3. Challenges in the industry

Big game developers and publishers, as well as distribution platforms and stores have complete control over their products and almost all control over the industry itself. They may alter their EULA and terms of service at any moment, granting them uncontested power. These companies dictate how games are created, monetized, distributed and even played. The communities that inhabit and give life to these platforms and online worlds, unfortunately have little say in the space.

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The first stages of the metaverse are being built with current game engines, such as Unity and Unreal Engine, which are packed with cool features. However, the issue is that most parts of these engines were built a long time ago, even before web2, let alone web3.

These tools became exceedingly complex over time. The steep learning curve attached to these engines requires users to study them for months before they can start efficiently creating. This imposes barriers to new creators who oftentimes end up looking for more approachable tools.

Interoperability can be defined as the capability to standardise assets, interactions, economies, and systems in order to integrate them across different virtual worlds, preserving their appearance and function.

One of the great issues we see in the current game development landscape is that assets created in one platform are usually limited to that platform only, and they cannot be used to create games in other platforms.

This hurts creators, who oftentimes don’t notice this limitation early on, not realising that all of the time and effort they put into their work will be trapped in a singular space. These creators could be earning more, and developers would have more assets available to them, if it wasn’t because of the lack of interoperability.

Similar to the interoperability issue, platforms have so much power over the content created by users and in many cases they even retain ownership. Added to that, the content becomes siloed into that platform and their servers. This disrespects the time, effort and talent that creators put into what their work, which leads to the next issue.

Currently creators have been pushed to a corner and left with little say on how their content is handled. Because of this, many platforms end up giving little back to creators, dictating how they can monetize their work and charging incredibly high fees. Roblox, for example, currently takes up to 75% of the revenue [3], and Valve attempted to take a similar margin with the introduction of paid mods on Steam Workshop, but decided to remove the feature after receiving backlash from the community [4].

This lack of incentives means less people end up creating content, and the content is not as good as if creators were being rewarded fairly.

Finally, developers only keep these platforms online as long as they are growing and increasing in revenue. If they think the platform does not benefit them any longer, the developer can simply pull the plug and close down the platform [5], wiping out all of the content and leaving users with nothing.