With Crypto back in the news, interest in the Metaverse, ignored for the since OpenAI launched Chat-GPT, is again on the rise, but this time it’s more closely associated with games. We checked in on four companies involved in social games and virtual worlds: Spatial.io, which pivoted from enterprise XR, to NFT galleries to games; MeetKai, a platform for training and simulation; social game company Vulcan Forged; and Supersocial, which develops games and other experiences on Roblox.
Meet the CEO of the new Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, formerly of Facebook.
There was once a debate about the definition of The Metaverse. Meta won the name, but subsequently lost the debate. The Metaverse is defined as connected 3D virtual worlds, exemplified by Roblox, which has a thriving creator economy. All other accouterments, like Crypto – and VR – are simply nice to have. Whatever we call it, people are playing games in 3D virtual worlds and companies inside and outside the digital media industry are taking notice.
Head to head in Vulcanverse.
Founder and CEO, Jamie Thomson, started Vulcan Forged four years ago, when he was teaching computing in secondary school. “I created a website where people could sell blockchain items and nothing. Gaming. And I created a very small game on a web called block Babies. Like blockchain babies fighting each other where people could own the babies and have battle rattles and these kinds of fights. And it was a terribly made game, but I couldn’t believe the sort of money people were throwing at these ridiculous baby cards I was making. So from that, I sort of took a risk and put all my savings into Vulcanverse. The first alpha, I suppose.” All of Vulcan Forged’s games start as MVPs. When people start using the game, they tilt in the direction of the players. Who helps shape the game’s development while playing it.
Founder and CEO of Vulcan Forged Jamie Thomson.
As a Brit living in Greece, Thomson was inspired to use a Greco-Roman theme for his first blockchain game, Vulcanverse. “We were actually probably the first blockchain games, along with Sandbox. And we sort of grew strength to strength over the years. And as we’re seeing a reemergence now of the whole blockchain gaming scene.” The company has grown to 200 people and now has fourteen other games, but Vulcanverse remains the most popular. “Obviously, that was just a sandbox to start with. But now you’ve got quests, you’ve got trading, you’ve got fighting, you’ve got all sorts of stuff becoming more like World of Warcraft.”
The Gardens of Arcadia
Players in the Vulcanverse buy land and “terramorph” it, a version of what happens in Minecraft, but with much better graphics. You can’t make a car, or anything that doesn’t belong in that period. Thomson attributes his company’s success to focusing on the trading aspect of the game. “Our game revolves around runecraft kind of tactics. So trading assets, mining for things and incorporating the economy within the game has worked well for our players.”
Caption.
In the past five years, Vulcan Forged has expanded the Vulcanverse to include fourteen other games, including Vulcan Runner, Vulcan Tower Defense, Berserk, Vulcan Chess, Vulcan Arena, and Vulcan Royale. All games share the same Greco-Roman theme. “The two things that surprised me are how much people value the blockchain based ownership of things, and also how players spontaneously organize themselves in the games. We have quests and challenges, but often we’re the last to know what players do.” Game assets are NFTs on a blockchain and they can be bought and sold with a digital currency, PYR, which can be purchased on Coinbase and other exchanges. Thomson insists they are not another cryptocurrency company shilling its own coin. “Our players come to play. They’re not speculators and investors. Coin is only part of the game. The game is the only reason it’s there.”
Campus on Roblox.
“When everyone said, the metaverse is dead,” said Yonatan Raz-Fridman, founder and CEO of Supersocial, which builds games and other experiences on Roblox, “I was like, we’re just getting started. How can the metaverse be dead if it didn’t even start yet? We’re really at the beginning of that. I think what happened is Facebook changed their name to Meta, ruining the Metaverse forever by making billions of people around the world think that the metaverse is a 3D virtual reality device built by Facebook People also thought that the metaverse is NFTs sold with cryptocurrencies. That is not the metaverse. Those will be pillars that can help the metaverse emerge in its full form.”
Supersocial built its company right on top of Roblox, using the developer tools everyone has access to on the platform. “Roblox was already a pretty big platform when we started Supersocial. In 2020, it was about twenty-five million daily active users. Now it’s almost triple that. But it was already a key destination for young people.” Raz-Fridman points out Roblox is a game engine, a publishing and distribution platform, a social network, a virtual economy, and a cloud services provider. “When you build on Roblox,” he points out, “you don’t need anything. They provide you with all the technical infrastructure.”
Working with Unity, Spatial has just made it a lot easier to deploy an interactive world on its … [+]
Spatial was founded in 2017 as a cross-platform collaboration tool that would use the HoloLens and Magic Leap One to transform any room into a shared virtual space that can enhance remote collaboration. As the technology lagged, and as businesses fled to Zoom during the pandemic, the company pivoted to NFT galleries for both Open Sea and anyone who wanted to make their own. While that business declined in 2022 and 2023, Spatial made another strategic move: they introduced games.
“From what we’ve seen, a huge swath of the world plays some kind of game,” said Jacob Lowenstien, head of business for Spatial. “And the other thing I will say is that what works about gaming is starting to permeate everything. So, for example, this whole notion of using the word gamify. In a design context, it’s no coincidence, right?
Socializing in Spatial.
“So for us, I think we think of gaming as like, for us, it’s the central pillar of the metaverse, at least our central pillar.” Lowenstien continued. “Other use cases still are going to take a lot of time and a lot of reduction and friction to get people to use the metaverse in that way. We just didn’t have that time. And so I think for us it’s like now is the time.”
MeetKai is a Los Angeles-based AI and metaverse company that offers a range of software offerings, including IP, multimedia, live streams, games, and eCommerce. MeetKai’s cloud AI allows for real-time reasoning capabilities that facilitate AI-human interactions, and the platform supports cross-platform integration for targeted ads across smart devices or immersive worlds. “A lot of the companies we spoke to and deals were looking at, people sort of had that naive expectation that they could just get a bunch of money for doing very little.” says James Kaplan, co-founder and CEO of MeetKai. “I think that was one of the first things that was problematic about the concept of the Metaverse originally being like the path to monetization for people participating. But what we’ve definitely seen more broadly is that whether we call it the Metaverse or not anymore is definitely something we struggle with internally. Apple entering the game and showing what is effectively a really high quality dev kit has helped us drastically. Companies are reevaluating what they’re looking to do on five year timelines, and that includes what Apple calls spatial computing. Formerly, the Metaverse. We won’t miss the word.”
Kim Libreri, Chief Technology Officer of Epic Games, speaks during the Consumer Electronics Show … [+]
Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri held the keynote for the State of Unreal that traditionally is held at the Games Developer’s Conference every year. He announced Unreal Engine 5.4, which provides some new cool features to help people develop more realistic games.
But the most important topic of the conference has been for me UEFN (Unreal Engine for Fortnite), which is the editor, based on Unreal Engine, through which creators can create worlds for Fortnite without having hard technical skills. In the first year that UEFN is out in the wild, creators have published more than 80,000 UEFN islands, and Epic has paid more than $320 million to creators in the first year of engagement payouts. All this while the metaverse was dead.