If socializing within games is so popular, why hasn’t the multiverse arrived yet?

Virtual Worlds EC-1 Part 4: For technical and cultural reasons, multiverse virtual worlds are about to go massively mainstream

Thus far in this series we’ve outlined “multiverse” virtual worlds — a concept different from the metaverse — as the next stage of social media and what this future will look like. It begs the question though: if video games have been massively popular for many years, why hasn’t this shift to online virtual worlds as mainstream social hubs on par with Facebook and Instagram already happened?

(This is part four of a seven-part series about virtual worlds.)

The thought of virtual worlds for socializing evokes Second Life (launched in 2003), where users created unique avatars to socialize, build and trade with each other. Contemporaneous press hype told us that our entry into “the metaverse” appeared imminent, and a 2006 cover story in BusinessWeek magazine featured an analyst who predicted that Second Life could displace Windows as the leading PC operating system.

That didn’t happen.

Granted, Second Life is still around, albeit with only a few hundred thousand active users. Eve Online is another long-running, open-world MMO where the experience is shaped by users’ contributions and social interactions. It’s been the subject of numerous studies on economics and psychology, given the depth of its data on human interaction, but it remains niche as well.

The popularity of Roblox, which surpassed 115 million MAUs and 40 million user-created experiences in August, and Minecraft, which surpassed 112 million MAUs, shows this movement gaining traction in a bigger way among the youngest generation of internet users.

There are both technical reasons and cultural reasons why participation in virtual worlds will finally go massively mainstream in the next few years.

On the technical side, most consumers have lacked the high-performance hardware necessary to meaningfully participate in advanced MMOs while going about their daily lives. And even if they had the right hardware, they weren’t entering one shared virtual space with all other users, they were just entering one instance of that world which was limited in scope and player count by the capabilities of a single server.

That’s all in the process of changing:

  1. Consumers have better hardware. A visually stimulating virtual world filled with activity from different avatars previously required the graphics and computing power of a gaming console or high-performance PC. Plus, high-speed and low-latency internet has been a necessity for MMOs, not just for the speed of response in shooting games but to avoid awkward social interactions. Quality internet is now commonplace and new smartphones can handle graphics and storage that used to require an Xbox.
  2. The widespread adoption of 4G and the rollout of 5G will enable mobile devices to process huge amounts of data and minimize latency without a Wi-Fi connection. 5G is still a few years from widespread availability in urban areas, but just as 4G enabled the rise of social media and mobile games, 5G will enable lots of people in the same area to all run data-intensive, interactive apps from their phones.
  3. Games can now be streamed from the cloud rather than needing to be downloaded and run on each user’s device. There remain many obstacles to cloud gaming at scale, but within the next few years, the ability to play games with AAA-quality graphics as easily as streaming a YouTube video will dramatically lower the bar of hardware necessary for a consumer to participate — nearly any smartphone, tablet or PC will do.
  4. Many game developers are making their games cross-platform, because so many devices can now handle data-intensive games. Fortnite reached 10 million accounts within its first two weeks because friends could participate from different consoles and PCs, and then it expanded to even more people when it launched on mobile six months later. Cross-platform play naturally enables more socializing because friends with different devices can congregate in the virtual world. While those on mobile won’t have the equivalent experience of someone with a large screen and controller, when the focus is on social interaction and not hardcore gaming, that’s not critical.
  5. Developers can now use multiple servers to host a single instance of a virtual world. Server networking and game-hosting companies like Improbable and its SpatialOS are pioneering the ability to host expansively large and detailed virtual worlds that are persistent — that continue running even when users log off — and that can handle huge numbers of players co-existing in the same instance. MMOs like Fortnite can currently only handle up to ~100 players in a given instance of their virtual world; the much talked about Marshmello concert in Fortnite, for example, had about 100,000 instances of 100 players in attendance rather than one instance with all 10 million players interacting as a mob in one place. It’s tough for a virtual world to act as a social network connecting everyone when they’re not persistent and when no more than a few dozen users can coexist in that world at once.

In terms of consumer behavior, there are two important cultural shifts underway right now in social media: The first is that the obsession with broadcast-based social media is wearing off as I wrote about earlier in this series. The second shift is that mainstream adoption of games has made most internet users comfortable with simple gaming environments and with in-game purchases for virtual goods or benefits.

Most people connected to the internet play video games now, and free-to-play mobile games are the largest segment of the gaming industry in terms of revenue and participants. Hundreds of millions of people who don’t think of themselves as gamers spend real money on virtual goods in games. Of all consumer spending through mobile app stores last year, 72% was on mobile games (with in-app purchases as the dominant revenue stream). According to App Annie, the majority (55%) of time spent and three-quarters of consumer spending (76%) in mobile games is on core games like MMO role playing and action games, rather than casual games like puzzles and arcade games, even though the latter are downloaded more often.

The combined shift underway here is that high-quality, social virtual worlds are becoming accessible from any device at the same time that gaming is experiencing rapid growth in popularity and that people are craving more genuine, intimate social experiences online.

Virtual worlds will become substantially more popular as social hangout spots, particularly as the developers behind them allow for simple socializing and creative expression to take center stage.


Virtual Worlds EC-1 (Special Series) Table of Contents

Also check out other EC-1s on Extra Crunch.