[Animats]

A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining.

Which is what Second Life does. Land payments support Linden Labs.

There is a new generation of virtual worlds - VRchat, Sansar, Sinespace, and High Fidelity. The last three have numbers of concurrent users well below 100. VRchat had around 10,000 at peak, and is now down to around 5,000. There's also Facebook Spaces, which is a VR interface to Facebook that didn't catch on, and Decentraland, which was an excuse for an initial coin offering and whose blog is down. Those are all holdovers from the VR boom that didn't happen.

The next new technology is Spatial OS, a back-end game engine for really big MMOs and virtual worlds. A few games are just starting to use this. The company behind it is valued at $500M, which means they have to charge so much to use it that big game developers are staying away. You have to run it on Google servers, and they don't publicly disclose the price schedule. It's generally said to be high, though.

[norswap]

Based on this and my own investigation of the tech, I predict Spatial OS is going to tank. Hard.