Why an open metaverse economy might be coming soon (ft. Jamie Burke)

Highlights

• Facebook’s foray into the metaverse: “Facebook is now saying they are transitioning into becoming a metaverse company, away from being a social media company. But this isn’t anything new. They’ve been undergoing this transition for a long time, of course, with their acquisitions in VR and Oculus. But of course, they’re also trying to launch [Diem], which is their own cryptocurrency. That’s no coincidence. They understand that there will be this economic system that is woven throughout the metaverse.”
• Fortnite’s venture to the open metaverse: “Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games — who also has a duopoly on gaming engines with the Unreal Gaming Engine — he himself has stated that he believes the metaverse needs to be open for all the reasons he’s a sci-fi nerd, as you would expect as well, that we saw with Ready Player One. He fears that when he’s gone, Epic Games could be an evil corporation and it could have power beyond the wildest imagination. And it will try to seize control of the metaverse. So he’s already talking about the open metaverse. He’s just raised over US$1 billion to make Unreal and Epic Games more open.”
• Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are now the economic layer of the metaverse: “But if we kind of focus on NFTs, because I think that’s more generally how people will invest in the metaverse, these effectively are collectibles in different media types and different forms. But ultimately what they do is they restore the idea that you can have something that is digital and scarce, which is ultimately the web broke collecting. It made anything that was digital close to free, or at least people expected it to be free.”
• Why metaverses need interoperability: “Let’s say they get bored with the game and people always eventually get bored with the game. You can’t perpetually keep people locked in and entertained by a game. That could last for a decade. It could last for a year. It could last for a month. But ultimately they’ll get bored. And when they get bored, then what? Ultimately, in this case, all the value and time that they put into it is lost. They can’t transfer that out of that system.”