Incidentally, Linden Lab is still looking for a VP of engineering for Second Life. On the other hand, the Well, mentioned on HN today, once cost US$6/hour. Fully modifiable multiuser virtual worlds have to do much more server-side, which costs. Most games are able to offload much of the work to the clients, plus much of the asset processing is done once when the game world is built. Facebook Horizon, anyone? Virtual worlds turn out to be expensive to run from a compute standpoint. Most of what's come out since has been worse. Second Life is the high water mark of that idea. I'm interested in seeing the Metaverse of Ready Player One/Snow Crash happen. They did license the technology to the NetEase unit of Tencent in China, where it was used for Nostos, a MMO with great art that a good player could finish in a few hours. But they have enough money left to fund three in-house game studios, in hopes of getting a hit.
Now, as far as their website says, they have no real customers. They all went broke within months, because the operating costs were so high.
Three reasonably good free-to-play indy games were built on it. You had to host your virtual world/game on Google's cloud, and there was a complicated pay-per-transaction scheme, billed to the game operator. They spent about $400M of VC money to build the underpinnings of the Metaverse. A bigger cost failure is Spatial OS, from Improbable.
