Tech Companies CEOs Less Enthusiastic about Metaverse

Despite the attention which the metaverse got at several levels and the increasing number of fans, some CEOs of tech companies were less enthusiastic about this virtual world, according to Bitcoinist Website.

During the Wall Journal Tech Live conference, Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox, criticized metaverse in its current form, describing it as a poorly-built video game.

Spencer said: “Building a metaverse that looks like a meeting room, I just find that’s not where I want to spend most of my time.”

According to him, the metaverse is still in its early stages and will evolve. He pointed to the privileges offered by the gaming world over the metaverse through the creation of captivating virtual worlds.

Meanwhile, CEO of Snap Inc. Evan Spiegel described the metaverse as living within a computer, saying he would not prefer to join it after a stressful work day.

“The metaverse is ‘living inside of a computer.’ The last thing I want to do when I get home from work during a long day is live inside of a computer,” Spiegel underlined.

Snap focused more on reducing the hardware in its service as well as paying more attention to augmented reality (AR) over virtual reality (VR), Spiegel noted, adding AR is more immersive and consistent with Snap’s goals to make people love the real world more as a fundamental bet.

Earlier, he said that his company refuses to use the word “metaverse”, describing it as “ambiguous and hypothetical.”

Moreover, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Marketing Greg Joswiak said the metaverse is a word he’ll never use as his company prefers AR over VR.

The tech companies’ officials’ statements come in conjunction with recent reports about significant losses achieved by Reality Labs, Meta’s unit keeping unit on the metaverse activities, in the third quarter of 2022, estimated at $3.67 billion, a matter which increases the total losses from the beginning of 2021 to nearly $20 billion.

Meta’s Chief Financial Officer David Wehner expected that Reality Labs’ losses would continue in 2023 year-over-year.