[imiric]

Sid is a few years too late with the warning.

Gameplay and original game design have taken a backseat to increasingly hostile monetization schemes, lazy/safe/rehashed game loops and marketing/shareholder driven development for at least a decade now. The amount of AAA titles built on hype and released broken at launch, with promises of future patches, is too long to list. With some notable exceptions, most of the innovation and interesting game design is done by indie developers and smaller studios.

This video sums it up nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q38fjcyP1IQ

[34679]

If I understood Zuckerberg correctly during his Lex Fridman interview, he's trying to build an entire alternate reality based on this concept of monetizing in game items. He said something along the lines of, "People want to dress nice and look good in person, so why not in a VR meeting?" and then proceeded to talk about charging people for clothes and haircuts in the Metaverse. I have to wonder what sort of scenarios this might lead to, with all of Facebook's corporate partnerships. Are people going to end up having to pay Facebook in order to keep up with dress codes at company meetings? Will hair grow so anyone who doesn't pay Facebook for a haircut shows up looking like a bum? Will clothes become stained and ragged over time?

Lex even proposed an alternative of a closet that you only pay for once, but updates with a basic style over time. The suggestion was mostly dismissed by Zuckerberg.

Way too late to be talking about video games, this stuff is about to hit many other aspects of human interaction.

[bitwize]

> He said something along the lines of, "People want to dress nice and look good in person, so why not in a VR meeting?" and then proceeded to talk about charging people for clothes and haircuts in the Metaverse.

"Her date doesn't look half bad himself. The other girl is a Brandy. Her date is a Clint. Brandy and Clint are both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white trash high school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer-games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can almost feel the breeze. Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome and has an extremely limited range of facial expressions." --Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (whence the term "metaverse").

[donmcronald]

Lmao. It's stupid and I don't see how it's going to work. How many people that cut their children's hair to save money are going to buy into virtual haircuts? Lol.

Zuckerberg is a case of an elite dumbass surrounded by yes men where everyone in the room has so much money they can't fathom the idea of needing to choose what to spend it on. In their world, you simply buy everything you want.

I think it would be neat to see an attempt at it though. I would love to go into a VR world where I could see how many people are wearing the default clothes and haircuts vs people paying for virtual goods.

Is a virtual suit tax deductible? Imagine creating a virtual clothing manufacturer in a tax haven and having your US company buy $2k virtual suits for the entire staff. That's instant profit shifting and tax avoidance.

Would they have IP protections for virtual goods? Who owns a plain black tee shirt in VR? What's the difference between a designer purse and a knockoff in VR? Will people inspect my avatar to make sure I'm wearing genuine Calvin Klein (TM) (C) (NFT) underwear?

[RoddaWallPro]

It's laughable to me that with everything you could possibly do in the human universe as a billionaire (or even a run-of-the-mill-person), he's out here wanting to sell virtual clothes to people :facepalm:

[opportune]

They probably don't even want to sell virtual clothes. They just want to skim 30-80% off all the virtual clothes transactions with a "platform"

[joshschreuder]

The broken at launch thing feels like a response to the increasing cost and resourcing of AAA titles. Big games these days cost a gazillion dollars to make. I imagine at some point in development they end up just being money pits and the developer wants/needs to recoup some cost to continue working on them.

Maybe this is a result of it being hard to estimate and budget new releases, rather than being explicitly consumer hostile (though it may well be as you say).