Exactly like Second Life, there are dozens of titles that over the years have tried to create more or less successful virtual open worlds.
The ones that are working best are the eternal Minecraft, the Chinese Roblox (with over 3 billion users) and Fortnite (still tied to the Battle Royale mode, but expanding on the rest).
What would be different about the metaverse of the third richest man in the world?
What Menlo Park wants to change is the way we live in these worlds: no longer through a screen, but in a more immersive way that allows users to fully immerse themselves in these new realities made of pixels and code.
In March 2014, the then-named Facebook had purchased for $2 billion (including $400 million in cash) Oculus, a company specializing in virtual reality viewers.
In the note published after the purchase, it was already clear the direction the company would take: "Facebook aims to expand Oculus' current advantages in games to new areas, including communications, media, and entertainment. Mobile is today's platform and now we are also preparing for tomorrow's platforms." Oculus has thus become part of Facebook Technologies, the branch of Meta that handles hardware development. It has continued to churn out virtual reality viewers in recent years but none of them have ever appealed to the mainstream audience.
Mark Zuckerberg's big dream, at the moment, is stuck in front of this technological barrier: there is still no effective and economical way to live in virtual reality. Video games dedicated to this type of environment have never broken through, and many viewers still cause feelings of nausea, disorientation and dizziness after a handful of minutes of use. Looking at the data, the virtual reality industry is expanding but not exploding: according to a research by Grand View Research at the moment the whole pie is worth 15.81 billion dollars and the forecast is for an annual growth of 18% until 2028. In all this, 60% of the industry is occupied by the sale of devices, the rest by all the software and related services.