If the metaverse takes off, it will take cues from today's privatized, centralized, financialized tech ecosystem and echo the development of play-to-earn games
In a virtual world full of virtual goods, finance could get weird. — Years ago, while on vacation in the Northwest … Tweets: @michaelluo , @newyorker , @parismarx , @caseynewton , @bijanstephen , @lainnafader , @annawiener , @annawiener , @jmrivera02 , @lainnafader , @theunread , and @shannonpareil Tweets: Michael Luo / @michaelluo : .@annawiener: “I tried to imagine myself in a corporate-owned and venture-funded metaverse: a virtual axolotl in a virtual sweater, writing for a virtual magazine in a virtual office, hemorrhaging virtual money.” https://www.newyorker.com/... @newyorker : For its makers, the metaverse will be stuffed with money, @annawiener writes—in every dimension, all the way down. https://nyer.cm/tZgR3YE Paris Marx / @parismarx : The metaverse and crypto projects build on previous experiments with virtual commerce as they seek to push finance into even more facets of life. @annawiener lays out what such a future could look like. It sounds like one we need to stop. https://www.newyorker.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Always read @annawiener: “Arguments in favor of web3 are frequently made using utopian rhetoric—democratization, decentralization, transformation, freedom, revolution, and so on—that elevates, or obscures, what would otherwise be a financial conversation.” https://www.newyorker.com/... Bijan / @bijanstephen : best take on the metaverse i've seen is naturally from @annawiener, who's always brilliant https://www.newyorker.com/... Lainna Fader / @lainnafader : Not the future I want but if we get there I can't wait for @annawiener to write about it https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/... Anna Wiener / @annawiener : Hard to cover something that doesn't exist, but: notes on play-to-earn games, RMT, FarmVille, the “assetization” of video games, and some very amazing metaverse chit-chat from tech CEOs & investors ("a new economy that is larger than our current economy"!) https://newyorker.com/... Anna Wiener / @annawiener : I wrote about an aspect of “the metaverse” that I find very interesting 💸 https://newyorker.com/... Joshua Rivera / @jmrivera02 : here's anna wiener painting the future more clearly than anyone i've read so far and boy does it suck https://www.newyorker.com/... Lainna Fader / @lainnafader : “I wondered if there were people who wanted this, or would find this vision exciting. Then I reminded myself: FarmVille. I think it is useful, in attempts to forecast the future, to be humble about the enormous mystery of other people's desires.” https://www.newyorker.com/... Dustin Kurtz / @theunread : In which Anna does an incredible job of summing up the entire recent history of gaming economies, microtransactions, the forefront of rentier capitalism and why everything is FFXIV now. https://www.newyorker.com/... Shannon Bond / @shannonpareil : “Reading about the metaverse, I've often had the uneasy feeling that I am taking something far too seriously—giving credence to the wrong things, internalizing the wrong logic—simply bcs a small number of world-historically wealthy people have told me to” https://www.newyorker.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing at peak hype in January 2022, Anna Wiener argued in the New Yorker that any metaverse worth the name would inherit today's tech ecosystem as-is: privately owned platforms, centralized control, and finance layered on top of everything — the same dynamics that drove play-to-earn games and their boom-bust cycles into virtual worlds. Her frame ran directly against the industry pitch of the moment, when Meta was spending on the vision laid out in Jason Rubin's 2018 Oculus memo and Epic's Tim Sweeney was selling a creator-owned counter-model to Facebook's "manicured" feed.
Two years on, the corpus reads like a vindication of her caution rather than a refutation: Decentraland land prices collapsed from roughly $45 to $5 per square meter once the speculation drained out, and Meta itself retreated from metaverse evangelism to an efficiency agenda barely a year after its dystopian Super Bowl ad.
First-order effects
- The immediate stakes sit with Meta and the developers building on its platform: Rubin's memo framed VR as a market to own, and developers have since raised alarms about strict app store rules and acquisitions that concentrate that market under one owner.
- For players and creators, Wiener's argument means the default metaverse would be one where every asset — a sweater, an office, a plot of land — is a rentable, ownable product of a corporate platform, not a commons.
Second-order effects
- Decentraland's land-price collapse is the controlled experiment: when virtual real estate trades like a financial asset before a real user economy exists, the speculative layer unwinds first and takes the platform's credibility with it.
- Epic's positioning around creators becomes a forced contrast strategy — the more Meta centralizes and financializes VR, the more Epic's open-ecosystem pitch differentiates, pushing competition toward governance models rather than hardware specs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, virtual-world economies will be built the way social platforms were: winner-take-most platforms capturing rents on digital scarcity, with play-to-earn-style financialization arriving early and regulation arriving late.
- The longer-term question the corpus leaves open is whether consumer appetite for a financialized virtual world exists at all — the Decentraland data and Meta's pivot suggest the constraint may be demand, not technology or capital.
The trend: Virtual-world platforms are learning the same lesson social networks did — that financialized, centrally owned digital economies attract speculation before they attract users, and the correction hits the token layer first.