Issue #2: A Deeper Dive Into The Evolution of Metaverse aka Web 2.0

Metaverse has covered a tumultuous journey to become the buzz of today’s time. And now that you have a pretty good idea of what constitutes the major parts of Web 1.0, it is time to switch to the second gear and ride through the nitty-gritties of the developments from 2004 onwards, after the advent of Roblox.

The Gaming Reign Continued

2006: Officially launched on September 1, 2006, Roblox went on to become a giant with a variety of popular games so much so that in May 2020, it was noted that the most popular games on Roblox had over 10 million monthly active players each. Till August 2020, at least 20 games had been played more than 1 billion times, and at least 5,000 have been played more than one million times.

2007: May 4, 2007 is marked as a historic date for Jagex Limited, a British video game developer as it achieved the biggest feat with its game Runescape reaching the milestone of 1 million member accounts. The game had successfully attracted a solid core audience aged between 14 – 24, built entirely by word of mouth.

The studio now lets players vote on content updates for RuneScape Old School.? Also, more than 89 percent of the RuneScape community have given a unanimous vote for Jagex to add the God Wars Dungeon. The dungeon with four new bosses allows players to pick up a legendary Godsword, as well as high-level armour and other special weapons.

2008: For all the gaming aficionados, it was a delight to discover the release of PlayStation Home on Playstation 3. Playstation is no Greek to anyone. To simply explain, Playstation Home was a virtual 3D social gaming platform developed by Sony Computer Entertainment's London Studio for the PlayStation 3 on the PlayStation Network.?

It was accessible from the PS3's XrossMediaBar. It was free to access but required a PSN account. However, it was shut down, still in beta form, in March 2015.

2010: First launched in North America on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft with several expansion add-ons being released for the game since it hit 12 million players on October 7, 2010.

Such a huge achievement was a result of the support and enthusiasm that gamers across the world continue to show with an affirmation that the game offered one of the best entertainment values available back then.

Onset of the Era of Acquisitions and Mergers?

The gaming industry was at the zenith with players from all over the world showing unparalleled interest towards Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games. Such massive response from the worldwide was just the beginning of a new era of the gaming industry, which further gained momentum when several tech giants jumped into the pool.?

2013: The uncontrollable craze for League of Legends was unsurmountable when Riot Games held the season three finals for League of Legends at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles owing to the rising popularity of the game, both in its playbase and as a spectator sport . Seems a little too fancy to believe right?

But, it was very much true and so much so that the tickets went on sale and were gone in approximately one hour. Then the second wave of tickets for the huge event went on sale at 12 pm Pacific today and were gone within five minutes. Literally a Eureka, isn’t it?

2014: The morning of August 25, 2014 witnessed the e-commerce giant Amazon acquiring Twitch, a live video game streaming site with more than 55 million monthly users for $970 million in cash. Hailed as the YouTube for video game streaming,? even Google had agreed to a deal to acquire Twitch for $1 billion, but that never materialised.

This particular acquisition and the intent of Google to acquire Twitch was a gamechanger in the multiplayer online gaming mosaic and was an important step in shaping the gaming industry back then into the Web3 and metaverse backed games of today.?

On September 15, 2014, following the footsteps of Amazon, other tech wizard Microsoft acquired Minecraft for $2.5 billion to diversify its game portfolio. This huge step by Microsoft was just another feather in the cap of the online gaming industry.?

The game continued to be available across iOS, Android and PlayStation as well as on Xbox and PC. However, the exit of the game founders post the acquisition sparked mixed response from the gaming community as they lost the cornerstone of trust and anticipated a bleak future for the game.

The Wind-Up

In a nutshell, the timeline from 2005- 2015 was the ‘decade of several online games making their way into the hearts of the gamers’ aka Web 2.0.

The successful evolution, acquisitions, mergers of the online games or gaming platforms and the introduction of the technology companies to multiplayer games opened several avenues for advancements which we today know as Web3 games, metaverse or blockchain based games.?

Brace yourselves for the last ride into the evolution of metaverse that will give you a kaleidoscopic view of the evolution of metaverse.

Have a great day ahead!!