The creator of one of the earliest and most enduringly iconic virtual worlds is returning to his roots. Second Life’s founder Philip Rosedale will rejoin the company he founded in 1999 as a strategic advisor after High Fidelity, the spatial audio company Rosedale co-founded in 2013, invested in Second Life’s developer Linden Lab. The deal […]
Roblox CEO Outed For Using Completely Legal, Completely Ridiculous Tax Dodge
Game-making platform and fledgling metaverse Roblox made the news yesterday as the focus of a New York Times report about a ‘90s era tax cut that’s spun out of control. Originally created to foster investment in small businesses, the Qualified Small Bu…
Roblox is back online after three days of Halloween outage
Roblox, the gaming platform that is immensely popular amongst young players, said on Twitter Sunday evening that it is back online worldwide. Roblox is back online everywhere! Thank you for your continued patience as we get back to normal. — Roblox (@Roblox) October 31, 2021 The recovery came after an outage that lasted three days, […]
Roblox Has Been Down For Over 35 Hours And It’s Probably Not Chipotle’s Fault
Roblox, one of the most popular games in the world, has been down for over a day now and while many frustrated players are blaming an in-game Chiplote promotion, the devs say that free burritos aren’t the reason for the outage. Read more…
Core might be the Vegas of the metaverse
A self-described “endless arcade,” Core feels like a 90s cyberpunk fever dream come to life. Half playable game library, half no-code game creator, all neon lights, the new platform is a surprisingly well-realized vision of this metaverse thing everyone sure seems to be talking about lately. Billing itself as your “portal to the multiverse,” Core […]
Roblox pushes toward avatar realism, plans to add NFT-like limited-edition items
At its annual developer conference Thursday, Roblox painted a picture of what’s next for the fast-growing online multiplayer portal that’s like catnip for kids and teens. In his keynote, Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki outlined plans to spruce up player avatars, introduce new in-game monetization streams and streamline the experience for developers dreaming up […]
Twitter invests in avatar startup Facemoji
Avatar startups have come and gone over the past few years, but the future that many of the entrepreneurs behind them originally imagined has proven more or less accurate. Apple is increasingly interested in avatar representations through Memoji, Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be a metaverse company and platforms like Roblox, where users enter a […]
Epic Games to shut down Houseparty in October, including the video chat ‘Fortnite Mode’ feature
Houseparty, the social video chat app acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games for a reported $35 million back in 2019, is shutting down. The company says Houseparty will be discontinued in October when the app will stop functioning for its existing users; it will be pulled from the app stores today, however. Related to this […]
Infinite Canvas raises $2.8M for a metaverse creator group modeled after esports teams
With the promise of an interconnected virtual world coming into focus and user-crafted gaming content exploding, Infinite Canvas is looking to apply lessons learned in the esports boom to the metaverse. “Metaverse” is the hot buzzword right now, but it’s not an empty term. Ten different people would probably define the metaverse in ten different […]
Roblox acquires Discord competitor Guilded
Roblox is using M&A to bulk up its social infrastructure, announcing Monday morning that they had acquired the team at Guilded that has been building a chat platform for competitive gamers. The service competes with gaming chat giant Discord, with the team’s founders telling TechCrunch in the past that as Discord’s ambitions had grown beyond […]