TECH NEWS – The promises of tech leaders and crypto-evangelists have failed to convince the gaming industry that the future is Metaverse.

Yet “Metaverse” was such a powerful globetrotting buzzword not long ago! Facebook went so far as to change its name to “Meta” in 2021. Then last year, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees. This could be one of the reasons why the gaming industry is losing confidence that all this meta-talk means anything.

According to an annual survey of video game professionals published by the Game Developers Conference, a significant industry event in March, responses to questions about Meta and blockchain showed a slight but notable increase in scepticism compared to last year.

Like last year, survey respondents identified Fortnite as the most likely candidate to deliver on the promise of Metaverse. Meta, followed by Minecraft and Roblox. However, 45% did not predict any winner, saying instead that “the Metaverse concept will never deliver on its promise”. 33% of respondents said the same when asked this question last year. Doubt is growing.

The GDC’s State of the Game Industry 2023 report, which summarises the survey results, includes a six-point explanation of one respondent’s scepticism. Here is a summary of their reasoning, which according to the GDC, “appears to represent the voice of a significant majority of respondents.”

• It’s still unclear what this meta-thing is: “The ‘metaverse promise,’ as it stands, is nothing. The people trying to sell it have no idea what it is, and neither do the consumers.”
• VR games need “environments dense with small interactables,” but that’s a new challenge for the games industry, which has historically focused on “core gameplay, graphical fidelity, networking, etc.”
• VR headsets are still too expensive.
• VR needs better control standardisation.
• VR games require more power, so “over-the-top” monetisation strategies such as loot boxes and battle passes are more likely to “exhaust” users.
• There have been considerable advances in VR and motion-control hardware recently, but the technology is still not good enough: “Long load times, blurry text, sticky polygons; the hardware needs to be better, or developers need to get better at optimising their games for the platform.”

According to this year’s survey, the gaming industry’s opinion on the related topic of cryptocurrencies and NFTs has changed a little less. 5% of developers surveyed said they had previously supported using blockchain technology in games. But now they are against it, with 2% saying the opposite. 25% had no opinion, and the rest said they held the same views as a year ago: 12% still support using blockchain technology in games, and 56% remain against it.

Slightly fewer respondents than last year said that their studio is genuinely interested in using cryptocurrency or NFTs in a game project.

The majority of the 2300 respondents at GDC reflect the same scepticism that many PC gamers feel about the promise of Metaverse and blockchain. The Meta cuts cannot exactly be blamed on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s preferred buzzwords. He attributed the layoffs in part to his erroneous prediction that the early, epidemic-like Internet-use craze would never die down. Other technology companies are shrinking. But alongside Meta Horizon’s rough-looking demos, the company’s decline has confirmed our sense that the “metaverse” is now, at best, a corporate pipe dream. A vision of future profits more than anything else. Or, as someone so cleverly put it in 2021: b*llshit.

Source: The Verge