Gabe Newell, the president of Valve Software, isn’t that big on people hyping up the metaverse.
During an interview with PC Gamer, Newell explained that many of the metaverse’s trends that some companies are pushing as an exciting new thing are just old ideas many of us have already seen.
“Most of the people who are talking about metaverse have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. And they’ve apparently never played an MMO,” Newell said. “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.”
As an avid Final Fantasy 14 fan, I can confirm that practically every city-state within the game is more lively than any metaverse demo shown off thus far.
Newell is far from the only games industry veteran that’s not a fan either. Last month, PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi spoke ill of the metaverse, even calling VR headsets “annoying” among other less-than-pleasant things.
The metaverse has been a hot-button topic within the games industry for several months now, and we’ll likely be hearing about it for quite some time to come.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
