The Elder Scrolls Online dev says the Metaverse is sinking because it ignored 20 years of games doing the exact same thing: 'it's not new, and they should stop treating it like it's new'
When the Metaverse's sales pitch did the rounds in 2022 and 2023, anyone who has been playing MMOs like The Elder Scrolls Online likely had the same thought: «Hold on, I can already do this in a game that lets me have legs.»
It's not exactly been panning out, either. Meta has lost billions trying to make a virtual world you can live in, buy property in, and customise an avatar in, that sort of thing. You know, everything that the MMORPG has been providing for players for years.
Even when virtual reality headsets arrived to make all those Ready Player One-style pipedreams come true, games like VR Chat actually delivered on the process of being baptised by a priest while Winnie the Pooh watches. Heck—I'd trust the powerful furries of Second Life to build me a digital home far more than Zuckerberg's research department.
That's a sentiment (the MMO thing, not the furry thing) echoed by The Elder Scrolls Online's creative director Matt Firor in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz: "[The Metaverse] was last year's buzzword, right? This year it's all about AI and nobody's talking about the Metaverse anymore … My earliest games were text-based, with no graphics at all, and they were very much virtual worlds where people got together, chatted, and had fun."
Frior, who rather sensibly believes that «virtual worlds» like the Metaverse need to be backed up by communities (rather than speculative, ugly virtual property going for thousands of real dollars), says that the sales pitch of the Metaverse really only worked in the sphere of big tech investments.
«I think the critical thing is that the Metaverse talk from last year was very much a tech discussion, which is very big in Silicon Valley when you're looking for investment. But nobody will play a virtual world if there's nothing to do inside the virtual world, so it's really a content and systems discussion. The tech's been out there forever. Maybe AR goggles are new, but we've had the tech to display virtual worlds for
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