Sweeny Swindles

Drifting away from reality

So what's up with that Metaverse thing? You know- Metaverse? It was that pathetic marketing buzzword purloined from a dystopian sci-fi novel and repurposed into a limp glorification of monopolisation and corporate centralisation under the guise of 'revolutionising the internet'. Basically, some foolish individual treated the marketing boards of big tech companies to a binge of movies like The Matrix, Ready Player One and other dystopias that play around with the idea of interpersonal dissociation brought on by the unstoppable proliferation of socialisation stunting virtual interfaces- and those executives did the predictable thing and said "Let's make our own socialisation stunting virtual interface and make money off of it!" You have to be some absolutely special breed of moron to host giant marketing pushes for a fad literally named off the big bad thing from a novel called 'Snow Crash'.  The actual definition of skimming the cliffnotes before writing the essay.

Of course, the whole idea of the Metaverse was attached to the wave of cryptocurrency revival off the wave of that other nowhere fad, NFTs. (Another easily predictable dud which somehow took the world by semi-storm for a year and a bit.) And again, devote just the slightest iota of thought into it and none of these systems really make sense together. NFTs and Crypto was borne from the idea of decentralisation of digital ownership and money from the central banking institutions and traditional copyrighting platforms respectively- whereas all fully formed conceptualisations of the mythical 'Metaverse' quite literally proposed the linking of all marketplaces, services and social media networks under a one-stop-shop portal/platform/prison. Even NFTs were fancied as some bizarre way of linking together various disparate concepts, like games from different publishers, various distinctly different copyright fields from images to syndicated television and even the idea of gainful employment and gaming. All absolutely antithetical conjunctions to the core ideals of Crypto. (But what does a little thing like sense matter to these people?)

Now it seems the veil has been lifted. After a full year of every desperate company under the sun announcing some form of a metaverse and being mocked for it, and Facebook literally divesting all of it's heart and soul into the idea so much that it changed it's name to 'Meta'- (Although that was probably also to escape easy name-recognition to the many internal crimes they have been pegged for over the years including but in no way limited to flagrant misuse of user data and assisted genocide.) the farm bell has rung but no chickens have returned to roost. They've all flown the coop and taken several billion of research and development funds with them. It's no longer just a joke to announce a metaverse project, it's actively harmful to your bottom line as everyone has come to realise what a pointless waste of effort it all was from the word go.

Generative AI was, of course, the final nail. A hot new trend for these people to chase, and whatsmore this one actually works a little. And again, it feeds into that desire for companies to fall into the exact traps that generations of sci-fi authors have warned against, regarding over reliance on AI over humans. Not that the artificial 'intelligence' we have now has any capability of becoming sentient and taking over the world- but in a much more real way people's jobs are in peril thanks to AI soundly taking the talents of these people and replicating them whole hat. Artists, journalists and actors are suddenly in the crosshairs for unemployment thanks to the sporadic and entirely unregulated proliferation of AI, and that prospective cost cutting alone is immediately more monetary appetising than the Metaverse ever was in it's entire lifespan, if we don't count the false value generated by Mark Zuckerberg with his hairbrained and increadibly expensive dedication to the worst business redirect of all time. (I'm just sad he finally snapped out of it. I wanted to see him sink his entire fortune chasing that rabbit into wonderland.)

But even as we sit on the otherend of the Metaverse world wondering what it was that just blew through us and disappeared in as much of a flurry; there are those still stuck stubbornly in what was, unable to move on and get with the times of today. I think it's a lag that settles in with age, a desire for the clock of progression to slow down just that little bit so you can get used to what is exciting today; that your mind warps your perception to think "This is still a thing, right?" Some people still don't have Facebook figured out, oblivious to the fact it's called 'Meta' now and nobody earnestly uses it as a social media platform who can help it. Youtube Shorts is still a wonder to a generation who stubbornly refuses to engage with Tiktok. (A generation that includes me, by the by.) And CEOs from the techfield who like to think themselves somewhat savvy and with it can't accept that the Metaverse is dead.

I'm sure that if the burning pyre of Twitter wasn't keeping him well and truly hands-full busy, Elon Musk would be weighing in on this matter; but until he's finished roasting alive with his cesspit of a platform, we've got Epic Games head Tim Sweeny ready and willing to make a fool of himself for public entertainment. Because you see, recently the fellows over at Business Insider posted their own, increadibly comprehensive, breakdown on the death of the Metaverse as a sort of open-casket eulogy of the terrible idea killed off in it's infancy. A fine read, but when you think yourself the vanguard of all things tech and revolutionary, such a statement can be interpreted as a shot across the brow. I'm sure Tim Sweeny must have thought "We disrupted Steam with our newness and people made fun of us the same way- I need to rush to my buddy Zuck's defence and ensure I'm on the right side of history for this one!" Image preening makes fools of us all.

"The Metaverse is dead! Let's organize an online wake so that we 600,000,000 monthly active users in Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, Sandbox, and VRChat can mourn its passing together in real-time 3D." Tweeted Tim, presumably whilst smiling and laughing uncomfortably between strangled sobs. In hindsight I know this can kind of read like a biting spit at the corpse of the Metaverse, but let me assure that in the replies he wants to bat for the notion that the Metaverse is still alive. Apparently he conflates the idea of the Metaverse and gaming as a whole into one unholy amalgamation in a warped belief that the 'Metaverse' is the natural successor to gaming because... they both run from computers? I don't... I assume Tim didn't do well in English at school, because that correlation is pathetic to say the least.

To the CEO mindset, admitting defeat is like committing infidelity with a recently sanctified farmyard animal- it's as taboo as taboo gets. So even faced with the definition of exactly what a Metaverse would be, as described endlessly by company after company badly regurgitating the rhetoric of Mark Zuckerberg like a failed game of Chinese Whispers, Sweeny prefers to blind himself to the truth and pretend that any game with an active internet connection is now a 'Metaverse'. Roblox? I guess that is a social platform to some description. Fortnite? That's certainly what it's going for, he would know being the CEO. Minecraft? Umm... not really by design... or even by utility... but I see where he's trying to go. VRChat? There's no functionality to that game but the idea is reminiscent of what a Metaverse wants to become I guess. PUBG Mobile? Just what? Why only the Mobile version of PUBG? Is he feeling okay? Oh, and Sandbox- can't forget my favourite game- Sandbox. Let this be an example why we, as a rule, need to go get our CEO's spayed before they spout stupid stuff on the Internet. It's simply better for everyone this way.

The problems at Meta

 Meta-tastophe!

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, we lived in the reign of the mega-empire known as the 'Facebook' supremacy. A time where all lived under the purview and 'grace' of our poorly-masked cybernetic overlord Mark Zuckerberg, whom harvested the data of his citizens for capital sustenance. His was a total and unending reign, entwined like a spiderweb around every online service in all the Internet. You want to interact with the news- 'Share to Facebook' would present itself as a pop-up. Show off a funny video- whilst you share it to Facebook. Maybe even skip the arduous process of making another damned website password, for why bother when you can send that login token to your Facebook account? I'm sure Overlord Zuckerberg would treat that data fairly... but as with all those driven by hubris; a fall would inevitably come. But whereas Rome fell to destructive whimsy of a spoilt and cruel Emperor Commodus, albeit through the bleeding of several proceeding regimes, Facebook died to the machinations of the same man who rose it. Perhaps an even greater betrayal, in the grand scheme of things.

You see, Mark Zuckerberg had an idea. Not really. Mark Zuckerberg stole an idea and proved to be better at selling it than it's original creators, both of which are so monumentally dense that they were key cheerleaders to the NFT boom of 2021. But the problem with Facebook, was that it became too big to stay ontop of the game. Like the mile-long ship that takes a week to turn, Facebook found it's next generation of potential users stolen away by fresher and differently attuned social media apps. Platforms that always seemed one step ahead of Facebook, and whenever Zuck tried to steal their ideas, suddenly that feature became pastiche or 'uncool'. That was how Facebook slid behind in the culture war; all it's other failures were purely of it's own construction. The failures in moderation, lack of foreign language development, facilitation of a real world genocide in Myanmar, and the whole widely exposed data selling side gig that Facebook was living off all tainted the seemingly unfellable monolith.

Because whilst not a single one of these issues could have single-handily defeated the cultural phenom that is Facebook; all of them mixed together could certainly chip enough away at the impenetrable armour to do much worse than kill. They could chip deep enough to cause doubt. And doubt is a weed. It's digs and it entwines and when it's stuck in deep and sturdy enough that weed will grow, feasting on your healthy thoughts and dreams like a leech. Those who ignore it, will some day become a slave to it. And those who try to blindly fight it, may just end up becoming it's fool. I believe Zuckerberg to be a reformed victim of the former, now entrapped by the latter; and his billion dollar unsinkable ship has been brought along for that ride, aware but unresponsive to the iceberg of their own creation the monolith is deftly sailing towards. 

And to what do we owe this sinking of fortunes? A simple change in direction. When the 'endless growth' model of Facebook prime began to taper off, Mark did the thing that truly desperate 'visionaries' do; he snatched ahold of a wisp out of the air and declared that if he threw enough money and attention to it, then that wisp would one day become the life raft which saves him from his predicament. That wisp was VR, and his life raft was called the Metaverse. And the reeds and bamboo sticks bashed together to try and keep his rickety dreams afloat are the hard works of the Oculus team which he bought to build off, and the engineers he has haply ignored in the many years since. All those billions sunk are slowly becoming little more than bobbing refuse drifting apart from Zuck's ramshackle life raft and the billionaire cyborg has no one else to blame other than his own misfiring sub-routines. 

In this mess and chaos it becomes easy to forget that Palmer Lucky is not the only significant tech-space fellow who slipped into the Facebook vortex before being spat out. So was John Carmack, lead programmer of some of Id Software's most influential and iconic titles. (I'm talking Wolfenstein and DOOM) Apparently the man was a genuine believer in VR and it's applications and really wanted to make something transformative and bettering through his time as head of the VR department. Of course, one might ask why someone with an ostensibly moral outlook on his life goals would work for a company who facilitated a genocide; but we all have our dichotomies we must wrestle with in life, now don't we? Sometimes we work with monsters for the good of everyone.

But it hasn't been good, has it? Facebook have changed it's name, it's focus, but never the colour of it's own muddy. blood-splattered stripes. How could it ever? Meta is just a front to extract even more intrusive data packets out of users for a better market cap to keep the tech-giant solvent for the next decade. All the talk about making life easier and revolutionising the way that the world interacts with one another fails to live up to the slightest of scrutiny. And for those like me who stood about aghast wondering how it is that no one within the company could see the utter gibberish their CEO was spewing; turns out there were! John Carmack was the little voice inside the machine trying to fix the particulars of a flawed construction. He even claimed to have been ignored by Mark himself, although it's hard to know whether he's conflating upper management with Mark or if he literally had meetings that went nowhere with the metal man.

From Carmack's accounts, sent in an internal memo that he later published on Twitter after fearing that the leaks to the news weren't providing the right context; Meta is an absolute money dump. A garishly huge organisation that wastes money and manpower on ineffectual policies and bad-faith ideas that end up going nowhere. Not least of all the Metaverse avatar controversy, which shook the company into a state of self consciousness that has them promising simply impossible fidelity for the platform they seek to make. It sounds as if the key decisions are being made purely by people who have literally no idea how the nitty gritty of actually coding and building the product actually works; which leads to an impassable gorge between expectation and reality which, through the magic of marketing, is starting to seep into the public too. Mark is the architect of his own mockery.

Meta's 'Horizon Worlds' metaverse is something of a disaster. The common man can't afford to interact with it thanks to the prohibitive software and hardware price, the tech hobbyists know about better competing products they'd rather spend their time enjoying and the tech curious are finding empty worlds that fail to hold their attention for more than a month. Yes, Horizon worlds has an average turn-over rate of one month. For the apparent future of social interaction; that isn't exactly great. Now Carmack has had enough and fled for greener pastures, and Palmer Lucky is still busy trying to actively break international morality conventions by designing a VR headset that can kill you- (Yes, he's a weeb for the single worst popular Anime ever; SA:O) there really is no more superstar VR cheerleaders left for Mark to alienate. Which leaves the metal man alone to drag what's left of his reputation into the dirt with more bad decisions piled atop more failed ideas. There's something to be said about commitment and dedication, but knowing when to quit is it's own strength too. Maybe someone should program that life lesson into the Zuck.

Paradox metaverse meltdown

 All publicity- right?

If this blog is fifty percent about gaming, then the other fifty percent is laughing at the constant stumbles of crypto projects because they just make for such good stories. So good, in fact; that I'm not entirely convinced that some of them aren't literal bait conjured up to try and create the illusion of a real failed start-up doomed for failure. And in the case of Paradox Metaverse; you'd have thought the CEO's themselves were professional comedians for how effortlessly they've set up an entire minefield of rakes around their headquarters for them to 'accidently' step on each and every day. How do you go from an absolute unknown to the laughing stock of the Internet in less than a week? Follow the example of Amio Talio. He has a couple of accomplices that are also along for the ride, but Mr Talio has done an amazing job of detailing himself as the worst of the bunch.

But first of? Who is Amio and what is the Paradox Metaverse? Well, in typical Metaverse fashion the whole thing is a bit of an unknown entity outside of his specific head-space, and especially an unknown around the gaming industry, and yet Amio felt confident enough in his position that in March he confidentially declared that the 'Solana' Crypto platform would "leave Ethereum in the dust when it came to gaming this year." Which is kind of like a pair of ants starting the London Marathon and mocking each other's slow progress. Both your platforms weren't headed anywhere with their Crypto gaming ventures! For an industry rife with 'move fast and break things' apologists; Crypto gaming has been unforgivably lethargic when it comes to growth or tangible improvement!

The man would have stayed an unknown if he didn't shell enough ducats out of his 'bribery' bank account (That's a joke, I need to add. He sounds British and seems like the kind of creep who searches the ends of the Internet to look up his own name. I ain't getting sued over this moron's insecurity.) to buy the sponsored time of controversial ex-Twitch Streamer IShowSpeed. Now if you know Speed, you know he's the answer to question: How far can you push the: "you have to forgive me because I'm young" excuse when you act like an idiot in public. He keeps apologising and then making even more stupid mistakes, so I really do wonder how his long term future as an internet celeb is going to go considering he's seventeen so he's going to loose his biggest trump card very soon. Speed and Amio joined forces recently to handily sink the budding reputation of Paradox Metaverse in beautiful fashion.

As this involved a well-known Streamer, this sponsored stream had to catch the attention of commentator Charles White, connoisseur of cringe; but then he passed it on to famed financial scam critique Coffeezilla, which can only mean juicy details are afoot. For the cringe, we have the sponsored stream itself. Paradox Metaverse decided to market itself with a fake Ronaldo that they advertised as the real guy apparently (which is objectively just funny) and then struggled with Speed to weather a storm of 'L Speed' ridicule from the live chat as the literal teenager audience saw right through the thin veneer of another Metaverse embarrassment. Which is about the best that they could have expected from this event. What did they want? Speed's target audience aren't old enough to vote; it's not like they could have financially invested in the platform! And the scam? Well... that's more Coffeezilla's realm than mine.

The Paradox Metaverse program is multifaceted and muddled; and from a laymen's perspective it's all just too boring and convoluted to draw any real attention. (Which is probably how it's coasted along so well up until now.) But from Coffeezilla's video on the matter, which I recommend you look up if you want real details, it sounds like the team were basically setting up every single failsafe that is typically exploited by pump and dump rug pulls. Unrealistic returns promises, locked funds incentives, and the final prototypical "The founders are locked out of the money, even if they wanted to scam you, thet can't!" (Typically proceeded by a magical access of the money and a vanished founder.) It's all very prototypical; but where I got interested, was with the video game portion of the Paradox Metaverse.

Because yes there is a game; and yes, it looks like total trash. In a faceplam of marketing, it seems to literally just be called 'The Paradox Metaverse - Battle Royale' and in an entire minute long trailer we basically see what would happen if you tried to make Crackdown 3 using only stock store Unity assets. I can't hesitate in saying, it looks like one of the most soulless, unimaginative and frankly clunky, bargain bucket Steam trash games you'll ever lay your eyes on. But of course, in the eyes of Amio and he's cohorts; it's a triple-A quality indie diamond in the rough! A veritable jewel of the industry waiting to bring play-to-earn to the mainstream. Because of course, on top of looking terrible, it's supposed to be a play-to-earn game that replaces your real job. To their eyes, the game is on the road to being finished and is only a year out because "How long does it take your average game to be made? Two to three years, right?"

Now first off; no. It does not take 'two to three years' for the average game to be made. If a team knows exactly what they're doing, and is working with a set of development tools that they understand with assets they can manipulate and rework; like the COD teams, then they can get a two year cycle going. A developer who knows what they're doing but is trying something new, is looking at Four years. A team that kind-of knows what they're doing, might be looking at five. Any longer and you're staring development hell in the face; which is exactly where this Paradox Metaverse is destined for if these knuckleheads think they can emulate the quality of modern classics before their launch. A launch which I'm certain is coming at some point... sure...

But none of that is even the craziest part. Because the real insanity, is that despite volunteering for the town-clown role, Amio can't take criticism! Such became apparent once it was revealed that this 'genius' reached out to threaten a Tiktok creator who made fun of him, and then on his easily accessible discord publicly posted a bounty for that man's 'capture'; like he's some mob boss. His cohorts have tried to wave away his behaviour, but haven't disavowed him; which is just about the perfect way that one can strap themselves to a sinking ship and call it 'loyalty'. Those are the sorts of friends you need to get. The kind that will ride your burning venture to the ashes, destroying their own careers and reputations, all because you can't keep a lid on your anger management issues! Friends to the bitter, and abruptly premature, end.

All crypto metaverse projects are doomed to ignoble ends once they either ride along far enough to rugpull, or eat dirt themselves and lack the strength to stand up again. If Facebook can't manage to get the idea to work, no half-functioning moron who can barely conjure coherent sentences is going to leapfrog them. This year has seen the absolute crash of global crypto stock, the very public and explosive death of two 'absolutely safe' crypto pillars and a further breakdown of public sentiment from 'laughing at' to 'actively despising'. So let that be a lesson to all those tech-nerds thinking their path to the easy 'get rich quick' life is by shilling a crappy crypto project: Maybe stick to the crappy affiliate programs and online courses grifts. Those seem to have a higher hit rate.

META's Metaverse is a mess-iverse

 That's the thing with life; no one makes it out alive.

Throw the body in the pit, it's useless to us now in the future that is METAVERSE. When we all transcend our frail physical bodies and it's limp limitations so that we can spend our waking lives hooked up to daddy Zuck's Mean Dream Machine and have our lifeblood slowly be drained out of the brain jar that makes up our new evolved forms. In the metaverse there's a place for all of us. A place as- powerless peon under Mark's boot, indentured servitude cleaning Mark's virtual mansion, or the premium toilet plunge cleaner at Zuckerberg's communal seminal sewers. Finally we all become functional members of Mark's society just like humanity was born to be. Aren't you excited to toss behind your fleshbags for Mark's dream vision? You better be, because it's coming at you whether or not you like it! ALL HAIL OUR META OVERLORDS!

But seriously, Facebook's whole Metaverse project has been an utter failure of marketing from the word go, and it's actually somewhat humbling to know that someone with the apparent monopoly on siphoning personal data out of you (with the exception of TikTok, I guess) can't put together a decent presentation selling their biggest life-line business scheme to outlive their Facebook platform which isn't going to last past it's current generation of users. You'd think people like that would have the hardwired exclusive access to our frontal lobes with perfect advertising to trick the whole world, but unless Mark Zuckerberg has a humiliation fetish, and with him who knows, this whole project of theirs has been a disaster. Their meaningless 'Metaverse' buzzword has been stolen by every company under the sun, the very idea of what a Metaverse even is supposed to be has been lambasted daily by anyone who grants it even the laziest critical eye and their own fledging work to start their Metaverse is such a mystery that one of the top searched Google suggestions in reference to Facebook is "What's Facebook's Metaverse called?"

Horizon Worlds, is the answer to that. Which yes, means that if Google recognises you as a gamer than the second you try to type in the name of that online you're going to have the Horizon games starring Aloy shoved in your face. (-5 points to brand recognition) But what if you do manage to find the thing and source the relevant equipment in order to play it? What can you expect? Well Horizon worlds is currently attempting to be a social hub for life-less looking avatar's to enjoy a lazy neon sunset themed world with nothing of substance or value to it. That's right, all those game developer's that were coming out trying to tell Facebook that the whole 'online social hub' thing was essentially just the MMO worlds they'd been creating for the past twenty years; Facebook has proved you all wrong by releasing its  social space as an MMO without the game. Groovy.

Okay so there are actually games spread about here and there but almost all of them totally suck ass. They're embarrassingly amateur programs that wouldn't even cut it as an inconsequential minigame in a Watch_Dogs game; that's how lazy they are. All while the actual talented developers trying their hands at Horizon Worlds are scratching their heads wondering how in the hell they're supposed to get all these systems to sing for them so they can construct anything worthwhile to do in here. Of course, those developers also have to contend with the lack of interest around Horizon Worlds, so that any effort they do put in is likely to have some waste when no one is around to actually play it. Try balancing the problems with developing VR games beneath the misbalancing factor of it having to run on a program that actively repels most able-minded players to even look at due to the Facebook connections. Really makes one consider their current contracts and allegiances.

All of which is to say that META's platform is undergoing some pretty rough growing pains for the express moment, which it makes it so very laughable that Mark, and at this point it's important to divorce the machinations of Facebook and the personal directives of it's pale-skinned dictator, drove up the price of the Oculus Quest VR headset specifically because of their Horizon Worlds project. As if he suddenly just realised that the incredible added value of his lifeless and empty platform warranted a flat retail increase for a console that is years old at this point. What is Mark, a Nintendo sleeper agent or something? And it's no twenty dollar jump like when Bethesda decided that it's Fallout 4 offerings needed to be overpriced to account for the total dogs dinner of DLC they wanted to put out between their two expansions. This is a big $100 dollar hike, across the board of headsets. Everything is just that large leap more expensive, and it's a trainwreck worth watching.

Think about the degree of unshakable delusion that has to have been running through the heads of everyone involved in that decision. First, they had to have been looking at the unimpressive adoption rate of Horizon Worlds, and realised how their current growth strategy was failing their overriding ambition. Then they must have totally ignored the value proposition of that software, and why that might turn people off from trying it out and straying, and instead tricked themselves into believing that the people just weren't taking the headset seriously enough and decided to hike the price. Or, even more damning, they saw the lack of revenue generation and thought that gouging their own console price was the way to supplement for it. Which is just... so wrong. What ever the case, Zucks might actually being doing the world a favour by grinding any feasible chance his ecosystem had of getting a grip in the market down by way of pricing his own hardware away from public interest.

As if VR needed another barrier to entry. It's already a criminally underserved and underadopted form of gaming that optimists are failing with their naïve belief that just because the tech is finally sound the product itself is going to just magically catch on. Sure, it's slowly getting more popular. Agonisingly slowly, however. Anyone looking to make a genuine living out of being a solely VR developer needs to either be one of the slam dunk mega hit games, like Beat Saber, or have a truckload of outside investing ready to keep the company afloat. There's just not the numbers to support an ecosystem. And the way to supplement those numbers, funnily enough, is not to raise the price of the damn thing in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis! (Does anyone in the tech industry ever look outside the bubble they live in to try and get a feel of their market? I'm thinking not.)

But if you're a late comer to VR and rush to quickly get a headset you have a scant few weeks before the hike gets into effect. And if you miss it don't worry; the new version of the headset comes with $30 VR hit Beat saber. (Good luck trying to dig up the other $70 of that value somewhere) Oh, and that offer is only temporary. After six months of the new price the headset will come alone. As much as it pains me to see an increadibly dumb pricing choice, it is ingratiating to acknowledge it's Facebook that are going to suffer the brunt of the bad decision. Maybe that will be enough to grind this vaccous concept of the 'Metaverse' down to an ignoble and deserved halt. At least until Amazon gets on developing their own, because these companies are like hydra; cut one head and three more take it's place.

How to realise you're the bad guy of a YA adventure novel

 "None shall oppose my >Insert megalomaniacal plan here<!"

A very important distinction that we must make some point in our lives. Else we'll forever be the clueless rube wondering about with the world burning around us pondering "Did I do that"? And you might think it simple, a straight forward case of checking your 'to-do' list and seeing if 'rule like a tyrannical despot' is listed on there but oh boy would you be wrong in that lofty assumption! Take for instance, one man who believes himself to be a visionary industrialist poised to revolutionise not just entertainment, but the individual-machine relationship forever more. This man's name is Shane Isaac, and to get an idea of who this fella is, let me just list his Linkedin self descriptors: 'Futurist, creator, gamer, technophile and believer in diversifying the global distribution of wealth'. Firstly, you know there's a problem when the tag 'gamer' isn't the cringiest thing you can describe yourself as. Secondly, doesn't that last bit rub you the wrong way like it does me? I mean I know I get flowery here and there, chuck in an extra adjective or two, but it's done consciously, I have intent when I get verbose. The use of 'diversifying' just teeters a bit too much into redundancy, it's big for the sake of being big; there's no intent to it. And believe it or not, those two observations sum up our man pretty well.

Shane is known for his newest project, his only project of note, Earth 2. That's right, those who have heard of it, and welcome, those lucky enough to avoid but not lucky enough to also avoid this blog. Earth 2, the totally ground-breaking and unique project to- drumroll please... create the Metaverse! (Wait, why are you all booing?) Yes, one would have to embody every characteristic of the egotistic to declare themselves the leading mind behind the metaverse; although we've discussed before how misleading the narrative of the title 'the metaverse' can be, so I'm assuming Shane knows better and is just using that label for marketing purposes. What is he actually making? What is Earth 2? Well, it's kind of like NFTs without the blockchain stuff. You know all that Landrush garbage I bemoan everytime we're talking about an NFT project? The thing where people buy virtual plots of land in hopes of flipping them for a profit when the full game launches? (And it never does.) Earth 2 might not be the origin of that idea, per se; but they've certainly gone a long way to popularise the idea in this current NFT wave.

As one might imagine, Earth 2 is pawning off pictures of our glorious earth as NFTs without the Non-Fungible part. But don't worry; the blockchain stuff will come later, he promises, as soon as they're done with the game. Oh but there's a game too! Of course, and its... well, to be honest I don't know what this game is. Nobody does. Because Shane doesn't want to tell us. We know that it'll contain the detail of Red Dead Redemption 2, (already a bit of a dated claim. Might want to update that to 'Horizon: Forbidden West', young Chris-Roberts-in-training.) a vastly bigger worldspace than any traditional game can handle and... I dunno, I guess the game has mineable minerals? We know there'll be minerals. So I guess this is a start-from-nothing MMO? Like Dreamworld? Whatever happened to Dreamworld again... Oh yeah, that's right! It launched to a horrendously terrible asset-flip nightmare the likes of which I could even outperform. And then Youtuber Callum Upton took a provocation to create his own parody game called NightmareWorld in order to mock the piss-poor efforts of the cash-grabbing 'dev team'. If you can even call a group that put something like that together a 'dev team'. (Hmm, I went into a lot of detail on that seemingly unimportant diatribe. I wonder if it will come back into play later?)

The special thing about Earth 2, and the reason why I think it's succeeded in grabbing so many hearts and minds; is that the creator absolutely refuses to share a single real detail about the game, so the heart can come up with it's own, perfect, game. Everyone can look into the colourless, shapeless, putty that is this concept and just reach in and morph their ideal life sim, or RPG, or adventure game. With a title like Earth 2, and the way in which Shane has framed the thing on certain occasions when he's let the yawn-inducing technobabble mask slip for a little bit, leads me to believe he sees a vision of some sort of social hub similar to Second Life. Only his idea is grander and further reaching, because of course. He wants to encompass the whole world in a digital landscape of virtual ownership and play-to-earn finance. He wants to be the architect behind our very own Matrix experience. If only the naysayers would put behind all logic and deductive reasoning so they would blindly believe and follow him! Then he'd already be halfway there!

Indeed, Shane here seems far more interested in the machinations of nay-sayers who look at the size of his project, assess his relative skill and lack of progress, compound the potential for squeezing money out of people and thus scrutinize this project. These people incense him, they upset him, and none more so than the Youtubers with reach who natter on about his project in a couple of videos every few months or so. He has called them every name he can get away with on a monitored social platform, calling them hacks, uniformed, and members of a secretive shadow cabal hired by owners of an Earth 2 competitor that didn't even exist when Earth 2 was announced, and dedicated to trying to destroy his project with weaponised doubt and fear. I'm not kidding about that last one, Shane has real 'main character' syndrome bubbling under the surface, it would seem.

And all this came to a head when, after a rare showcase of actual in-engine footage of what this Earth 2 thing is supposed to be, one Youtuber chose to ridicule the supposed technical prowess of what was being shown. This Youtuber commented that they themselves could do a better job, and that was just one step too far for Shane. Mr Issac flew into a rage, shook about crying for 5 hours, and after he managed to calm himself down; took to challenging this Youtuber online to put their money where their mouth was. He challenged them to make a product with some very specific specifications, most of which hadn't even been criticised by this Youtuber, in a week with a hefty cash incentive if this Youtuber delivered. Yes, because like an actual super villain, Shane wrote fail conditions for himself into the challenge that he issued, rather than just say something benign like "Well you make the whole game then!" (This guy thinks he's The Riddler, I swear.) And this Youtuber he challenged? The rube he would embarrass for their lack of ability to deliver once they shied away from the task? It was Callum Upton. One of the only Youtubers shown to have the talent and gumption to actually put his money where his mouth is with Nightmare World. Yeah... I don't know if Shane thought this through...

You know, maybe he did. He was just so sure that his various offhanded parameters for the challenge would never be met by the- huh, Callum did them? All of them? Huh. Well at least Shane wasn't a total crybaby about this and, upon seeing the update posts that Callum was putting out as he worked, changed the goal posts. (Oh wait he did. Shane did do that!) Now put yourself in the shoes of an average observer, as if you aren't already. So this egoist CEO of a unrealistically ambitious company issues a challenge to a lowly independent to match his talents, only to balk when this indie dev does exactly that and then tries to change the win conditions so that he doesn't have to part with the reward money. I'm sorry; that's just makes this CEO a plainly written YA adventure novel villain. And don't take my word for it, dabber Youtuber JoshStrifeHayes coined that very label himself. And more to the point, doesn't this whole situation just make one wonder what exactly a financial ride with Shane Issacs entails? Because that's what this is all about at the end of the day, you read the part of Issac's manifesto about 'diversifying financial freedom' or whatever; the guy is trying to make his early buyers rich. But when he demonstrates himself to be this petty, picking fights with people who criticize his work from an observer's perch, one might wonder if this is the brain they really want in charge of making them money. 

At the end of the day, this is just a microcosm of the whole speculative investment metaversal trend we're seeing touch our industry. Ill planned and shaky, prone to emotional outbursts to cover up the lack of professionalism, and slathered with an unremovable, permanent layer of egg-on-the-face. Whether Earth 2 is a scam or just a guy who really overestimates his own abilities going to bat for himself, the project is a rudderless ship, kicked off from Southampton with the promise of transatlantic opulence, and steered directly into iceberg waters by a truly clueless captain. As with any project like this (>cough< Star Citizen >cough<) the involved are far too invested to critically assess themselves and when it all falls apart around them and they're left penniless and gameless, they'll point the fingers at everyone around them and cry "Why would FUD pushers do this?" And perhaps some, the truly enlightened out there, will be struck with the diamond insight to look objectively and ask; "Wait, was I the idiot?"