Valve’s (Steam) boss, gaming legend Gabe Newell, is launching a broadside against new trends like NFT or the Metaverse. Most people talking about the Metaverse right now have no clue, says the head of Steam. They probably never played an MMO.
This is the situation:
- Gabe Newell is somewhat like the “father of modern PC gaming”. He is an iconic game developer and entrepreneur who developed “Steam”, the dominant PC platform of our time.
- In recent years, there have been some tech trends like “the Metaverse”, about which most gamers are not quite sure what it actually is and why it is so great. The Metaverse seems to be envisioned as “a virtual universe where people and companies are visually represented and interact and conduct business together.”
- Newell is now commenting on this trend in the context of the presentation of the “Steam Deck” : “Metaverse”. For him, it’s old news.
Ideas that promote the “Metaverse” have existed for decades in MMOs
This is what Newell says about the Metaverse: In an interview with PCGamer, he views the current discussion about the Metaverse critically. According to him, there are some “get-rich-quick” schemes regarding the Metaverse. For him as an MMO player, this is nothing new:
“Most people talking about the Metaverse have absolutely no idea what they are actually talking about. And they apparently have never played an MMO. They say things like: “Oh, you have these customizable avatars!” And I think to myself: Go to La Noscea in Final Fantasy XIV and tell me that this isn’t a problem that was solved a decade ago. This is not some great new thing that you are inventing fresh.”
Gabe Newell
Moreover, science fiction authors have already dealt with the idea of a Metaverse decades ago. Newell says he is a friend of the author Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash). He is someone who today is considered one of the fathers of cyberspace along with William Gibson (Necromancer).
Whenever Newell meets Stephenson today, he gets upset about the latest silly “Metaverse” story. Today’s tech companies do not understand that the idea of a “Metaverse” was depicted as dangerous in the novels back then.
New Metaverse fans arrive “too late to the party” but bring investors with them
Is a Metaverse coming? Newell is rather optimistic about it: He believes they will manage to do it. However, many Metaverse fans are probably just late:
“Obviously, the gaming industry has been researching these techniques for a long time. It is interesting to see how people are now behaving who are so late to the party and to see what they will bring besides people who want to give them a lot of money for some magical reason. But in the end, a useful technology will prevail, so I’m not too worried about that.”
MMO fans find it hard to see more in the “Metaverse” than “Second Life”
What’s behind it: Gabe Newell explains here why gamers find it so hard to understand the “special” aspects of the idea of a Metaverse. After all, the vision ultimately sounds quite a bit like an MMO that refers to the real business world, similar to Second Life.
If someone explains to you the fantastic idea that you could play an avatar in the “Metaverse” and customize it personally, you as an MMO player just shrug your shoulders. We have been doing that for decades and call it “character creation”.
The current trend in gaming is mainly about the opportunity to make money:
NFT is the new trend in gaming in 2021, companies are worth billions $ – But why?
