARON (a righteous object notation) is derived from my VRML work. I hate JSON, XML, etc with the passion of a billion burning suns. So I stripped out DEF/USE prototyping and the JavaScript events and made this, cleaned up a bit of the syntax, and made this:

https://code.google.com/p/aron/

mintplant• 13 years ago

"Died"? Second Life has a booming economy and a consistent 50,000-60,000 concurrent user count. Many of us still enjoy it; the only thing that "died" was the unsustainable media hype.

drill_sarge• 13 years ago

thats not a high user count. look at Wow or other popular MMOs. I bet the role playing stuff in Garrys Mod has more players.

lifeformed• 13 years ago

Not concurrent players. Garrys mod has around 20k. Here are more stats: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

unsignedint• 13 years ago

From my experience in SL:

1) What you can do there is so limited unless you pay $___ (fill in the blank for the price of land, etc.) to build something.

2) If you don't want to pay for land, you'd naturally go elsewhere to check things out -- I looked around, but many of the places I visited offered a very low level of interactivity. You want to ride a cool car in the field? Nope, you do not have permission to do that, and I believe that was a pavilion set up by some sort of car company or something.

Why virtual worlds died

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