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Should NQ abandon their "Metaverse" obsession...?


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As I've pointed out before, NQ's new CEO (Nouredine Abboud) is huge on the metaverse concept. 

 

If you look at Abboud's LinkedIn, they dedicate their posts to discussing the metaverse and user generated content. They even call it a "user generated content game". 

 

Here's some very revealing bits from their posts:

  • "We don’t deliver content, we deliver game mechanics"
  • "We are nurturing a number of new projects in other new crowd-pleasing settings"
  • "We don’t dream about the metaverse, we build it"
  • "As the Metaverse is eating the world, Massively Multiplayer Online Game economy building, Play2Earn controversy and NFT versus real life debates are all over the place. 🚀 One game has pioneered those topics since 2014, Dual Universe..."

 

From this, I think we can learn a few things about why Dual Universe has seemed to have no direction or leadership:

 

  1. As people have mentioned before, NQ is moving on to other projects. That's a big deal...resources are likely not entirely focused on DU. 
  2. Abboud doesn't believe in creating content, he believes in creating a "user generated content platform". When you ask "where's the content in DU?" the answer is that NQ's leadership actually doesn't believe in content
  3. NQ's apparent arrogance problem is showing with these posts...or at the very least, upper management's complete disconnect from the reality of their product. DU has nothing to do with some of these topics, never mind "pioneering" them.  
  4. NQ's leadership seems more interested in making them look like a "metaverse company" vs making DU the best game it can be -- as many have speculated, they're likely trying to make themselves appealing for a buyout or for more investment. 

 

Like many NFT/web3/metaverse people, he's all about huge ideas that lack specifics, follow-through, or an explanation of how these disparate concepts translate into a solid game design. 

 

No wonder there's been no decision-making for months, here...their new CEO is just as "head in the clouds" as JC! 

 

Do you think NQ should abandon their obsession with the metaverse?
Or are they actually right to let DU fail and pretend like it was never supposed to be a game, just a platform for user content...? 

Is this all coming back to claims that DU is "little more than a tech demo"...? 

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NQ has quite frankly failed in realizing DU as a "metaverse".

The idea was cool at the time, but in the years since, many big players have pretty much taken NQ's ball and ran with it, leaving the whole idea NQ has/nad  in the dust.

 

While the server technology JC/NQ envisioned and designed 10 years ago may have been innovative and novel at the time, it's fairly archaic and outdated by today's standards as this technology is moving very fast and NQ has not been keeping up, nor have they adopted their tech as the wider technology improved and changed.

 

That howveer does not mean DU has no chance, but if NQ keeps trying to shoehorn the game into the "metaverse" mold then I do think there is little chance for that to fit.

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For me, this metaverum exists more as a pipe dream, it will certainly not be implemented in a meaningful way in the next 10-30 years. (Except very modest test versions or smaller versions of it).
Apart from that, how should a DualUniverse integrate into the Metaverse? There are basic problems and feasibilities being talked about here that this voxel technology for building and active PvP at the same time like AvA doesn't really offer. So how should a real metaverse have a shooter sandbox space and at the same time be packed with dungeons, raids, arenas and street races, with casinos or sail races on the side?

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Way back in the beginning when there was nothing but a website with a few pieces of concept art and a few dev blogs, JC was throwing around the term Metaverse, and i think it was fine the way he was using it back then.  But at this point i'm afraid the word has too much baggage.  If NQ wants to continue to make a game that has many similarities with the concept of a Metaverse, i think that's a great idea.  But the more they use the term, the more they're going to associate themselves with all the scams and grifts that are going on in that area.

 

Let's say NQ heard that a lot of people were excited by the Brooklyn Bridge.   So they decided to build and sell a scale replica of it.  If that was something that people were interested in, that might be a good idea.  As long as they made it clear that it was a replica, and if you gave them money, you wouldn't be getting an actual bridge.  You wouldn't own any property in Brooklyn, and you wouldn't own any bridges.  You couldn't drive your car across it, or sail a boat under it, and you sure as shit wouldn't be able to resell it for a profit.

 

That would be great.

 

Unfortunately, the "Metaverse" at this point is just a bunch of grifters yelling "Who wants to buy the Brooklyn Bridge".  

 

And the sad part is none of them even have a "replica" that is half as good as what NQ is/was working towards.

 

I think building an MMO that is as close as we can currently get to the concept of a "Metaverse" is a great idea.  But i don't think throwing the term around a lot is going to do anything but damage their reputation.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Sycopata said:

Metaverse is a main stream concept and dual universe is a niche game, with a poor engine. No try compete in the hi leagues with a flaw product.

 

Can you provide any examples of this high league?

 

From what i've seen everything they are selling looks like garbage.  I think most "web3" companies would absolutely love to have a product like DU, if they could afford it.

 

Personally, i hope NQ continues to attempt to compete in a real market, with real customers, that produces a real product, that people want to buy with real money.

 

There's nothing wrong with making good old fashioned Video Games.

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11 hours ago, Atmosph3rik said:

 

Can you provide any examples of this high league?

 

From what i've seen everything they are selling looks like garbage.  I think most "web3" companies would absolutely love to have a product like DU, if they could afford it.

 

Personally, i hope NQ continues to attempt to compete in a real market, with real customers, that produces a real product, that people want to buy with real money.

 

There's nothing wrong with making good old fashioned Video Games.

The product "DualUniverse" is great and ingenious purely from the voxel mechanics as a sandbox. What is fatal is that you want to integrate other things into the game, which are apparently not (yet?) to be implemented. 
Especially in the PvP area, the game is far inferior compared to many other games designed for PvP. You can't even call it a "game", more like a test version.

Other games may not offer a voxel building kit besides the open PvP content, but a lot of other content: Dungeons, quests, main quests, raids, arenas, battlegrounds, achievement systems, mounts, pets, mount fights, pet fights, openworld bosses, treasures, jump&run puzzles, housing, professions, economy, trading systems, guild content, faction fights, castle fights, battles on land and water with machines or ships, it is in the end the multitude of occupation that many players can actively experience in a game. (active, meaning not afk flying through space for hours to watch a Netflix series). 

With all due respect, other games don't have to hide, as they offer far more and better content to keep players busy and happy. Even the one server mechanic doesn't help if you can't even play smoothly and together with 50 players. 
You can do that better in other server-based games. The 40vs40 battlegrounds in World of Warcraft alone are more stable and more fun! And that's the point - what's the point of having the best technology if it doesn't work or is too expensive for the studio to maintain that it has to be run at the minimum all the time? 
Personally, I want to log into the game in the evening and enjoy 2-3 hours of my free time, have fun and experience something. I certainly don't spend those 3 hours flying through space - because then I can skip the game and watch the series in peace.
I would very much like to know from NQ how many players with which subscription price can financially support the game - not with minimum server performance, but with maximum, so that you can really "play". 
Furthermore, I'm very interested in how you're going to manage to bring the building game in line with PvP in terms of performance. Is this possible at all, also in relation to AvA or planetary wars/territorial wars?

 

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4 hours ago, Zarcata said:

What is fatal is that you want to integrate other things into the game, which are apparently not (yet?) to be implemented. 

 

I think there's a misunderstanding of what @Atmosph3rik is trying to say...WoW and other traditional MMOs aren't web3 / NFT projects. They have lots of content because they were developed as traditional games, not scammy NFT crypto nightmares. 

 

There's a mess of such projects branding themsleves as a "metaverse", so many that the term has been polluted by blockchain enthusiasts that still believe that crypto is the answer to everything. 

 

NQ's new CEO is very much adjacent to these projects -- he was executive producer over Ghost Recon Breakpoint, which (in)famously sold like 18 NFTs in the month after their launch...a game that will no longer receive updates (even if Abboud's LinkedIn calls it "the biggest comeback ever" lol).

 

Granted Abboud left a month before those NFTs dropped, but there's zero doubt he influenced this direction as executive producer prior to his departure. He was at Ubisoft for 15 years and the timing of this departure makes me wonder if the higher-ups knew this latest Ghost Recon was going to flop and wanted a "change" in leadership. 

 

The point is that NQ wants to be like these scammy projects that don't view themselves as games. 

 

They want to be a "content platform" not a "content maker"...and that's a reason why DU feels so empty. Not just because DU is "missing" key features / content that other games have, but because they don't even believe in making such features! 

 

IMO, they should have ditched this silly metaverse obsession a long time ago and actually develop DU as a "good 'ole fashioned game". This is why DU has no content: because NQ's leadership literally doesn't believe in making content thanks to this metaverse obsession.

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Metaverse is just a fancy word for multiplayer VR. And VR requires a lag free and spatial coherent environment at all times.

And no amount of eloquent words from the CEO is going to turn the current technology we see used in DU, fit for 'metaverse' usage.

 

And only if and after they manage to solve to fundamental technological problems in DU, can they start talking about being 'the metaverse' company (despite not having made a single VR product ever)..

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I don't think DU has anything to do with NQ's metaverse other than being a stepping stone. Until a standard platform and client comes about, there will only be a bunch of universes.

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And facebook.. sorry AlfabetaMetawhatever is going to be the standard by default (for better or worse) simply because they have the money, experience with VR (HW and SW) and more users then they know what to do with.

 

And if NQ's secret plan is to be bought up by Meta, they have to show something better then what the many, many other VR startups already are doing out there.

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