Rec Room and VRChat are like earlier social MMOs, but with the inherent appeal leaving them attractive enough to cut out the pretense of gameplay (e.g. OSRS, MUDs, were not that dissimilar in being mostly about chatting with a distraction present)

It also raises the question of what Facebook's metaverse could do that VRChat and Rec Room haven't. VRChat is the more successful of the two and has achieved the level of success of "video game more popular than you might realise", which for the small dev team is enough for a profitable business.

How do you make it profitable at meta scale? NFTs, loot boxes and cosmetic microtransactions seem to be the prospects raised by people promoting such ideas. But then how is VRChat + microtransactions - your local modder's blatant copyright infringement more appealing than VRChat?

Facebook’s metaverse is just marketing. It’s akin to AOL commercials implying that AOL is the whole internet. What meta is providing is a gateway to the metaverse and maybe a portion of it called Horizon. The metaverse is built on the internet. No single entity can own or control all of it despite what any marketing implies. (Ready Player One is fantasy masquerading as sci-fi imo)