Microsoft Buys Least Metaverse-Friendly Game Company to Boost Its Metaverse Plans

This is one of those surprised/not surprised news items:

Microsoft Corp. plans to acquire Activision Blizzard Inc. in its largest deal yet as it looks to boost its gaming business and capture opportunities in the metaverse... “Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms,” Chief Executive Satya Nadella said in the release. 

The deal definitely makes sense for Microsoft's gaming war chest, but talk of the metaverse makes me wonder if Microsoft actually grasps the concept. (I mean if I were head of Microsoft's metaverse strategy, I'd spend less time trying to acquire legacy old school game companies, and more time updating and rebooting Microsoft's Minecraft into a full-fledged metaverse.)

And yes yes, Activision Blizzard has a great track record of creating hugely successful mass market games (good relations with its employees, not so much) with highly polished UX and deep narrative/world building. What Activision Blizzard is not especially well known for is the key feature that comprises any metaverse platform worth the name:

User-generated content. Blizzard's World of Warcraft is nearly as old as Second Life, and still hasn't added a player housing option -- basically the bare minimum of enabling and encouraging UGC. Even beyond a lack of user creation tools, Activision Blizzard games are famous for being tightly controlled experiences, pleasantly pigeon-holing gamers into the heavily designed experiences and character types the studio has created for them. (If the real world analog to the metaverse is Burning Man, then Activision Blizzard is Disneyland.)

I guess the best case you could make for Activision Blizzard vis a vis a metaverse strategy is Microsoft can now create a truly polished user experience for a Microsoft metaverse platform that's appealing to core/mid-core gamers. Then again, the current leading contenders in the metaverse platform race -- Fortnite Creative, ROBLOX, and Free Fire to some extent -- already have larger userbases than all of Activision Blizzard's games.  

Comments

[seph]

Gaming makes up very little of Microsoft's earnings. They know the value of it though. Microsoft knows what Solitaire meant to Windows, Facebook know whats Farmville meant to Facebook. We get into new tech for leisure and entertainment reasons, end up staying for all sorts of reasons like productivity and business.

Microsoft's been at it awhile with AR/VR via Windows Mixed Reality headsets and HoloLens. I don't know what in particular Activision-Blizzard can add to their concept of a 'metaverse' that their plethora of game studios can't already, but a future of games to help sell Windows Holographic when it becomes more of a thing makes sense.

[Adeon]

> but talk of the metaverse makes me wonder if Microsoft actually grasps the concept

Everyone is 100% sure they're using it correctly and everyone else is wrong about it.

Sure, sure.

Time to realize the truth, WJA: No one knows what the Metaverse is, because the term is meaningless. It means whatever you want. It's a filler buzzword.

Sorry, your personal ideas for the metaverse might be cool, but they aren't the metaverse. Best describe what you're interested in using actual words that have meaning.

Because Metaverse is just the new Dot Com

[Joey1058]

"Because Metaverse is just the new Dot Com."
This is what I've been seeing for months and couldn't pinpoint it. Thank you, Adeon!

[Wagner James Au]

It's totally like the dot com boom except for the 500 million to 1 billion active users in platforms that roughly fit the description of the Metaverse from Snow Crash.

[Adeon]

When you have a term that ambiguous of course there will be billions that meet a definition.