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Steam is seen as one of the most important innovations in PC gaming history,
By 2020, the App Store had become one of the best businesses on earth. With revenues of $73 billion and an estimated 70% margin, it would’ve been large enough to be a member of the Fortune 15 if it was spun off from its parent company
Third, Apple’s desire to protect these revenues effectively prohibits many of the most Metaverse-focused technologies from further development.
Today, a high school tutor can sell video-based lessons directly to customers via web browser, and if they choose to offer an iOS app, they can opt against in-app payments. This is because video-focused apps are “reader apps.” But if this tutor wants to add interactive experiences, such as a physics class that involves the construction of a simulated Rube Goldberg machine, or an instructional course on automotive engine repairs with rich 3D immersion, they are obligated to support in-app payments because they’re now an “interactive app.”
The policies of Apple and Google limit the growth potential not only of virtual world platforms, but also the internet at large.
Several open standards are already being shepherded, including OpenXR and WebXR for rendering, WebAssembly for executable programs, Tivoli Cloud for persistent virtual spaces, WebGPU, which aspires to provide “modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities” inside a browser, and more.
However, these are really just the “iOS system version of [Apple’s Safari] WebKit wrapped around Google’s own browser UI,” according to the Apple expert John Gruber, and the iOS Chrome app [cannot] “use the Chrome rendering or JavaScript engines.” What we think of as Chrome on iOS is simply a variant of Apple’s own Safari browser, but one that logs into Google’s account system.§10
The best case study here is Safari’s tepid adoption of WebGL, a JavaScript API designed to enable more complex browser-based 2D and 3D rendering
However, Apple’s mobile browser typically supports only a sub-selection of WebGL’s total feature set, and often years after they’re first released. Mac Safari adopted WebGL 2.0 18 months after it released, but mobile Safari waited more than four years to do the same.¶
Because cloud game streams are video streams, and the Safari browser supports video streaming, cloud gaming was still technically possible on iOS devices (though Apple prohibited these applications from telling users this fact).
In the summer of 2020, Apple finally revised its policies so that services such as Google Stadia and Microsoft’s xCloud could exist on iOS and as apps.
Apple’s policies also stated that Stadia subscribers would still not be able to play Stadia games through the Stadia app (which would remain a catalogue). Instead, users would need to download a dedicated Stadia app for every individual game they wanted to play.
Finally, Apple said that every subscription-based game must also be made available as an à la carte purchase through the App Store. This, again, differs from its policies with music, video, audio, and books. Netflix does not need to (and doesn’t) make Stranger Things available on iTunes for purchase or rental.
Apple prohibits all iOS applications and browser-based experiences from using NFC mobile payments, with the sole exception being Apple Pay.
When Tencent’s WeChat launched in 2011, China was primarily a cash society.
This was a consequence of many of WeChat’s unique—and in the West, effectively impossible—opportunities and choices. For example, WeChat enabled users to connect directly to their bank account rather than require an intermediary credit card or digital payments network, which is prohibited by the major gaming consoles and smartphone app stores.
WeChat offered tiny transaction fees: 0%–0.1% for peer-to-peer transfers and less than 1% for merchant payments, with no fees for real-time delivery or payment confirmations.
In the West, these systems would normally be at the mercy of the hardware gatekeepers.
Apple was forced to allow WeChat to operate its own in-app app store, and directly process in-app payments—and iPhone launched in China two years before the messaging service.
In the fourth quarter, Ethereum processed more than Visa, the world’s largest payment network and 12th-largest company by market capitalization. That this was possible without a central authority, managing partner, or even a headquarters—that it all happened via independent (and sometimes anonymous) contributors—is a marvel.
the process of electrification, which began in the late 19th century and ran midway into the 20th century,
skipping past the centuries-long effort to understand, capture, and transmit it. Electrification was not a single period of steady growth, nor a process through which any one product was adopted. Instead, it consisted of two separate waves of technological, industrial, and process-related transformation.
began around 1881, when Thomas Edison stood up electric power stations in...
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quarter century after his first stations, an estimated 5% to 10% of mechanical drive power in the United States came from electricity (two-thirds of which was generated locally, rather than from a grid). But then, rather suddenly, the second wave began. Between 1910 and 1920, electricity’s share of mechanical drive power quintupled to over 50%
By 1929, it stood at 78%.
factories first adopted electrical power, it was typically used for lighting and to replace the on-premises source of power (usually steam).
over the past five years, Hollywood has progressively integrated real-time rendering engines, most typically Unity and Unreal, into their filming process.
Building upon his work on The Lion King, Favreau helped pioneer “virtual production” stages where an enormous circular room is constructed using walls and ceilings made of high-density LEDs (the rooms themselves are called “volumes”). The LEDs were then lit up with Unreal-based real-time renders.
In 2022, Genvid launched The Walking Dead: The Last M.I.L.E. with the comic book franchises, Robert Kirkman, and his company, Skybound Entertainment. The experience allows viewers, for the first time, to decide who lives and who dies in The Walking Dead,
Amazon’s most noteworthy gaming initiative started in 2015, when it spent a reported $50 million to $70 million to license the CryEngine, a middling independent game engine owned by CryTek, the publisher behind the game Far Cry. Over the next few years, Amazon invested hundreds of millions transforming CryEngine into Lumberyard, a would-be competitor to Unreal and Unity, albeit one optimized for AWS.
Linux Foundation taking over development in early 2021, renaming it the “Open 3D Engine,” and making it free and open-source.
The first multi-billion-dollar acquisition Nadella made was for Minecraft—
title’s playerbase has grown more than 500% since acquisition, from 25 million monthly users to 150 million, making it the second most popular real-time rendered 3D virtual world globally.
January 2022, Microsoft agreed to buy Activision Blizzard, the largest independent game publisher outside of China, for $75 billion (the largest acquisition in GAFAM history).
While Sony was the only Hollywood giant without a legacy TV business to protect, and launched its streaming service Crackle the same year Netflix pivoted from DVDs, it failed to capitalize on the opportunity.
In time, it will become clear that many of the leaders in the Metaverse weren’t even mentioned in this book—perhaps because they were too small to be of note, or unknown to its author.
recall that GAFAM represents less than 10% of total digital revenues in 2021—but enough to collectively shape the economy
There are several hypothesized strategies to minimize “Metaverse abuse.” For example, users may need to give other users explicit levels of permission to interact in given spaces (e.g., for motion capture, the ability to interact via haptics, etc.), and platforms will also automatically block certain capabilities (“no-touch zones”).
But what does the Metaverse mean for hiring rights and minimum-wage laws? Can a Mirror instructor live in Lima? Can a blackjack dealer be in Bangalore? And if they can, how does that affect the supply of in-person
These are not altogether new questions, but they will become more significant if the Metaverse becomes a multi-trillion-dollar part of the world economy
On any given day, it’s likely that the cheapest Cryptopunks listed for sale are those with dark pigmentations. Some believe this price dynamic is an obvious manifestation of racism. Others argue that it reflects the belief that it isn’t appropriate for white members of the cryptocurrency community to use these Cryptopunks.
is natural to worry about a future in which no one goes outside and spends their existence strapped to a VR headset. Yet such fears tend to lack context.
United States, for example, nearly 300 million people watch an average of five and a half hours of video per day (or 1.5 billion hours in total). We also tend to watch video alone, on the couch or in bed, and none of it is social.
Shifting any of this time to social, interactive, and more engaged entertainment is likely a positive outcome, not a negative one, even if we’re all still indoors. This is particularly true for the elderly.
The average senior in the United States spends seven and a half hours per day watching TV. Few among us dreamed of retirement and long life in order to spend half of each of our remaining days watching TV.
importance of the Internet Engineering Task Force. This body was originally established by the US federal government to steer voluntary internet standards, especially of TCP/IP.
2017, American consumer credit reporting agency Equifax revealed that foreign hackers had been illegally accessing its systems for more than four months, and had stolen the full names, social security numbers, birthdates, addresses, and driver’s-license numbers of nearly 150 million Americans and 15 million residents of the United Kingdom. Two years later, Equifax agreed to a settlement of $650 million—a sum less than the company’s annual cash flow and which provided victims only a few dollars each. Multiple
The amount of computing power will increase, thus enabling higher concurrency, greater persistency, more sophisticated simulations, and altogether new experiences (and yet, the supply of compute will still fall far short of demand for it).
From 2007 to 2013, Apple’s operating system was highly skeuomorphic—its iBooks application showed digital versions of books on a digital bookshelf, its notes app was designed to look like a physical yellow pad of paper,
