If you’re cynical about their statements, I don’t blame you. The metaverse buzz has been largely driven by Facebook – I mean, by mistake, Meta – a company that urgently needs restructuring. The actual plans, meanwhile, may sound like just glorified VR or dystopian nightmares.
That doesn’t mean the craze is gone. The opportunities for embedded internet, which mixes real and virtual worlds, are enormous – both for investors and users. Playing could be the first step in fulfilling this promise.
Not only players can monetize the metaverse; they can also become the early adopters who push it into the mainstream.
Some metaverses probably already exist in games. Nadella certainly thinks that’s the case.
“If you take Hall as a game, it’s a metaverse,” said Bloomberg TV last november. “Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In a way, they’re 2D today, but the question is, can you take that to a full 3D world now, and so we absolutely plan to do that. “
Xbox and Activision Blizzard have not yet entered VR gaming, although Microsoft has produced the Hololens mixed-reality headphones.
The company’s metaverse could also use its established one gaming business, professional services and Azure cloud computing platform. Indeed, analysts were optimistic about this offer prior to the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. “We would argue that Microsoft is extremely well positioned to have almost all the core capabilities needed to deliver a metaverse platform today,” Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler said earlier this month. according to MarketWatch.
Those capabilities now span Activision Blizzard’s game catalog, with 400 million monthly users and nearly 10,000 employees. That could give Microsoft a big advantage over rivals like Meta.
There’s only one fair way to solve this: arm Zuckerberg with Oculus Quest 2 and Nadella with Hololens and send them the metaverson for a duel at High Noon.
Source
Thomas Macaulay