A 23-Year-Old PC Gamer's Two Cents On Virtual Reality and the Metaverse

Just writing this to hopefully have an "I told you so" moment. Take everything with a grain of salt.

Is the Metaverse crap? What’s a realistic outlook of virtual reality (VR) in gaming and the metaverse?

These questions came to me after watching a Jan. 9 WallStreetJournal video titled: “Trapped in the Metaverse: Here’s What 24 Hours Feels Like” . Like the title suggests, the video shows WSJ’s Joanna Stern wearing a VR headset, roaming the Metaverse for 24 hours.

So what is the metaverse today?

As the video shows, it’s a ground floor, raw, unfinished type of virtual reality in which you can navigate between daily activities with an avatar you create, and interact with other people through avatars they created. This type of interactive internet is Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse, or as he called it an “embodied internet,” in a July 2021 interview with The Verge.

*Video spoiler—Stern did not enjoy her 24-hour metaverse experience. She said, “What did I learn from this adventure, other than I’d never recommend you do this?” And I don’t blame her. There’s—understandably—no practical use for the metaverse at this point. The limited activities it does offer aren’t more efficient or fun alternatives to those in real life, and aesthetically it looks like shit. Stern attended a meeting in the metaverse, but said by the end of it the experience felt too long and her head and eyes hurt. The metaverse looks more like a gimmick than something you’d actually want to spend time in.

So it’s safe to say that right now, the metaverse is crap. But it’s not even at stage 1. It’s at pie-in-the-sky, almost SpaceX, Virgin Galactic level. It’s barely more than an idea and has a loooong way to go before being practically used.

How long? It depends. I know that answer sucks but hear me out.

It depends on when people are sold on VR gaming, because people need to be sold on that before they can be on the metaverse

VR gaming encompasses the metaverse, not the other way around. I guarantee that 97 out of 100 people you hear talk about the metaverse do not have a VR headset, or have ever played with VR before.

Ask yourself these questions:

-Do you know anyone that plays VR video games?

-Do you know a single VR video game title?

-Do you know a single piece of equipment that you need to play VR?

-Can you remember the last time someone brought up VR gaming in conversation with you?

The answer to all those questions is probably “no” for you, and is “no” for most people.

People Do.Not.Actually.Care. about VR yet.

I think the answer to why boils down to one one thing—VR is expensive. An Oculus Quest 2 headset costs $299, and to play high quality VR games you need a strong enough PC—VR games are much more demanding than regular PC and console games—and those cost upwards of $1000. That’s expensive for anybody, but absolutely unaffordable for the people that’d actually be interested in playing VR. Those people are kids. Middle schoolers, highschoolers, college students. People that are actually able to spend hours everyday playing video games, *surprise* have no money. It needs to be affordable to them before VR can ever take off. They hold the power to propel VR to the mainstream. Right now, the VR headset alone costs as much as an Xbox One, and everyone’s friends have an Xbox—not an Oculus headset and gaming pc.

So to estimate when VR might take off, you need to think, when will it become affordable? My guess? Five to ten years (I pulled that out of my ass, but still). Meta, Microsoft, or Sony will need to release an affordable VR headset & PC bundle that lands in the $500-$1000 range. That happening sooner than later sounds unlikely, because basic parts of a gaming PC like the CPU, GPU, memory and motherboard together run around $500. But if there’s one thing that’s been growing exponentially over the last 20 years, it’s gaming technology (and tech in general). People everywhere carry phones in their pocket more powerful than supercomputers from the 90’s, so for computer parts and VR equipment to make massive strides in affordability in the next decade isn’t outlandish. However, even once that point is reached, people still need to be convinced on VR gaming—when that happens, the metaverse can get rolling.

I fully believe in the metaverse as a concept and in VR as the future of gaming. Right now, we’re seeing Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and literally everyone realize this and try to capitalize on it in every way possible. While I do think VR gaming emerging into the mainstream is something that can happen in the near future, the metaverse feels like a generation away. The plans for it are so much more than just gaming. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball projects the metaverse to include a full-fledged economy, and I’m already getting metaverse real estate scam ads on YouTube.

I think the metaverse gets here in my lifetime (23 here, sorry if you’re old), and when it does, it will have as big of an impact on our lives as everyone thinks.