Matthew Ball overhauls The Metaverse book in its second edition

Matthew Ball estimated that 70% of the second edition of his book The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet is brand new. That’s a pretty big overhaul for the title, but you have to agree that the metaverse went through an amazing hype and crash cycle in the last two years since the first book came out.

Ball has been a leading thinker on the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. Ball’s writings were a kind of bible for the metaverse, as the book became an international bestseller.

The first book was written with lots of detail and an elevated view of what it all meant. I was flattered that Ball said I was the writer with the most citations in footnotes in the first edition, as well as the second edition.

Many thought the metaverse, a term first coined by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash 30 years ago, was pure fantasy. I had never given it much thought until Tim Sweeney, as early as a decade ago, began saying we were heading toward the metaverse in a short term.

As we slouched toward the pandemic, Ball wrote a timely and prophetic piece in early 2019 about Fortnite‘s opportunity to become a metaverse. The idea gathered steam at the beginning of COVID-19. Then we were all forced into lockdown and had no way to socialize with each other except through games. Gaming led the way to the metaverse, but the hype died down as the pandemic lifted and people were able to go outside again and devote time to the real world instead of the virtual.

Still, the seed was planted among true believers that they should go build the metaverse. And even Stephenson himself felt it necessary to enter the fray as many different leaders — including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — put a stake in the ground to be the first to colonize the imaginary space.

To tout the new edition, Ball released the first-ever public interview between Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, and Stephenson, who is now part of Lamina1 Web3 company.

In this interview between these three Metaverse pioneers, Sweeney and Stephenson shared their thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro. They Sweeney and Stephenson both revealed that neither has even tried the Apple mixed reality headset.

Stephenson said, “My drawer is full. The drawer where I put expensive goggles that I never use.” Sweeney, who is in frequent legal disputes with Apple over platform control, says he has better uses of his time. (Stephenson will be a speaker at our GamesBeat Next 2024 event happening in San Francisco on October 28-29).

Here’s more of what they had to say on other topics:

The future of Fortnite and Unreal Engine 6: Sweeney said that in seven years, he hopes Fortnite’s tens of thousands of worlds are all directly connected like Disneyland and suggests that Fortnite may soon double from 100 to 200 people per match.

Facebook’s name change to Meta: Stephenson revealed how he felt the day Facebook used his word “metaverse” to rebrand and reposition its company. (He had no forewarning and, instead, found out after a famous friend suggested that one of his loved ones had died. He says it was obvious at the time that a year later, Big Tech would refocus on another hype cycle.) Sweeney says the word “metaverse” doesn’t work if it’s associated with a specific company, in the way “Google” now means to “Search.” (Zuckerberg said this too, but not as many people have believed him).

The term Metaverse: Sweeney says the metaverse isn’t dead, it’s growing and now has 800 million monthly users across platforms. The issue is that the “word has a stock price” that goes up when something releases that is “cool” and down when it’s “lame,” and that mostly “lame” products have been released since Facebook’s rebrand, unfortunately.

Blockchains/Crypto: Stephenson is working on his own blockchain for the metaverse. Sweeney said the “underlying idea of blockchains is awesome… There’s great use of cryptography, great protocols for distributed agreement on events, and a really interesting foundation for the future of distributed computing systems of all sorts, including the Metaverse.” But it’s “very unfortunate that it didn’t have another couple decades to be nurtured in the purely nerd community before it was adopted as a financial instrument, because the currency has been greatly undermined by speculation and scams and regulatory uncertainty and so on.”

Generative AI: Sweeney says that it’s wrong for any models to be trained using data where they don’t have clear and explicit permission from the creator of the data and that Gen AI technology ideally needed another decade in the hands of researchers before being treated as mainstream.

Snow Crash 2: Stephenson says that for years now, he has been working on the “Snow Crash Extended Universe.” (I have also heard Stephenson talk about this in private, and I am beyond excited that the sci-fi universe that inspired so many people will soon get a modern update).

Regarding the 70% new claim to the 2022 edition, Ball said there are 40-plus charts and graphs, new chapters on AI, 3D Graphics, and XR devices and updates on timely topics like Epic’s partnerships with Disney + Lego to create a games/entertainment universe.

The original version of the book, which was personally blurbed by Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Sweeney, Reed Hastings, and more, became a national bestseller in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and China, and was named a Book of the Year by The Guardian, Amazon, The Economist’s Global Business Review, and other publications.

I’ve got a copy and I plan to read it the next time I get a chance. I finished the first edition and found it to be a great read that communicated some important conclusions — like the notion that developers won’t be able to build the metaverse so long as they’re stuck paying 30% platform fees to tech giants.

So is the metaverse going to emerge? The book points out that a lot of elements of the metaverse are already here with online games and smaller scale virtual worlds. But Ball has strong opinions on what is still to come and how important it is to shape and consider government policy, the opinions of big tech leaders, artificial general intelligence, economics and human rights related to the spatial internet.

I agree with that analysis and I believe that the metaverse, just like the internet, needs to be built with openness and interoperability in mind — or it will never fulfill its potential. I’ll let you know what I think when I’m done with the second edition, but I’m sure I’ll highly recommend it.