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Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft\u2019s gaming company Xbox is optimistic about the Metaverse but remains \u201ccautious\u201d about play-to-earn (P2E) crypto games due to its economic and speculative aspects. <\/p>\n
Speaking with Bloomberg anchor Emily Chang on Aug. 25, Spencer suggested<\/a> that while many gamers are not yet sold on the current concept of a Metaverse, according to his definition, they have essentially been playing in Metaverse worlds for decades: <\/p>\n \u201cMy view on Metaverse is that gamers have been in the Metaverse for 30 years. When you\u2019re playing games, if you\u2019re playing a World of Warcraft game, you\u2019re playing in Roblox, you\u2019re playing in a racing game where everybody\u2019s in a shared world.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n In Spencer\u2019s view, the Metaverse is essentially a \u201c3D shared world\u201d in which people can freely communicate with each other and engage in shared experiences and common purposes. <\/p>\n \u201cIt’s not at all surprising to me that gamers might look at Metaverse and think well I don\u2019t 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,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Spencer\u2019s sentiments echo that of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella<\/a>, who after telling Bloomberg in November that people could \u201cabsolutely expect\u201d the firm to make moves in Metaverse gaming, noted that: <\/p>\n \u201cIf you take Halo as a game, it is a Metaverse. Minecraft is a Metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they\u2019re 2D today and the question is can you now take that to a fully 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Spencer however did not address more contentious issues in the Metaverse, such as the concept of owning virtual Metaverse property through NFTs. Crypto proponent<\/a> and billionaire investor Mark Cuban recently slammed<\/a> virtual property investment as \u201cthe dumbest s— ever\u201d due to an apparent lack of utility and scarcity. <\/p>\n The Xbox head instead went on to add that commercial usage of the Metaverse space has continued to pique\u00a0the interest of Microsoft<\/a> and CEO Nadella as of late. <\/p>\n \u201cBut 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,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n The Xbox head spoke in much more tentative terms over blockchain-based P2E games however. <\/p>\n While Spencer admitted that monetization in games has been around for years, he holds concerns about<\/a> games being primarily built around \u201cmenial tasks\u201d to accrue digital currency. <\/p>\n \u201cPlay-to-earn specifically is something I\u2019m cautious about. It creates a worker force out of players, for certain players to kind of monetize.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cNow 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 \u2014 we said we don\u2019t want that,\u201d he added. <\/p>\nCautious about P2E<\/h3>\n