Microsoft fleshes out metaverse ambitions

The computing giant and Xbox maker Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard showed how it believed gaming and game-building capabilities would not only be important for the metaverse, but to cement Microsoft’s specific place in it.

Why it matters

Microsoft sits in an interesting position in the world of big tech. It’s less about pivots toward different ideas and much more focussed on an often-discussed idea of “tech intensity”.

This is important for an idea such as the metaverse, which no one company will build, and will likely be a parallel process of building and adoption. Software tools are key to this.

Why does this matter to marketers? Building out game development capabilities either at an agency or brand level is going to be seriously expensive. Should Microsoft succeed in its plan to “democratise game building” as CEO Satya Nadella explains to the FT, the potential for these experiences gets a little closer.

The ambitions

• Despite its largely theoretical nature, Nadella is much clearer. “Metaverse is essentially about creating games”, he says. “Just being great at game building gives us the permission to build this next platform, which is essentially the next internet: the embodied presence”.
• It’s a similar presence that has made physical workplaces so important, he continues, it’s just that now in a hybrid working world remote participants’ expectations of their collaboration experience has changed. “They’re not going to be second class. They want a first class experience”.
• But a critical question about whether the metaverse is going to be a glorified game or the next phase of The Internet is whether anybody can figure out how the different spaces link together: the embodied internet’s version of the hyperlink. Microsoft is thinking about this as a “syndication of identity”, the mechanism of deploying one identity across different spaces.

Big idea

Though Facebook’s name change to Meta has fused it to the idea, the building of this next phase will be shared between big tech, smaller firms, and users. For more details on how to engage with the ideas and think about pitfalls, check out In this metaverse or the next on WARC.

Sourced from WARC, Financial Times