Microsoft’s $69B Activision Blizzard Buy Begs the Question: Is the Metaverse Gaming, Commerce or Escapism?

If you thought Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg renaming the social media giant Meta and calling the metaverse its future was big, how about Microsoft shelling out almost $68.7 billion for gaming giant Activision Blizzard?

“This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft’s gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse,” the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant said in their Tuesday (Jan. 18) announcement.

In all likelihood, the move will also accelerate the growth of a Microsoft versus Facebook feud.

Short- to medium-term, the deal adds to Microsoft’s own very substantial foothold in the gaming world as maker of the Xbox. The acquisition raises the possibility of a console-based metaverse — which actually makes a fair bit of sense.

To be the truly immersive experience its promoters and believers promise, the metaverse will have to be a 3D environment — which is something that’s largely available only on gaming platforms like the Xbox and Sony PlayStation at the moment.

Beyond Gaming

The gaming industry is certainly interested in metaverses. MMO games like Fortnite and Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (WoW) are a good approximation of a two-dimensional metaverse. Players don’t only kill monsters; they spend hours making and selling goods for in-game currency (and at the risk of a WoW ban, for real money), form coalitions — guilds in WoW — and work long hours for outfits and mounts that do nothing but look good.

In the NFT-based Axie Infinity game world, one of the main points is to create goods that can be sold in-game or on NFT marketplaces for real money. It’s part of a bigger gaming trend called “play-to-earn.”

As for Fortnite, its CEO has essentially said outright that the game world is expanding to create a metaverse with a very large game inside it. Events like the Travis Scott concert, which drew a staggering 10 million attendees, are a clear sign of its ambitions.

See also: What’s a Metaverse, and Why is One Having a Fashion Show?

Notably from a metaverse expansion perspective, Microsoft also owns Minecraft, the highly pixelated, hugely popular gaming world which already has a fair number of aspects of a metaverse. After all, there is a game component, but it’s an open world in which people simply build stuff from the Legolike building block for its own sake: Massive castles, whole cities, even rudimentary but working computers.

All that said, the metaverse isn’t about gaming, at least in the WoW-Fortnite sense.

Rather, gaming has a place in the metaverse, under a slightly different name: Gamification, the process of adding game-design elements to commerce, the workplace and other business-related activities to influence and motivate customers and employees.

Thus, we see things like Nike dropping limited edition NFT sneakers, or Gucci issuing limited-edition virtual bags that outsell their real-world counterparts. A brand makes its goods more desirable through marketing and scarcity, set an in-metaverse economy, and get people — potential customers — to compete for them.

More like this: PYMNTS NFT Series: In the Metaverse, NFTs Can Buy Experiences, Luxury and Eyeballs

Similarly, Samsung set up a pop-up store in Decentraland’s metaverse that coincides with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), with the store offering a game in one room and a new products pavilion in another.

Read here: Samsung Welcomes Users to Its Metaverse at CES 2022

Getting Away From It All

If you look at literature that defined the metaverse, from the seminal cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash” to Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of “Ready Player One,” the metaverse is a place to escape from reality by living another, semi-fantasy life — one where you’re better looking, more athletic, more successful and can forget about your dreary life and dead-end job — as well as a place for some people to be very successful creating that world and selling the necessities of virtual life.

Read also: Metaverse Land Prices Mirror Real-World Real Estate as Investors Flock to Virtual Worlds

The hero of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” which coined the term metaverse, is a failed software designer who helped create the Metaverse but has no wealth or fame from it. Hiro Protagonist (no, seriously) lives in a shipping container development, delivers pizza for the mafia in an armored car, and spends his off-hours in the Metaverse, where he is the greatest swordsman in the world (having written the early code…).

It’s escapism. That’s why metaverses like Decentraland already has neighborhoods like Fashion Street, Crypto Valley and Museum District organized around plazas. There’s an area for casino games, a university and a gaming-style battleground.

Yes, But…

Still, none of the hype really talks about the reality of a virtual reality world. Social media has already proven quite clearly that if you give people a forum where they can speak to the world anonymously, bad behavior ranging from trolling and harassment to hatred is enabled and given a platform.

What would happen in a virtual world with social media’s lightly regulated social guidelines?

Particularly of interest will be blockchain-based metaverses like Decentraland and The Sandbox, which will use decentralized finance’s governing tool — the DAO — to set rules and manage problems.

See more: PYMNTS DeFi Series: Unpacking DeFi and DAO

As a possible glimpse into the future, look at Minecraft’s open world.

In 2014, Denmark built a virtual Denmark as a teaching tool, which American gamers promptly invaded and set on fire before raising the Stars and Stripes.