The primary draw of “Ready Player One,” both as a book and a movie, is the notion of entering a virtual world in which all of your favorite characters are essentially up for grabs. But here in the real world, things are much more complicated: The Readyverse may have the rights to “Ready Player One,” but crucially, they don’t yet have the rights to all of the popular intellectual property featured in the movie.
“We’ve already begun conversations quietly with a few major studios and significant rights holders of beloved IP and they’re all leaning into figuring out collaborations with us,” Farah told THR. “Everyone’s really excited about this being the way to bring their IP to the metaverse.”
Translation: Unless the proper deals get hammered out, and there’s no guarantee they will, participants will not see the “Back to the Future” DeLorean or the Iron Giant or Halo’s Master Chief or any other piece of major IP in the Readyverse. If the platform were to launch today, it sounds like the only pop culture-related thing customers would see would be some of the generic locations that appear in the movie, and maybe a character made for the film like Wade Watts/Parzival or Samantha Cook/Art3mis. That’s little more than an empty shell when compared to what’s depicted in the OASIS.
Even if this company was somehow able to convince every major IP rights holder to fork over the rights to include recognizable characters in this new venture, consumers have not yet shown signs that they’re actually interested in participating in the metaverse in the way these companies seem to envision. (Just look at the failure of Facebook’s own Metaverse.)
Maybe that will change one day. Maybe the Readyverse will even be the platform to usher in that era of entertainment. But if society gets to a point where people are as invested in the Readyverse as the “Ready Player One” characters are in the OASIS, whoever is left in the real world will be dealing with the consequences for a long, long time.