Xbox boss Phil Spencer says metaverse is 'a poorly built video game'

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg might be going all in on metaverse but executives from other companies don't seem to be in any hurry to ride the trend.

Metaverse is currently an experimental and expensive bet into the future of social interaction online. Instead of sending messages and interacting with people over video calls, the bet here is to meet them in a digital space with digital avatars.

At the WSJ Tech Live 2022 conference, Microsoft Gaming CEO and head of the Xbox division Phil Spencer said the current concept of the metaverse was like a "poorly built video game."

Spencer said that video games already put people together "in 3D spaces to go and save the world from invading aliens, or conquer the castle" but the current iterations of the metaverse concept looked more like a "meeting room" than a virtual world. He said that's not "where I want to spend most of my time".

Former Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey compared metaverse to a "project car" that Meta was pouring unreasonable amounts of money into.

"I don't think it's a good product," Luckey said. "It's not. It's not fun, it's not good. I think actually most of the people probably on the team would agree that it's not currently a good product."

Earlier this month, a leaked internal memo showed that the Horizon World's team within Meta rarely used the app, prompting the company's VP Vishal Shah to place the unit in a "quality lockdown."

Snap Inc CEO Evan Spiegel echoed the sentiment and said he personally identified metaverse as "living inside a computer".

“The last thing I want to do when I get home from work at the end of a long day is live inside a computer,” Spiegel said.

Spencer, despite his reluctance to accept the current state of the metaverse, does feel that there is potential in the concept and believes that it will change over time to resemble video games.

“I tease a little bit in [saying it’s] a bad video game. I just think we’re early,” Spencer said.

He believes that it is “going to end up looking a lot more like video games than some of the models that I see for the metaverse today”.