> the market has repeatedly shown there isn't much demand for persistent virtual worlds
I don't know if you have a more narrow view of this idea or specifically mean VR/AR, but that just sounds like what massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft are. I think Roblox is even a broader use case, though I am fairly unfamiliar with that.
MMOs have been very viable from both a business and user stand point and have been a fairly big thing for going on a quarter century or so at this point. Whether these branch into more of the Second Life non-game social space or into being largely AR/VR driven is pretty up in the air, but it's not some sci-fi concept really.
Really? Everything that's not named World of Warcraft seems to die out, usually in less than a year. It's a genre that's been a notorious recipe for failure for most companies not named Blizzard.
World of Warcraft is actually on the wane, and has been since 2015 when Blizzard stopped reporting subscriber numbers [0]. Big WoW streamers like Amsongold have recently switched to other MMOS, mainly Final Fantasy 14 [1], in the wake of Blizzard's sex abuse scandal and many lukewarm WoW expansions. Final Fantasy 14 has over 4 million monthly subscribers, and that number seems to be growing [2]. Amazon's MMO "New World" also had nearly 1 million concurrent users in the weeks after its recent release [3].
MMOs aren't eating the world like in 2005, but they're a solidly-established genre that looks here to stay.
World of Warcraft is RPG. Not all MMO are MMORPGs. And there are now many MMORPGs which are similar size or even bigger than WoW is now, for years already. Though, it's true that outside asia no RPG seems to be as big as WoW was at it's peak.
But MMO in general today are massive, far bigger than WoW ever was. Though, there is also far more diversity regarding world-sizes. From smaller worlds for some dozen to hundred users, to bigger world with thousands and ten thousands, to the big massive virtual continents that WoWs era defined, we have them all now.
Minecraft, Roblox, Second Life (probably, not sure whether this counts as game). Pretty much every Multiplayer Sandbox-World nowadays is able to scale up to MMO. At usually out of the box they are not RPG, even though they can be modded to be RPG. Similar things happening at GTA5 or RDR2, where the basegame is not RPG on a technical, but RPG by world-setting and gaming-style.
Then we have the endless amounts of wargames[1], shoots[2] and old browser-games[3]. Or the newer genre of battle royale, where we have hundreds of players per session in some game. Though, there is not much richful interaction between the players outside the game, it's all just simple chat or even none at all. Though, I heard Fortnite has gained some persistent world-aspects outside the game-sessions?
Other than Second Life, those aren't really persistent virtual worlds. Video game worlds, sure, but do you really see Facebook creating video games for it's blue site and instagram audience?
The oldest public minecraft-server will hit its 11th birthday next month. Not sure how much more persistence you can demand? Some of the other games also have persistence in various ways available. But that's the point, persistence is not a hard demand of MMO, it's just a strong trait for RPG. For MMOs in other genres it makes not much sense to let the player wait in some virtual graphical lobby, when a textual lobby is good enough. For an MMO, a game must support a huge number of players in the game itself, not in the pauses between the games. The definition today has become more flexible than 20 years ago.
> but do you really see Facebook creating video games for it's blue site and instagram audience?
I think their point is more that they will offer the graphical virtual space for the players to wait and meet between the games and work, while others will create the games and apps which people than can enter from this space. My understanding is, they offer technology and the connecting point, not the content. The same way they already do it today with plain old 2D crud-interfaces.
I don't know what the situation is now that Blizzard is no longer really Blizzard, but back in the early years of WoW this was - in large part - because almost every other MMO that launched just plain sucked.
Blizzard was to the gaming industry what people often believe Apple is to the hardware industry. They were the only ones that invested in polished UI, coherent UX, etc. and it was so incredibly noticeable.
I'm sure a lot of this was pressure to get something out quickly to make a "WoW killer", which is what gaming media branded basically every MMO that launched after WoW.
They're an environment crafted to scratch a dopamine itch by providing instant gratification for work, with a social layer attached on top. I write this as someone who used to play MUDs back before MMORPGs even became a thing.
Unless Facebook is planning on releasing their own WoW branded as the metaverse, I don't see how they're the same.
I don't know if you have a more narrow view of this idea or specifically mean VR/AR, but that just sounds like what massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft are. I think Roblox is even a broader use case, though I am fairly unfamiliar with that.
MMOs have been very viable from both a business and user stand point and have been a fairly big thing for going on a quarter century or so at this point. Whether these branch into more of the Second Life non-game social space or into being largely AR/VR driven is pretty up in the air, but it's not some sci-fi concept really.