Cody McGrath 
Phil Spencer says “gamers have been in the Metaverse for 30 years” since games offer 3D shared environments.
Although Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft’s Xbox division, is upbeat about the Metaverse, he is “conservative” about play-to-earn (P2E) cryptocurrency games because of their speculative and economic elements.
Although many gamers are not yet convinced by the idea of a Metaverse, according to Spencer’s definition, they have effectively been playing in Metaverse worlds for decades: Spencer made this claim in an interview with Bloomberg anchor Emily Chang on August 25.
“My view on Metaverse is that gamers have been in the Metaverse for 30 years. When you’re playing games, if you’re playing a World of Warcraft game, you’re playing in Roblox, you’re playing in a racing game where everybody’s in a shared world.”
According to Spencer, the Metaverse is essentially a “3D shared environment” where people are free to interact with one another, exchange experiences, and pursue shared goals.
“It’s not at all surprising to me that gamers might look at Metaverse and think well I don’t really get it because we already have an avatar of myself and I can already go into a shared world and I can already sit there and have voice conversations with people anywhere,” he said.
Spencer’s views coincide with those of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who highlighted the following after telling Bloomberg in November that consumers could “definitely expect” the company to enter into Metaverse gaming:
“If you take Halo as a game, it is a Metaverse. Minecraft is a Metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they’re 2D today and the question is can you now take that to a fully 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so.”
The idea of owning virtual Metaverse property through NFTs, for example, is one of the most divisive problems in the Metaverse that Spencer chose not to address. Due to its apparent lack of utility and scarcity, crypto proponent and billionaire investor Mark Cuban recently called virtual property investments “the dumbest s—- ever.”
Instead, the Xbox head went on to say that Microsoft and CEO Nadella had recently been more interested in the commercial use of the Metaverse domain.
“But I do think the skills that we have as game designers and game creators make a ton of sense in a lot of enterprise experiences. And this is why Satya gets excited about it,” he said.
Concerned about P2E
However, the Xbox boss was far more circumspect when discussing P2E games built on the blockchain.
Spencer acknowledged that game monetization has been for some time, but he is concerned that some games are primarily designed around completing “menial activities” to get virtual currency.
“Play-to-earn specifically is something I’m cautious about. It creates a worker force out of players, for certain players to kind of monetize.”
“Now you find games that are starting to build that into the economy of the game itself. We made some comments in Minecraft about how we view NFTs in this space because we people are doing things that we thought were exploitative in our product — we said we don’t want that,” he added.
However, he didn’t fully dismiss the idea of play-to-earn, acknowledging that there might be some intriguing use cases that emerge in this field.
“I think sometimes it’s a hammer looking for a nail when these technologies come up. But the actual human use — or player use, in our case — of these technologies, I think there could be some interesting things,” he said.