Agree with everything you said, but to me one key piece of the minecraft ecosystem rules it out as a meta verse contender - every one of those permutations you mentioned drops players into their own isolated environment which does not interact with any others. At best you can pop a few hundred people into a server specially configured for that, or use a discord/irc shim to bridge chat across a few instances.
I get the sense something more integrated at the user experience level is being suggested here as ‘metaverse’. I guess part of my read on that is cynical - if true it suggests a winner takes operator all at the centre with some kind of app/content ecosystem alongside. Perhaps I’m reading the roblox comparisons too literally.
Check out the large scale MMOs. No one interacts with everyone else. They find a guild and play with those people.
It's not that hard to find a different minecraft server, there are bazillions of server lists. That would be the equivalent of changing guild or being in several guilds at the same time.
I don't think we humans want to be part of a large crowd. More like part of one or more small groups. Before the internet it was mostly one. Now you can easily do several.
> No one interacts with everyone else. They find a guild and play with those people.
This really depends on the MMO. In World of Warcraft, yes this is majorly the case in the past few years. In games like FFXIV, this is most certainly not the case.
WoW enables the behavior of only playing with your guild because the community at large is toxic which is also enabled by the game.
FFXIV has a much stronger community, players greeting each other in cities, sitting down to watch a Bard play video game music on a harp or everyone chatting in party chat through cutscenes in main story dungeons.
There is a sense of community in these games that draws people to them. I think certain groups of people do want to be a part of a large crowd, but not when doing so puts them at risk of being put down like in WoW.
I get the sense something more integrated at the user experience level is being suggested here as ‘metaverse’. I guess part of my read on that is cynical - if true it suggests a winner takes operator all at the centre with some kind of app/content ecosystem alongside. Perhaps I’m reading the roblox comparisons too literally.