Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!! — Benedict Evans

The final pixie dust to tie all of this together is NFTs - this year’s set of ideas for how crypto can get from pipes and rails to applications - to a Netscape moment. Can NFTs, money, creators, collectibles, games, tokens and skins provide a new economic, incentive and experience layer that ties together games, VR, place, identity and broader popu... See more

Facebook has bet big on AR and VR as the next smartphone (and as potential liberation from Apple's control), so Mark Zuckerberg has naturally started saying metaverse a lot. But VR today seems to be at risk of stalling out as no more than a subset of hardcore games.

That’s a lot of buzzwords in one place, and meanwhile games people, like art people, don’t necessarily see any problem in their world that NFTs solve.

So, all of this is rather like standing in front of a whiteboard in the early 1990s and writing words like interactive TV, hypertext, broadband, AOL, multimedia, and maybe video and games, and then drawing a box around them all and labelling the box ‘information superhighway’. That vision of all consumers everywhere being connected to something was... See more