Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!! — Benedict Evans

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.

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

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

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.