How to break in the games industry - an insiders' guide

[Vilham]

Honestly I'm not sold, this has been tried a dozen times and sometimes with a hardware user bases larger than fakebooks current Rift base. Remember Playstation Home, had a user base of what, 40 million people, dead. Second life, dead. Those weren't VR, but is an even steeper barrier to entry.

Plus VR chat currently exists for the actual innovators/first adopters of this tech (which is critical for something to grow) and that even though its available on Index/Vive/Rift and windows mixed reality has a tiny user base.

I guess time will tell but right now, this is in the fad column for me.

To be clear, i am sure VR gaming will continue to grow as the technology becomes more accessible, but I don't believe social VR will catch on and become mainstream.

Edited January 14, 2022 by Vilham

[blackdog]

I am hoping this social/metaverse won't gain traction. The fact that the barrier to entry is so high is comforting. It's just scary imagining all these people plugged in like in the Matrix, pursuing virtual shit that don't matter. Seems a way to just rob people of everything. The repercussions of socials are already well known, force feeding dopamine boosts to people seems like sending lemmings over the cliff.

In a sense it was cool the gaming we've experienced growing up, it was an equalizer, it didn't matter who you were, if you could afford to wear Nike at school or not, in game we were all the same and just the skill mattered... now with NFTs and all this personalisation content we are just recreating the clique aspect of the school playground. If I'm immersing myself in a virtual world is to get a break from the real one... are we gonna get people hustling to sell you shit, like those on the side of the street?

@Castle where do you find all that time to spend in VR, I've got a child to feed and educate, I can hardly message family when I'm looking after them. And when I see friends I want to hug them and share food with them... even if I could afford a VR kit, I just wouldn't have time.

[Castle]

On 1/14/2022 at 6:05 PM, blackdog said:

 

@Castle where do you find all that time to spend in VR, I've got a child to feed and educate, I can hardly message family when I'm looking after them. And when I see friends I want to hug them and share food with them... even if I could afford a VR kit, I just wouldn't have time.

Get cripto right once and its cypher punk life for life. Nothing else you can do in life will make the kind of money crypto can make without even breaking a sweat.

The VR existence is basically unlimited social interaction at big parties indefinitely. It spreads past that and leaks into real life eventually where you will be in contact with all kinds of people around the world in cliques that never would have existed before. Networking potential is sick especially if the game industry starts to have a bigger role in the VR space. Threads like this wont even need to exist, you will just go to the right parties and meet the right people and probably get a job doing something within a week.

As a metaverse game developer you will likely be a very well known person in the community and gain the kind of treatment you probably expect a celebrity would experience. Nothing combines our job with socializing in the way this medium does. Literally your avatar will be a signifier that you are someone of stature. Your resume can be a place people actually visit. And if you are someone who contributes you get treated like a rockstar. 

So this can go dystopian black mirror or it can go sci-fi novel amazing. It comes down to how the tech gets used. At the moment everything is wild west so its a sneak peak into the future might be like. If its decentralized and nobody controls it then its just an extension of humanity. If it get centralized then its going to be heavily controlled and it will suck and probably die as nobody will use it.