Valve’s president Gabe Newell said in an interview that most people barely acknowledge what the metaverse actually is.
“Most of the people who are talking about the metaverse have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about”, – Newell said for the PC Gamer interview. “And they’ve apparently never played an MMO. They’re like ‘oh, you’ll have this customizable avatar’ and it’s like well, go into La Noscea in Final Fantasy 14 and tell me that this isn’t a solved problem from a decade ago — not some fabulous thing that you’re, you know, inventing”.
The famous game developer mentioned his friendship with science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who was one of the metaverse concept founders.
Newell told that every time he meets Stephenson now – the author just reacting with a facepalm on any other new metaverse story.
President at Valve also highlighted that there is a lot of get-rich-quick schemes around the metaverse. But he doesn’t see any potential in the metaverse now in terms of practical applications.
“It will be interesting to see if anybody who’s sort of coming to the party late has much to add rather than a desire to have a whole bunch of people give them a bunch of money for magic reasons. But you know in the end, customers and useful technology win out, so I’m not super worried about that”, – Newell summed up.
Sources: The Gamer