Netsmith

> In many more words: 2017 sales of "full VR" rigs were flat or even negative, with Rift shipping slightly more HMDs in 2016 than 2017, and HTC Vive shipping less last year than the year before.

By those numbers, PC VR sales are only down in 2017 if you exclude Windows MR. That seems a bit arbitrary, as the Odyssey at least is apparently a fairly decent system overall.

Again by these figures, sales of all PC and console VR systems are up except for the most expensive, the Vive, which was $800 US for most of 2017. That seems to support optimism that future PC VR price reductions will improve sales: especially an end to the cryptocoin-driven GPU cost (and availability) crisis.

It also has to be said that people with inside information have publicly expressed skepticism about the SuperData numbers: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/959172783765729280

(Repost of my comment: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2018/01/vr-sales-shipments-2017-superdata.html?cid=6a00d8341bf74053ef01b7c95052ff970b#comment-6a00d8341bf74053ef01b7c95052ff970b )

There's a book called Designing Virtual Worlds from 2003 that might be interesting to you; since it's 2003 it predates World of Warcraft and some of the information is dated, but other elements are timeless. It was re-released under a Creative Commons license in 2021: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2021/08/richard-bartle-designing-virtual-worlds-free-book.html

And another recommendation if you're interested in worldbuilding is the Encyclopedia Eorzea books from the Final Fantasy XIV game, three of them; they contain the full backstories, timelines, summarised in-game stories, locations, characters, races, etc etc etc. However, it's written "in-universe", not so much from a developer's point of view.

That said, you didn't specify which part of said games you would like to read about, I can imagine more information about the design and build would be interesting too, a look behind the scenes. The video game resources I mentioned get you there partway though.

HN has outlasted Slashdot by a wide margin at this point.

IIRC, Slashdot stopped being great around the same time as the decline of the Digg era. It started to sink in quality around 2007, which gave it ten years at most of being a central part of the online tech community (1997 - 2007).

I started reading HN in 2008. It's lasted nearly twenty years as an incredible community.

Here are some graphs:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/01/slashdot-fail.html

"All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use."

I wonder what the implications are for Stable Diffusion, DALLE and Midjourney since that art images on the internet are copyrighted by default.

Even with a fair use argument, there are examples in cases where AI was generating art that included the signatures of artists.

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/lensa-ai-art-images-without-consent.html