Here's the demo launch of Bored Ape Yacht Club's Otherside system. This uses the Improbable M2 engine to handle thousands of avatars in one space. It is viewed in a web browser. Game development was by Animoca Brands out of Hong Kong.
BAYC raised US500 million from their users for this.
It costs each user US20,000 to US $100,000 to get in.
Comments?
Nagle said:
It costs each user US20,000 to US $100,000 to get in.
Um, wait. I need to pay 20,000 to play one online game? You can't be serious? No typo?
This really raises the question of what those players expect from their investment? Is there a promise of pay to earn, gamble with land, etc.?
What does it cost me to join Second Life for a comparison?
Beside, the amount of players is impressive, even it's too crowded to implement a traditional game. They need more land :D
Maybe they even need a better lighting system to improve depth perception, it looks like random noise of colors.
At this scale, what also really hurts is the lack of realistic physics. I guess there are still many glitchy teleports of people due to network, as seen in the former test video.
Those glitches maybe are not a big problem, but the next ‘signature’ described from this famous Brian Eno quote:
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
So we could just accept this for the greater win of playing together.
But much worse than that: The characters move like UFOs, with instant high velocities defying laws of physics. It looks more like ‘Glitch Space’ than any reasonable, causal reality.
This seems like a big mistake, hard to fix later. It also makes it hard to implement true game experiences on top, which i guess they plan to do. Trajectories should be just slower and easier to predict.
But not really sure, maybe things become well behaved once players distribute over larger areas (or become just less) to reduce their density.
Personally, i'll rather buy the next upcoming 500 AAA games for the money, but it remains interesting to observe the apes and their progress.
This is definitively more than just a roadmap… : )
JoeJ said:
Um, wait. I need to pay 20,000 to play one online game? You can't be serious? No typo?
To get into Otherside, you must first own an Otherdeed, an NFT that represents a parcel in the virtual world.
The initial sale of those parcels raised US$320,000,000. Prices have declined somewhat since. Right now, the cheapest parcel is US$3,905. The most expensive parcel with an offer is currently US$2,291,000.
Hehe, it's like land on Mars, or buying your girlfriend a real star. :D
That's very distant from the vision of ‘just have fun together, in a virtual world where we can do anything’.
Maybe i'm just naive, but i always thought we would get this fro free. I mean, as free as internet, for example.
The economical side here seems far fetched, bringing back the impression of a bubble, which won't hold for long.
But maybe i just don't understand this yet. We will see how far they get, and if they shrink or grow…
JoeJ said:
This is definitively more than just a roadmap… : )
There actually is a roadmap for the thing.
The zipping-around style seems to be about half Improbable and half BAYC. Improbable's Scavengers encouraged multiplayer zerg rushes. BAYC runs large raves for people who hold Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. Working together, they produced a large online rave.
This is more of an initial demo. They had to get something out the door before the Securities and Exchange Commission brought the hammer down on them for issuing an unregistered security. (If you sell land in a game that exists, that's just buying something. If you sell land in a game that doesn't exist yet, it's an investment, and you have to do all the financial disclosures and audits required for a startup public stock offering.)
JoeJ said:
The economical side here seems far fetched
I tend to agree, but Yuga Labs already made their money. I thought the people behind Yuga Labs would take their $320 million and leave town. At least they shipped something that runs.
It's probably expensive to run. Not only is it using Improbable's rather compute-heavy technology on the back end, this demo was run as cloud gaming. The web client is just streaming video. So it seems they just rented 2500 servers for an hour.
These guys are event oriented. Their concept seems to be that every once in a while, they get their user base to log in for a few hours, play a bit and experience some kind of performance, and then they all log out. This could work out with cloud services where you can rent by the minute, such as AWS or Stadia.
Anyway, on me this really has a good effect on changing my mind.
I always expected this metaverse stuff ends up as shallow promises bordering scam, dragging gaming down as a whole. We already have enough image problems, and this felt like adding oil to the fire.
But now, actually seeing they work seriously on something, i feel chilled and more optimistic in general. It's good news.
There are some unexpected implications here. It's sort of been assumed that MMO-type systems should be live 24/7. But this is an alternative. It's only on for heavily promoted special events, when the promoters can line up performers for a live virtual event. Fortnite's biggest event was like that.
Doing this as “cloud gaming” has major load implications. “AWS, I want to rent a million servers for three hours.” Fortnite has had events with 15 million people, so it really is possible to get hundreds of thousands of servers on a short term basis. A few years ago, nobody would have dreamed of providing an individual video stream to everybody in a major country. Now it's routine.
