It’s always far behind Rec Room or VR chat and Meta seems to be trying hard to push it as much as they can. But until now at least, it hasn’t gone anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t root for it, I’m just wondering what your predictions would be.
No. Facebook has no clue what people actually want. Most CEOs see a square peg when they look in the mirror and think everyone’s a square peg. So they make clothes for square pegs, cars for square pegs, houses for square pegs, so all the other pegs look like square pegs because everything is designed around square pegs.
However, a platform like VRChat allows people to throw all that away and be the round peg they always wanted to be. This causes confusion in the brain of a CEO and can result in injury to themselves, their company, and lead to accusations that the other pegs are just a small selection of people being “woke”, weirdos, freaks, degenerates or being undesirable (bonus points if they flail around wildly and accuse black people of racism, gay people of homophobia, etc). After all, how could someone be different? Everyone knows the square peg is the most powerful, desirable, and all around good-looking peg in the bunch. As such, people like Zuckerberg will (hopefully) never succeed at making a virtual platform.
Yeah, I think they’re too tied down by a) being a large corporation and b) being in it only to make money, not because they’re passionate about anything there, which I think relates to your point.
I certainly wouldn’t want them to be the dominant “meet your friends - 3D world”. The only way I can see it go anywhere is if they use their platform control as an advantage: enabling certain features or tying it into the core experience and basically forcing everyone.
VRchat allows people to be social with few limits. That is hard to do in a corporate site like Horizons.
I feel like as long as they’re not doing anything special compared to Rec Room/VR Chat, they won’t beat them as they‘re currying the “no one like Facebook/meta” burden (rightfully so).
Maybe live events (like virtex) or other first appearance could help. What I’d personally like to see is them moving horizon home into horizon worlds:
- choose any world as your home world (also your own custom worlds)
- make it private/public/shared with specific people
Being able to share a virtual apartment with friends, where everyone has a room and you‘re automatically connected by walking to the next room (if both are online) sounds to me like a big step forwards.
That would ofc just use their platform as a leverage to force everyone on it. I‘d much prefer the option to set other games as your “home world”, but I think that’s even more unlikely.
