The DeanBeat: Metaverses that aren’t really metaverses

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Another week, another round of crazy acquisitions and metaverse hype in the game industry. While I’m very proud of the 30 or so sessions we had on the metaverse at our recent GamesBeat Summit: Int the Metaverse 2 event, I must admit that, like the rest of us, I’m getting tired of everything being called a metaverse these days.

I suppose we’re complicit in generating all that hype, but I hope we can be of service in sorting things out.

As noted at our event, Linden Lab’s Second Life deserves recognition for being a real metaverse and surviving since 2003, and its leaders Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale would like us to know that it’s still around. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick called it an “abject failure” at our previous event and that his company’s Grand Theft Auto Online was a better candidate to be called a metaverse. But Oberwager would like us to know that Second Life has a $650 million in-game economy from the denizens who make digital things and sell them to each other.

“Why are people hearing about Roblox and Minecraft but not Second Life?” asked Ina Fried, chief tech correspondent at Axios, in a fireside chat at our metaverse event.

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Rosedale said people have built different things in different ways, and those worlds have done very well with kids. That has made people think about Second Life, which has seen its own rebirth in the pandemic with a more adult crowd. Of course, Second Life doesn’t have the numbers to deserve the title of being “the metaverse.” Roblox is