Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, in a talk at South by Southwest conference in Texas, doesn’t believe that Facebook has the right direction for the metaverse. Despite Facebook’s parent company Meta focusing almost solely on the metaverse, a virtual reality network of persistent worlds, the current non-executive director for Brunswick Corp. and Spin Master Inc. thinks that the concept is better developed elsewhere.
Why Facebook’s vision for the metaverse doesn’t impress Reggie Fils-Aime
While speaking with Bloomberg‘s Emily Chang about the future of entertainment, Fils-Aime would rather see games like Fortnite and Roblox spearhead the effort for the metaverse which more naturally combines all types of people interacting with one another in a digital space.
In opposition, he believes that Facebook is not an “innovative company,” stating that “they have either acquired interesting things like Oculus, like Instagram, or they’ve been a fast follower of people’s ideas.” Thus, Facebook’s approach to the metaverse is faulty, he reasons:
“I’m not a buyer of that idea. I don’t think that their current definition is going to be successful.”
Then to reiterate his opinion, to ensure that he wasn’t mincing words, he offered a tweet that states that he is “bullish on @FortniteGame and @Roblox pushing the metaverse concept – not @Meta, not @Facebook.”
Fils-Aime’s stance falls in line with Nintendo’s current thinking on the metaverse, as laid out in a translated Q&A summary in a financial results briefing in mid-February:
“When the concept of the metaverse is introduced in the media, games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons are sometimes brought up as examples. In that sense, the metaverse is of interest to us.
But at this point in time, there is no easy way to define specifically what kinds of surprises and enjoyment the metaverse can deliver to our consumers… We might consider something if we can find a way to convey a ‘Nintendo approach’ to the metaverse that many people can readily understand, but we do not think that is the situation at the present time.”
In other news, fans are angry at Square Enix over the microtransactions in Chocobo GP, and both Microsoft and EA oppose the anti-trans legislation in Texas.
