There is a lot of talk about Metaverse projects, however, the lights and shadows that appear on these platforms sometimes completely confuse the consumer.
Since we created Ready for Metaverse I have realized that broken promises have been one of the rules established by the platform creators of #Metaverso. We decided to generate the platform to test the projects, present them to users and give them a balance as objective as possible about each of them. I count hundreds of people I have advised publicly and privately on the viability of these long-term projects. Today, I have decided to open the wing of my expertise a little more publicly. I will not name names, but by clarifying certain general vicissitudes, you will quickly realize whether you have made a good or bad choice, often with a prior financial investment.
Read this question, but don't answer it until the end of the article:
Do you regret the projects in which you placed your trust?
THE TECHNOLOGY IS IMMATURE
Complete and functional #metaversos generating devices are expensive. They are not available to the critical mass of users. But this does not stop here, this is the most mundane. The reality is that in addition to being inaccessible in many cases due to price, it is inaccessible due to technological limitations:
🚨 Image Resolution and Quality : Current VR and AR devices have limited resolution, making it difficult to create a hyper-realistic virtual world. In addition, its use for long periods of time can cause various physical problems such as dizziness, blurred vision or nausea.
🚨 Tracking : The tracking of VR and AR devices is still imperfect, which can cause immersion and coordination problems. Sometimes on the Oculus Quest 2 the tracking was lost or had bugs.
🚨 Volume: Yes, don't tell me no. They are big, quite big. Sometimes annoying, heavy or even cumbersome. Maybe you have tried physical activities with glasses. How are you sweating with them on?
🚨 Software: Although advances are increasingly significant, the experience is superior in an ULTRA video game than in any virtual world that your glasses can support. It has limitations, it is normal, but let's be realistic since the glasses in these projects are anything but realistic.
LACK OF INTEROPERABILITY
Everyone sweeps home, as usual. The famous interoperability that everyone talks about does not exist. Some don't want to share, others can't and others are open to it but are not interesting to others.
🔸 Interoperability in the Metaverse ( World Economic Forum ) 🔸
👉 https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Interoperability_in_the_Metaverse.pdf
What I leave you here above is the interoperability report in collaboration with Accenture of the World Economic Forum where it will explain in a very efficient way the benefits of interoperability. But remember, today it does not exist. There are collaborations, which is not the same as interoperability, but wow, there have always been collaborations even in video games, it is nothing new.
What happens with this? That on the platform you operate you are sold in the sense of having digital assets "owned". It doesn't matter if there is integration in #blockchain that you have a wallet and believe that they belong to you. It's a mirage. If it is not compatible with another platform, where do you plan to take them?
They will die in your wallet along with the platform the day it decides to close. Video game players know a lot about this: in each version of the game they spend and spend and when the game ends, the Items, acquisitions or progress die with them.
Buuuut, a few are learning from this. Players are beginning to complain, very, very much that their progress and purchases are not saved and they can continue playing with their weapon camouflages, for example in Call of Duty. And in this...
Activision has seen it coming
CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE II AND CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE III. TRANSFER CONTENT: ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTIONS
👉 https://www.callofduty.com/es/blog/2023/08/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-II-to-modern-warfare-III-carry-forward
If you go to the link you will see that the content of MWII will be compatible with some exceptions in MWIII, but not the other way around. However, if you later purchase MWII, you will have that content available in MWIII. Good move, right? The players are happy. However, you should always be wary. Read the message at the bottom of the article:
What had you believed? They don't belong to you at all. It is simply available for you to continue your journey (on our platform) and nothing further than on our platform. Forget about interoperability, generating savings with your assets or saving them to remember moments in 10 years. Forget it and let's move on.
SECURITY ISSUES
The new platforms specially integrated into blockchain are not invulnerable by any means. This is the case of $SAND
Cybercriminals used phishing to introduce malware and thus steal the data of platform users.
First, they sent fake emails that appeared to come from The Sandbox. These emails contained links to fake websites that were infected with malware. When users clicked on the links, the malware was downloaded to their devices and stole their personal data.
The stolen data included names, email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, and in some cases even passwords. Cybercriminals could use this information to make fraudulent purchases, access bank accounts, or even impersonate victims in the real world.
It is estimated that it affected more than 100,000 users.
Let's keep in mind that these platforms, many of which are totally indie, can suffer attacks and data leaks everywhere without a good cybersecurity system. Did you know that cybersecurity is the most expensive thing for a company and that it is usually the last thing to invest in?
Cyberbullying is also one of the main problems of our new life. And this of course has had its cases in "the metaverse"
I am going to recommend reading this article: Cyberbullying in the Metaverse and the case of Nina Jane
And as far as security is concerned, I am not going to talk to you about investing with cryptocurrencies or fiat money in this type of platforms, because here everyone, absolutely everyone, would lose out. The days, weeks, months and years show us today that the losses of the holders, faithful believers of these metaverses, are in catastrophic losses. And no, I'm not talking about traders. We are talking about people who do not operate on exchanges. We are talking about normal people who only wanted to have an investment or a land in #NFT format because the promises of the projects were ridiculously fanciful.
From my point of view, neither ethically nor morally these actions by the development teams are justified. Many of these have taught opaque perspectives on the true development of platforms. They have been based on small trailers and videos of what could have been and never was to date. Course changes have been made on the fly after committing to certain points vital to many users and investors that if this had not been the case from the beginning perhaps the user would have thought twice.
If we look at the profit figures since the release of the #tokens , which in the end is the new form of financing for small studies, the results are not very encouraging and are not based solely and exclusively on market sentiment:
$SAND 🔻-66% last year / 🔻 -96.50% from ATH
$MANA 🔻-58% last year / 🔻-95% since ATH
Bloktopia 🔻 -59% last year / 🔻 -99.25% since ATH
Somnium Space 🔻 -54% last year / 🔻-97.5% since ATH
Outer Ring🔻 -29.8% last year / 🔻 -98% from ATH
Gamium 🔻-48% last year / 🔻-96.66% since ATH
Over The Reality🔻-69.3% last year / 🔻-93.98% since ATH
Victory VR 🔻 -47.3% last year / 🔻 -99% from ATH
Star Atlas 🔻 -67% last year / 🔻-99.34% from ATH
Everdome 🔻 -71.6% last year / 🔻-99.28% from ATH
PROBLEMS WITH SCALABILITY
Going down the explanation to the user level, metaverses are virtual environments that require a large amount of resources to function, such as processing power, storage and bandwidth. When there are many users in the same scene, the demand for these resources can be too high for the servers to handle, which can cause problems such as delays (high latency), connection drops, or even the inability to enter a scene. with retries (infinite retries)
There are a number of factors that contribute to the lack of scalability in metaverses, including:
🔰The technology🔰 is not prepared to support the load of a metaverse with millions of users simultaneously. Currently visible and public tests
Scavengers Playtest 4.100 players
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYodPyhJQsU
Here I show you the public user test simultaneously in a video game. And we are talking about a video game that is already dead. Now add high-requirement technologies like VR. He says that a soccer stadium can fit 80,000 people or up to 100,000 or 10,000 to 20,000 in some music festivals. It seems that we are somewhat far away for now from technology allowing us to do certain experiences simultaneously.
🔰The architecture🔰 Current metaverses are designed to be centralized, meaning that all the load falls on a few servers. This is because it is cheaper, much easier to manage, with a single point of control for data and resources, in addition to their maintenance and updating. On the other hand, it is also much easier to control when it comes to ensuring that the brand and the products or services it offers are done in a certain way. At the same time, attacking a centralized metaverse is much easier because it has a single point of attack, while decentralized ones can distribute their information throughout each of them and it is more complex to attack all of them, although sometimes it is not strictly necessary to obtain certain information.
Currently, cloud computing is providing flexibility and scalability, being able to adapt the constant changes of a project in an agile but expensive way. Kubernetes is also playing a good role, allowing auto-scaling, load balancing or resource optimization.
LACK OF CONTENT AND ADOPTION
In addition to the previously mentioned problems, we add the fact of the lack of content in the virtual worlds, their appearance closer to video games from the first video game consoles, as well as the lack of users in these worlds. While it is true that various events have arisen on platforms such as Decentraland, these have been a small wave of very short duration, bringing together small groups of "metanerds" who wanted to get a reward or browse the map for just a few minutes in search of something new.
As of this writing, the Decentraland platform hosts between 200-300 connected users. You can view it here:
👉 https://status.decentraland.org/metrics
Now, if you are a user or a brand, do you consider it profitable to invest a single cent in this type of platform? Surely not, and if so, perhaps said action would have a speculative component.
On its rival platform, The Sandbox presents a sad 100 interactions in the last 24 hours through wallets. You can also view this information here: https://dappradar.com/dapp/the-sandbox
Does this mean that the metaverse is dead? No, far from it. This article aims from the beginning to give a vision of one of the pieces of the puzzle that make up the metaverse ecosystem. Limiting its concept to interactive virtual worlds or blockchain-integrated video games would be hypocritical of me.
I will talk to you about blockchain and where interest in the metaverse is heading in my next edition. In it I will introduce the current mechanisms that brands are carrying out to reach children, adolescents and adults through certain video games that now seem to become a metaverse according to some technologists. Blockchain has been a burden for developers and platform creators as well as for the consumer who, due to the friction that the blockchain generates in an inexperienced common user, becomes reluctant to participate in projects that have to do with cryptocurrencies or NFTs. ´s. But more about this in the next one.
I hope you found this article interesting and of course, you are invited to participate in the comments.
Thank you very much and until the next edition.
