For Microsoft, the Metaverse is just a “poorly designed video game” (Apple and Snap agree)
It was a few weeks ago, the American Meta launched its Horizon Worlds platform in France, allowing you to immerse yourself in the metaverse imagined (and financed) by Mark Zuckerberg and his teams. A launch then accompanied by a very unfortunate message from the founder of Facebook, then suggesting a visually very poor metaverse, with a look close to a (bad) Nintendo Wii game. Quickly, Mark Zuckerberg wanted to highlight the merits of a metaverse designed with billions of dollars…
Xbox, Snap, Apple, Disney… Facebook’s metaverse is not appealing (yet)
As part of a recent podcast Tech Live of the Wall Street Journal, it was the CEO of the Xbox division, Phil Spencer, who was asked about the metaverse. And for the latter, he is for the time being nothing but a “poorly built video game“, or a poorly designed video game. According to Phil Spencer, video game designers have the opportunity to create fascinating worlds in which players want to escape. “For me, building a metaverse that looks like a meeting room… I just find that’s not where I want to spend most of my time…” he indicates.
Note that the big boss of the Xbox division is not the only one to have serious doubts about the metaverse. Indeed, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat is not kind to the virtual world either, and sums it up to “live in a computer“, explaining that the last thing people want to do when they come home from work is probably to continue their life in a program.
For Greg Joswiak, from Apple, “metaverse is a word i will never use“. Ditto on the ed side at Bob Chapek, CEO of Disney, for whom the term metaverse will never be used. “It is a very broad term. For us, it’s next-gen storytelling” says the latter.
Not very complimentary remarks with regard to the metaverse under development at Facebook, which ultimately overlap with the general feeling that hovers on the side of Meta. Indeed, a few days ago, an internal note made it possible to discover not only that Horizon Worlds was riddled with bugs and far from meeting the expected quality standards, but also that the management of Meta had come to urge employees to use their own creation.
Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has already spent several billion for the development of his virtual world, which seems more than ever to be struggling to convince users, like other industry leaders. Obviously, the metaverse is still in its infancy, and on the side of Microsoft, it is estimated that the latter should quickly evolve into something more attractive, the American giant also probably having some plans on this subject. with Activision-Blizzard.
