“Where is it?” He said as he pointed to our banner.
“Where’s what?” I asked.
“The Metaverse” he replied, with a grin. “We’re all waiting to find out where it is and what it really is”
There’s only one real reply I can give to this question and its the same one I have given more than a hundred times when asked.
“Well, Im not too sure where it is right now, but I can tell you where it ISN’T”
I made him wait a beat — because this is my favourite part.
“It’s not going to be in an app store”
Our conversation then drifted into talking more about what we are doing at Studio Zero and why we think that its a good idea to be working on WebVR all day, every day. He tried telling me that WebVR can’t have the performance and fidelity that a native application can and right now — yeah, thats hard — but it wasn’t too long ago that we needed a browser plug-in to stream live TV either, now Netflix can do a pretty good job of it.
He tried saying that multi-user couldn’t scale on the web, which is a funny idea because the only way multiuser ANYTHING works is using the web.
I reminded him that the only way a true metaverse can exist is on the web. App stores are great for most entertainment now, and there is a genuine reason for them to exist (DRM)…for the time being, but eventually we are going to have to start treating VR more like the web. VR will suck if it’s just a bunch of app stores and disconnected apps. There are a lot of things we still need to figure out — links, shared worlds, user settings and the hardware needs to get more accessible.
I get it, I’m always going to defend the web because that way I’m defending my job, but in reality ( actual reality ) I defend the web because its the platform that has always come out on top. Right now, for AAA games, you’re going to live on an app store and be ‘native’ to the platform — for now. But with the advent of standards such as Web Assembly and WebGL2, you might just find that export options for VR are going to start being more centered around distributing on the web.
The Metaverse is coming, just not to an app store.
