People don’t go to virtual spaces because they want to compulsively buy things, they want entertainment and social interaction. The more “buy this! buy that!” you shoehorn into a platform that is hardly ready for even normal gaming experiences is not going to take off imo.

Roblox is terrible but they worked out the model a little bit more intelligently. Make an engine where it’s free to join, host experiences and create new ones relatively easily. They have a shop where virtual items can be bought and sold and Roblox takes a major cut of virtual currency to real currency and store transactions, but outside of that their involvement within the games themselves is less pronounced.

Even if I don’t play Roblox myself, it’s popular with kids and this platform I think is more capable of becoming a VR universe than Horizon worlds or other buzzed “Metaverse” implementations.

Even Garry’s mod servers have more interesting interactions than Meta’s pet project. And I don’t trust Meta enough to touch a platform they develop.