Minecraft, Roblox, Geometry Dash, Trackmania...these are games that succeeded because of their communities. Alone, they don't provide much for the average player, but creative players build interesting things that appeal to everyone.
I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal experience, I've heard this about VR in general). If you want to build a community, you must make development easy for hobbyists and small users*. I believe this has held even for the biggest companies, case in point the examples above.
* Though you also need existing reputation, hence small companies struggle to build communities even with good engines.
You can add the Flight Simulator series to the list, which spawned a vast ecosystem of add-ons, both free and commercial.
I believe though, that what you actually need as a big or small company, is good game first and foremost; the engine is secondary. When the community around a game reaches a critical mass, the very small percentage of its members who have the skills to modify things becomes significant as well.
For instance, Richard Burns Rally was not intended to be modded at all, yet the fans added new cars, new tracks, online scoreboards, etc.
In the Luanti [1] community (a voxel games engine/platform, designed to be moddable nearly from the start), one begins to see something similar as well: notable games gets mods, others don't (the former default game is a particular case; it is not exactly good but go tons of mods because of its status, and games based on it benefit from that ecosystem). Yet all use the same engine (perhaps Roblox is similar in that respect, I'm not sure if they have "reified" whole games like Luanti did).
[1] https://www.luanti.org/
The thing is, Minecraft of 10 years ago (or more) wasn’t even really that great of a game. It wasn’t bad, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t that great.
What it did do right was be very open-ended and be conducive to modding, both of which were amplified by multiplayer capabilities.
I would wager that most of the fun players have had in Minecraft is from experiences that were built on top of Minecraft, not from the game’s own gameplay.
It was, as far as I can tell, the first game which was infinitely procedurally generated yet changeable. Huge procedurally generated games have a long history but in e.g. Elite or Seven Cities of Gold you couldn't modify the world in any meaningful way. The closest is probably dwarf fortress, but there the modifiable world is pretty small (or was when Minecraft came out).
That made it a great game. I think it was inevitable that the first game which combined these two, infinite procedural worlds and free modifiability, would be a huge success. Worth noting also that infiniminer, despite the name, didn't have the infinite part worked out!
I'm always impressed when I check it, that flightsim.com is still running, and still has everyone's mods going right back to the 90s. Just in case anyone still wants the poor quality airport I uploaded for Flight Simulator 2000 twenty-something years ago.
Not sure if I understand exactly what you mean by reified, but Minecraft has a ton of minigames based on server-side mods which clone other popular games. Sometimes popular Minecraft minigames/mods even get implemented as standalone games.
Battle royale games were almost certainly heavily inspired by the Minecraft minigame which predates them. Factorio has the old industrialcraft mod as an acknowledged inspiration. Vintage Story is basically standalone Terrafirmacraft (and by a dev from that, as I recall).
Arent battle royale games inspired by things like The Hunger Games or Battle Royale? All the server minigames like that that I recall from back in the days were named something like Hunger Games
Yes. The Hunger Games film and book inspired by the Japanese film "Battle Royale" in turn, inspired the Minecraft minigame. But later battle royale games were inspired by the minigame, not the films directly. A shrinking world border, for instance, is pretty important to make the concept work (in a film, it doesn't actually have to work!).
Last man standing formats were perfectly possible in traditional FPS formats too, but they weren't really a thing because to actually be fun, the format needs
1. Big maps and lots of players (more than the typical FPS)
2. A "searching for loot" mechanic, where you can increase your chances of survival by looking for good items, making interesting risk/reward tradeoffs and discouraging just turtling up in the most defensible location.
3. Shrinking borders, to prevent an anticlimactic endgame of powerful players searching for hiding stragglers.
Minecraft basically had all three since 2014, and there were quite popular last man standing formats like UHC even before they had world border (and before the Hunger Games film came out).
Roblox had a phenomenal engine when it came out and its terrain destruction is still unmatched.
In 2006, I could download the Roblox app and bam, I would play thousands of 3D multiplayer games for free that loaded near instantly. With fully destructible buildings and dynamic terrain. Somehow I didn't get viruses from remote code execution.
That was groundbreaking at the time. In that era, I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode. Most games I'd buy on CDs. I certainly couldn't knock down entire buildings with grenades.
If you contrast with Second Life/Habbo Hotel, you could walk around and talk to people I guess?
The community that spring up around it eventually carried it into total dominance of gaming for American children, but the basic parts of the engine like "click button, load into game, blow stuff up" were a decade ahead of the curve.
Also Blockland cost money, Roblox was free.
> I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode.
It's interesting that you chose Counter-Strike as an example, as that is a Half Life mod itself, and by 2006 there was a large ecosystem [1] of Half Life modifications using Metamod and AMX Mod (X). The last one in a weird C-like language called Small or Pawn, which was my first programming language that I made serious programs with.
Especially the War3FT mod where users gained server-bound XP in combination with a reserved slots plugins which allowed top-XP users to join a full server really created a tight community of players on my tiny DSL home-hosted server.
[1] https://www.amxmodx.org/compiler.php?mod=1&cat=0&plugin=&aut...
In many ways it remains ahead of the curve. Kids that grow up making games in Roblox rarely survive the jump to a dedicated engine because Roblox is just so much easier to develop for in nearly every aspect. One big thing I've heard is that instantly getting working, robust online multiplayer by default baked into the engine is a major plus.
I would call multiplayer out of the box the defining feature for sure.
It's challenging to get networking right, and the effort required doesn't get all that much smaller just because your game is smaller.
Most engines do come with a networking framework or layer these days but Roblox gets to assume a bunch of things an engine can't, and as such provide a complete solution out of the box.
They originally accomplished this with an interesting approach to netcode you couldn't do today.
Everything was replicated in the client and server. So you could open Cheat Engine, modify your total $$$ on the client, and it would propagate to the server and everyone else playing.
They only fixed this in 2014 with FilteringEnabled/RemoteFunctions but that was opt-in until 2018 and fully rolled out in 2021 (breaking most classic Roblox games). This also made games much harder to develop.
how big was Roblox in 2006?
> In that era, I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode.
You could also play any Source mod. Also WC3 maps were insane at the time.
Roblox was tiny in 2006. I joined in 2008. It was still leading the market.
To give an example, Roblox added user-created cosmetic t-shirts as a way to monetize the platform. Developers immediately scripted their games to recognize special "VIP t-shirts" that would provide in-game benefits. And quickly created idle games called "tycoons" where you could wait 2 hours to accumulate money to buy a fortress, or buy the t-shirt to skip all that.
I don't think there were any modding systems with mtx support.
I disagree with regard to Minecraft (only game I played in that list). I bought the game while it was in alpha and even then the single player experience was outstanding and sucked me in. I still have vivid memories from 15+ years ago. The balance of creativity and survival (and friggen creepers) was perfect.
I dont think I am alone in saying this. IIRC the game was making millions while still in alpha.
Yeah, I think Minecraft definitely still would have been a hit without any modding. Though it might not have become the absolute juggernaut that it is now without it -- it's hard to say for sure.
The other reason being that nobody is asking for The Metaverse, and definitely don’t want to spend huge chunks of cash on a funny hat to wear in order to access it.
Some people are asking for The Metaverse. Currently, the entire VRChat userbase. But you're right that there is not a large population of people willing to throw cash at it outside of a minority of virtual furries
Critically, VRChat works on desktop (though it's an inferior experience), and you can incrementally enhance your experience with it by doing things like webcam face/hand tracking instead of buying an expensive headset.
Examples that demonstrate why lockdown hurts ease-of-use and therefore non-intrinsically hurts community. Meta or Apple may not realize people want on desktop want to use VR software; they may want people to spend more (although a smaller community may generate less overall revenue); they may want people to have the “true” experience (their idea of what the users want, instead of what they actually want); they may not want to spend the budget and expertise to develop webcam face/hand tracking.
If they released a cheap or impressive enough VR headset, I doubt desktop or face-tracking would matter. But I think the next best thing, a decent headset with an open platform that enabled such things, would’ve saved them.
VRChat is also consistently active with people making new worlds/maps, avatars, etc. There also used to be a client modding scene with e.g. melonloader but that got cracked down on around 2022. The "metaverse" however, does it even exist? Is there a vrchat-like, meta-built social vr environment available on quest hardware?
No idea, which is notable because I boot into my Meta Quest 3 most nights for sim racing. You'd think I'd have seen it if they were pushing it.
I am glad they don't, the headset should be a general computing device first and foremost, launching apps you choose to participate in.
It's also very highly customisable without being monetized out the wazoo, allows you to host your own servers, and in general avoids the incredibly bland corporate image that meta projects.
(Meta, I think, fails to understand that the people that most want a virtual space to interact with, to the point of putting up with the limitations of VR tech, mostly want to not look like regular people in that space, because they keep pushing a vision that seems to be a uniform 'normality' even more extreme than the real world)
I think they also would not accept that variability, in both avatars and spaces. Even VRChat developers have struggled with what users do and frankly as a company that makes total sense. It's a wild west which is great for a community, nightmarish for a company with moderation liabilities, copyright concerns etc.
The VRChat community should consider forming and funding an open source group to re-implement the platform as it will eventually get regulated.
For what it's worth I don't use VRChat, I've just been around the internet for long enough to know the pattern.
Yes, while VRChat does a lot of things right, the VRChat company definitely doesn't seem trustworthy in the long run. It's an aggressively walled garden where the company has full control over both content and narrative, and we're starting to see more aggressive pushes for revenue, with the major new features in recent months being subscription-gated or addiction bait (stickers, baubles, random reward boxes, etc). I'd love to see an open, federated VR social environment, but how do you get people to use it? Many VR users aren't technologically savvy at all.
There are currently two much smaller competitors that are perfectly usable but lacking community buy-in. Chillout, which is similar to VRChat, with some improvements the community has wanted for years, but missing some of VRChat's (admittedly excellent) homemade functionality, such as better IK code, better bone dynamics, etc. And Resonite, which is more similar to SecondLife, possessing a cross-world inventory system and in-game content authoring tools.
Probably half the people who grew up with Instagram cat filters are furries now.
I am now instantly reminded of that clip of the cat whose human filter wasn't working. 'I'm not a cat', indeed.
A lot of people seem to be spending huge chunks of cash on enormous monitors, dual monitors, curved monitors, etc., and the appeal of that is mostly that it gets you a little bit closer to wearing a head-mounted display.
Makes sense that a primate with front-facing eyes that is both predator and prey would prefer to look at things at arms length rather than encase their head in a cocoon that is designed to block environmental awareness.
Depends on what you mean with "environmental" awareness. Awareness of reality or virtuality?
That's a function of what software you have running on it.
Monitors load my desk, not my neck.
> I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal experience, I've heard this about VR in general). If you want to build a community, you must make development easy for hobbyists and small users*. I believe this has held even for the biggest companies, case in point the examples above.
Unity and UE have pretty good VR support nowadays, and even godot is getting there. Plus making a custom engine for VR was never that much harder than for a normal 3D game (well, once some API like OpenXR got normalized).
The big issue with VR right now is that it is more costly to develop for than normal apps and games, while having less user. It makes it a hard sell. For some indie dev, I allow them to profit from a market that is not yet saturated (right now, with no good marketing, you just get buried on steam, any app store, etc). There are many factors that make it more costly, like having to support several mobility and accessibility features for games (for example smooth and jump locomotion, reduce fov when moving the view, etc), that you usually don't have to care for in other plateform. And there is the issue of interactivity. UX (and in many ways UI) is still very far from ideal. Most VR apps and games just try things out, but there is still a world of pattern and good practice to build up. This makes using anything VR often an annoying experience. Especially since some issue can be an absolute no-go for some user. As an example, displaying subtitle in a 6dof environment can be tricky. Some game put it at a fix point of your view, which can cause nausea and readability problem, some move still follows the head/view but with a delay, which reduce nausea issue but can be distracting and also has readability issue (the subs can go out of view).
I think there’s a difference between “indie dev” aka either an experienced SWE trying it or some really motivated person with an established identity, credit card & income stream and a kid/teenager tinkering around.
In a “free for all” setting, anyone (including kids) could potentially learn enough (or even just download pre-made scripts) and try their hand at modding software/games.
In a modern situation with developer registration, etc someone would need some sort of established identity, potentially going through age verification, paying some nominal fee for a license, accepting an EULA and so forth. This is a huge barrier to entry for kids/teenagers just wanting to tweak the game experience for themselves/their friends. I remember my first time trying to install Apache on Windows I guess around 2008-09, and the (very well-made!) install wizard asked me for a domain name. At the time I wasn’t aware of how DNS/etc worked and was scared to continue, thinking I would either take up some other company’s name or not being “allowed” to use a random name I’d pick and get myself/my parents in trouble.
All these “regulated” ecosystems make it scarier for well-meaning but inexperienced devs to get started, while doing little to deter dedicated attackers who know the game and know actual cybercrime enforcement is both lacking and trivial to defeat in any case.
The “free for all” environment made me the developer & sysadmin (or DevOps person as the techbros call it) I am today despite no formal training/education and I am sad to see this opportunity go for the younger generations.
The Vision Pro might be pretty lock down, but making a VR app / game on PCVR or on Pico/Meta headset is pretty "free for all"
Agree! We saw this a lot. Launching with the Quest 3, we were often the first company to do X, Y, Z despite being months after new features had been released in the SDKs because they were poorly documented (and often even conflicting).
Diverging even slightly from the demo use case would quickly feel like Sisyphus; so close, but never succeeding in getting over the hill.
Good for marketing in certain cases (to be the first), but bad for the community of builders
> Not just locked down
The lockdown is a big part of it, though. The industry has cross-platform VR/AR SDKs like OpenXR that Apple refuses to implement. A big reason their platform isn't supported day-and-date with multiplat VR releases is Apple's insistence on reinventing the wheel with every platform they make.
If the rumors of Valve's VR headset being able to run flatscreen games are true, it's more-or-less Game Over for the Vision Pro. The appetite for an iPad-like experience with six DOF is already handled by much cheaper machines.
Many creative people don’t care about being “locked in”, since they already make mods that can be broken by updates (and often are, unintentionally) and threatened legally (for violating IP and DRM). I think the much bigger problem with locked-down engines is simply that the lockdown methods used make it harder to develop on them.
All of those were also all $0–$20. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem to build a user and developer community. Games have to build a strong playerbase with limited content, then enough gamers have to be invested enough to become creators. Enough have to be able to actually pull off the development, yes, but I think the even bigger problem is that they'll never have a reason to with the small number of users inherent with platforms that cost $500–$3500 for special hardware to get onto.
I think Valve wouldn't exist as they do now except for modding. Counter-Strike's popularity must have driven a lot of purchases early on, which allowed Valve the freedom to do things at their own pace rather than under pressure from publishers.
> these are games that succeeded because of their communities
To me an interesting thing when a game succedes despite its community. As if people can endure a lot of toxicity as long as the game is good
Fortnite has been attempting to be a platform rather than a game for years now. (Epic Games Store too, so you ridiculously have to launch one then the other before you can pick your game.)
Curious to know to what degree the "Creative" maps have fueled Fortnite's success as opposed to the 1st and 2nd party developed experiences.
I would throw Rimworld into that list as well. A fine game by itself, if a bit simplistic. But the mods make the game massively customizable and lets the player do basically whatever they want
The Meta Quest is very easy to develop for. There's tons of games of all caliber from solo devs up to full studios. The reason the Metaverse is failing is because no one wants it, even though they keep shoving it down people's throats. VR gamers just want to play games, not dick around in "worlds". Meta is tone deaf to this.
There isn't yet a game that involves all the players in one huge level, without shards, but there might be eventually. Current game engines don't support levels with that many players simultaneously. There is an interview with Neal Stephenson and Tim Sweeney on the Metaverse where Sweeney says supporting massive multiplayer is what he plans for Unreal Engine 6: https://www.matthewball.co/all/sweeneystephenson
> So one of the big efforts that we're making for Unreal Engine 6 is improving the networking model, where we both have servers supporting lots of players, but also the ability to seamlessly move players between servers and to enable all the servers in a data center or in multiple data centers, to talk to each other and coordinate a simulation of the scale of millions or in the future, perhaps even a billion concurrent players. That's got to be one of the goals of the technology. Otherwise, many genres of games just can never exist because the technology isn't there to support them. And further, we've seen massively multiplayer online games that have built parts of this kind of server technology. They've done it by imposing enormous costs on every programmer who writes code for the system. As a programmer you would write your code twice, one version for doing the thing locally when the player's on your server and another for negotiating across the network when the player's on another server. Every interaction in the game devolves into this complicated networking protocol every programmer has to make work. And when they have any bugs, you see item duplication bugs and cheating and all kinds of exploits. Our aim is to build a networking model that retains the really simple Verse programming model that we have in Fortnite today using technology that was made practical in the early 2000's by Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones and others called Software Transactional Memory.
I don't think they're tone deaf, they just know that inexpensive gaming headsets can't make them enough money. They've invested something like $100 billion into VR and "only" sold 20 million headsets The revenue generated annually is almost nothing.
UE5 is decent for vr.