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Novaquark is now "The MetaVerse Company"


blundertwink

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You'll notice on their Twitter and the DU website that NQ has a new design and focus around the metaverse. 

 

For those of you that don't know, the "metaverse" is a buzzword that describes a vague second version of the Internet with features essentially identical to the first version of the Internet...except with more microtransactions and an occasional focus on VR/AR. 

 

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the concept -- like many buzzwords, what it actually describes is vague and driven by a desire to aggressively monetize. Crappy NFT games where you too can have the honor of spending hundreds of dollars on virtual shoes are often touted as a "metaverse"...and obviously that's the aspect FB wants to cultivate with "Meta" -- they've made it clear that a big goal is selling virtual clothes. 

 

What do you think about Novaquark being "The Metaverse Company"...? Is this marketing fluff, a pivot in design direction, a way to frame NQ so it looks attractive to potential buyers....all of the above...? 

 

Is NQ becoming the "metaverse company" a prelude to NFTs or other aggressive micro-transactions in DU...? Or an indication that they want to support VR in the future (hah...)? Or does NQ's update have little to do with DU...maybe they are starting another project...? 

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What kind of buzzword bingo was that?  The old subscription model is antithetical to those newfangled digital economy business models. Now I know greed has no bounds... Bt what on earth indicated any of this to you, other than you thought it sounded good.

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25 minutes ago, Overstimuloredom said:

What kind of buzzword bingo was that?  The old subscription model is antithetical to those newfangled digital economy business models. Now I know greed has no bounds... Bt what on earth indicated any of this to you, other than you thought it sounded good.


I'm not sure what you mean.

 

It's clear they pivoted to using the metaverse buzzword -- I linked to their new Twitter and Website design that show just that...and their Twitter is posting stuff about the Metaverse after like a year of silence. 

 

It isn't me that's making any of this up because "it sounds good", which if you read my post I'm obviously not a fan of this concept. 

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Just now, sHuRuLuNi said:

To be fair they were called "A Metaverse Company" for many years now, before facebook and Meta etc.

 

They are certainly milking it now! 

 

It's the main subtitle now across all their social channels, LinkedIn, their new website, etc. They're making a very conscious effort to brand themselves more strongly as "The Metaverse Company". 

 

I expect they want to ride the wave of the Metaverse buzzword...it isn't like this sort of branding is hard, but it does take effort. They're doing it for a reason.

 

We all know that business as usual isn't working...it shouldn't be a big shock that they might consider some major pivots, including the monetization model. It's extremely obvious that a subscription model won't work for DU long-term.

 

When NFT games are making such absurd amounts of money, I wouldn't be shocked if they went down that scammy road. I'm not saying they will...but they didn't update all their branding and restart the NQ Twitter just for fun. 

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If anyone has read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, I think the Metaverse was his idea first (1992).  Stephenson's Metaverse was 3D VR space that people entered via terminals, was complete with digital streets and buildings, animated adverts, etc. run by a company called the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, in a future where everything is a corporate franchise. 

 

After a quick review of the related site content, I think they got the idea from Neal, but are trying to coat-tail on the new godawful tacky iteration of the concept. 

 

If anyone hasn't read Snow Crash.. they should.  

 

 

 

 

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This game and NQ were on the "Metaverse" bandwagon years ago though.  They were way ahead of this trend.  It's not their fault that metaverse+crypto is the new scam Du jour. 

 

They might be tossing the word around a bit more, now that it's such a buzzword.  But they were trying to make a real game, that could be called a "metaverse", long before it was a trend.

 

 

 

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25 minutes ago, Hecticus said:

If anyone has read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, I think the Metaverse was his idea first (1992).  Stephenson's Metaverse was 3D VR space that people entered via terminals, was complete with digital streets and buildings, animated adverts, etc. run by a company called the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, in a future where everything is a corporate franchise. 

 

After a quick review of the related site content, I think they got the idea from Neal, but are trying to coat-tail on the new godawful tacky iteration of the concept. 

 

If anyone hasn't read Snow Crash.. they should.  

 

 

 

 

Neal is credited with coming up with the initial concept/name. Several other groups over the last 20 years have used it as a guide for their creation. 

 

NQ has to my knowledge always had the metaverse tag line. I think people are only noticing it now due to the increased coverage the term has gotten lately... along with NQ using it more in marketing, it's hard to ignore it now. 

 

JC saw DU as MORE than a simple game, with the goal to create a metaverse with Dual Universe. 

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NQ has pushed their image as "the metaverse company" since like forever.. 

 

It was the biggest focal point early on when they tried to pitch/sell their server tech as what would allow others to drive "their metaverse". Early on secveral publications pretty much brought that point front and center, especially how this tech, used in "their game DUal Universe", could apply in any number of fields.

 

Obviously, ther whole push to license/sell the server tech fell though and so DU became the "only reason for NQ to exist". Viewed against a massive asset that can be licensed for big bucks, a game which is a "showcase" while losing money in the process woudl be acceptable. As a main asset, DU needs to (eventually) make NQ a lot of money for them to have a future as the studio developing DU...

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Ok I was unecessarily mean. The others explained it pretty well. It's in the title of the game too... They do have the ambition to make a virtual world. But so far nothing has indicated they have plans to turn this into f2p/crypto scam. IMHO they are rather holding onto their intial vision to a fault. The vocabulary gaining new connotations is just a coincidence. So yeah it lends itself to riding the bandwagon.

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The pages are relatively old after all and the info with the PR laugh has already flattened out.
Here is the page I posted weeks/months ago.

 

https://www.novaquark.com/

 

Quote

Dual Universe is a forward-thinking online game featuring a persistent and shared universe made with next-generation voxels. As a true precursor to the metaverse, the game world is fully editable, and the game experience is entirely driven by its players. Dual Universe is currently in public beta and reaching the final stretch toward launch.

 

Edited by Zarcata
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Beyond the marketing efforts, it's weird to me that people read novels like Snow Crash or Ready Player One...and somehow get the idea that the metaverse is a good thing...

 

That's like reading Fahrenheit 451 and agreeing that books are too "confusing" and ought to be burned. 

 

If NQ wants to be a "metaverse company" and not a game studio, it does explain a lot about their abilities as game developers.

 

If DU is a "demo" of their "metaverse technology" it is likely one of the longest development periods for a "proof of concept" in software history -- and is a really counter-productive way to show that your tech performs at scale. 

 

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I do think that the technology behind it, especially the scalability works. At the moment, however, it seems to be going more in the direction of minimalism in order to save costs or to see how little you could still manage the game itself. From time to time, you can clearly see that the performance is much better than it currently is.

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I'd say to judge them by their actions and not their words, but in this situation I have to assume it would just be the perfect setup for more semantical hangups.

 

 

I feel that, when we were storming the server on launch, they said they were gonna add capacity and on my end the lags drastically reduced. I'm sure even now we could find someone who won't hesitate to proclaim they're still drowning in pending operations, and TBF I know somebody with really bad internet, like 3mbit, to whom DU was unplayable no matter what rig he threw at it.

 

 

Edit(didn't read verywell): millions of players allways sounded like marketing, but who knows how wide the gameworld might have spread if those plans, and that kind of budget came to fruition.

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It's the same as if it were 1995 and someone calling themselves "The Virtual Reality Company." Maybe it won't take quite as long for metaverse to be a meaningful thing, but it seems like a long way off.

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JC really liked to talk about the metaverse und "Ready player one":

https://medium.com/@jcbaillie/the-oasis-from-ready-player-one-will-soon-be-a-reality-870121af659e

However I never understood what he actually wanted because "Ready player one" like in the movie would be an extremely bad game. Which is probably why DU is in the state it is today.

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Sounds hella old in that it's still extremly conceptual, for something written in 2018... I have to giggle even if I'm still enamored with JC's technobabble. Why did he keep bringing up deathstars, it's not within scale of dnymanic cores, and not particularly cooperative if put in use, lol. Why stick with that example.

 

 

Aaah sigh ?

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Most people don't understand ideas from visionaries because they don't think the same way, their ideas are not bounded by what is currently possible. That's what makes them special. You can doubt them and laugh at their failures all you want, but without them nothing new and interesting would ever happen.

 

Whoever successfully deploys a metaverse will probably be bought up like Oculus was for VR, unless Facebook actually does it but I hope not. IMO a crypto metaverse is better than a Google/Facebook/Microsoft metaverse, as long as it's not scammy.

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Facebook is already going full steam with the whole "metaverse" concept.

 

Having a vision is one thing. Not willing to understand that what you want is just not feasible and refusing to bring it down to what can actually be achieved is what nearly drove NQ (under JC) off the cliff. NQ lost many, many months, if not years chasing the impossible while they could have changed gears and maximise what they could have done instead. They are trying now but have pretty much run out of steam and money I am pretty certain.

 

There's still a chance, but without major funding it will be extremely tough for them to make even the most basic version of what DU coudl be a reality. The game has already been gutted and they have scaled down so mcuh I feel it can genuinely be questioned whether they wil be able to scale back up if massive numbers of players  were to somehow show up all of a sudden.

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23 minutes ago, Haunty said:

Whoever successfully deploys a metaverse will probably be bought up like Oculus was for VR, unless Facebook actually does it but I hope not. IMO a crypto metaverse is better than a Google/Facebook/Microsoft metaverse, as long as it's not scammy.

 

The crypro "metaverses" are scammy to an extreme. I'm interviewing with a new gaming NFT that raised over $70 million with pre-sales alone. That's like 3 times what DU has ever raised in the blink of an eye. 

 

People are buying this up as an "investment"...for a game that hasn't yet been published. It's not that different from a pyramid scheme. "Better get your WHATEVER coins now! They'll be worth so much if the game is a success!" 

 

Quote

Most people don't understand ideas from visionaries because they don't think the same way, their ideas are not bounded by what is currently possible. That's what makes them special. You can doubt them and laugh at their failures all you want, but without them nothing new and interesting would ever happen.

 

There's a fine line between a visionary and a con artist..."not bound by what's currently possible" can describe a lot of actual nonsense. I prefer to think about concepts as "even if it were possible, what would change"...? 

 

It's like talking about colonizing Mars. Even if it is possible....how would living on a lifeless radioactive rock actually improve humanity? 

 

The whole point of books like Snow Crash or even RPO is that digital worlds can amplify inequality -- we've seen how this works already with play to win games. My former boss worked at a big mobile game company and described how their top customer had a servant whose job was to buy microtransactions all day. Seriously. The person couldn't be bothered to spam the button. That is the future the metaverse wants to create, not some equal platform for humanity's benefit.  

 

If JC is a "visionary" I'd rather be blind. 

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It might not have sounded that way but I still respect JC, I listened to him a lot before I joined the alpha, it's more ribbing on JC like "dude stop it with the big words we know". I don't know what has happened and not seen any conclusive proof that would lead me to believe one theory over the other, but I do hope they still have JC in a corner to dream about the macro side of things, and remind the team, while not being the head of a company putting out checks with his mouth the company's arse can't cash. The way communication is handled at the moment leaves much room for improvement too, but I understand the value of what I deem to be the new "don't talk, unless it's to show stuff" line.

What makes me giggle is the naivitivity, or rose tinted glasses if you will, of such an ambitious project being in it's baby shoes (allthough, 2018! is the development slow or fast, I'm still undecided). And I just find it a bit silly to focus on virtual reality as a category. Because back in the analague age there were allready people wearing goggles to watch low poly stuff who thought they had it, and even in the future it might never ever be like in the movies, and which sci-fi novel exactly we are living in is also up for debate lol ?.

What's actually the most prominent feature is the attempt to get everybody on the same server in that kind of sandbox environment. I got like 800 hours in 7days to die, also played empyrion, ark, rust... I tried a bunch of these games, and they're good, but the dedicated server thing was getting old. Heck some of them even struggle with their netcode over LAN. It's allways the same, update drops that gets a handful of people interested, pound the game for a few weeks on a private server, forget about it, start over SHOULD you ever come back.  I'm willing to make a lot of conscessions for a persistent single-shard game. And there is some hard realities, if you can't rent your own servers and finetune settings of the claim, claim duration, decay etc there will necessarily be compromises made. It does remove a lot of liberties, where other designers can opt for one playstyle over the other, by adapting the rules however they see fit. If you wipe DU from time to time, to whole premisse is ruined. Sure those who aren't total babies will deal with the necessary number of wipes to get the game running on a technical level, but that must be it.

If you're being blunt about all the issues that need definitive answers, and don't prioritize one playstyle over the other, again it's the claiming rules that give all these other games their flavor, the whole thing becomes kind of hard to sell as an idea, but would effectively be the closest we have ever gotten to virtual reality/metaverse. But for the game to be successful that can only happen coincidentally, if you want subscriptions to flow in you need more of a game than a plattform, at least in this hardware hungry niche case, and at least until you reach that "critical mass" JC mentionned. Not everybody will look at this like me, and be like "whatever worth it", it's only normal to compare the immediate experience side by side with comparable games.

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26 minutes ago, Overstimuloredom said:

It might not have sounded that way but I still respect JC, I listened to him a lot before I joined the alpha, it's more ribbing on JC like "dude stop it with the big words we know". 

 

Because it always being about "JC talking smart pseudo-scientific BS looking great" (quite narcissistic thing), then about game. Game was always very secondary thing, just means to achieve all attention.

 

This why JC was so passionate etc. on stage when his work was to just talk-talk-talk in endless promoting interviews, articles, metaverse metaBS.

 

And this why he was so lost, when after many years of this meta-circus actual game needed to be delivered.

 

Sure, JC kinda visionary (50%), but second half pretty much con artist.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Overstimuloredom said:

Sounds hella old in that it's still extremly conceptual, for something written in 2018... I have to giggle even if I'm still enamored with JC's technobabble. Why did he keep bringing up deathstars, it's not within scale of dnymanic cores, and not particularly cooperative if put in use, lol. Why stick with that example.

 

 

Aaah sigh ?

 

It's actually the Death Thtar.

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