The head of Microsoft’s gaming firm Xbox, Phil Spencer, is quite optimistic about the Metaverse. However, he remains ‘cautious’ about play-to-earn (P2E) cryptocurrency games because of their economic and speculative aspects.
Phil Spencer insists that “gamers have been in the Metaverse for 30 years” as games have already offered 3D shared worlds for people to communicate in.
While speaking with Bloomberg anchor Emily Chang on August 25, Spencer suggested that while most gamers are not yet sold on the current concept of a Metaverse, based on his definition, they have fundamentally been playing in Metaverse worlds for decades:
“My view on Metaverse is that gamers have been in the Metaverse for 30 years. When you’re playing games, if you’re playing a World of Warcraft game, you’re playing in Roblox, you’re playing in a racing game where everybody’s in a shared world.”
In Spencer’s view, the Metaverse is mainly a “3D shared world” in which people can readily communicate with one another and engage in shared experiences and common purposes. He stated:
“It’s not at all surprising to me that gamers might look at Metaverse and think well I don’t really get it because we already have an avatar of myself and I can already go into a shared world and I can already sit there and have voice conversations with people anywhere.”
Spencer’s sentiments reiterate that of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who after telling Bloomberg in November 2021 that people could “absolutely expect” the company to make moves in Metaverse gaming, noted that:
“If you take Halo as a game, it is a Metaverse. Minecraft is a Metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they’re 2D today and the question is can you now take that to a fully 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so.”
Spencer nonetheless did not address more contentious issues in the Metaverse, such as the concept of owning some virtual Metaverse property via NFTs. Mark Cuban, crypto proponent, and billionaire investor, recently slammed virtual property investment as “the dumbest s— ever” due to its lack of scarcity and utility.
The Xbox head instead went on to add that commercial usage of the Metaverse space has now continued to pique the growing interest of Microsoft and CEO Nadella lately. He stated:
“But I do think the skills that we have as game designers and game creators make a ton of sense in a lot of enterprise experiences. And this is why Satya gets excited about it.”
Cautious About P2E
The Xbox head spoke in a lot more tentative terms over blockchain-based P2E games nonetheless. While Spencer admitted that monetization in games has been around for several years, he holds lots of concerns about games being primarily built around the menial tasks to accrue digital currency.
He added:
“Play-to-earn specifically is something I’m cautious about. It creates a work force out of players, for certain players to kind of monetize.”
“Now you find games that are starting to build that into the economy of the game itself. We made some comments in Minecraft about how we view NFTs in this space because we people are doing things that we thought were exploitative in our product — we said we don’t want that.”
He did not entirely reject the concept of play-to-earn, nevertheless, noting there might be some interesting use cases that sprout out from the area. He stated:
“I think sometimes it’s a hammer looking for a nail when these technologies come up. But the actual human use — or player use, in our case — of these technologies, I think there could be some interesting things.”
