Nintendo’s Nicest Ex-Prez: Facebook’s Metaverse Sucks

Meta (previously Facebook) would possibly need to placed on a VR headset and spend eternity within the metaverse as a result of the corporate received’t need to present its face after a former Nintendo government dressed the corporate down this weekend.

Former Nintendo of America COO and president Reggie Fils-Aimé took a second at this yr’s South by Southwest (SXSW) to rag on Meta and supply us with some not-so-favorable projections about the place the corporate is heading. When requested concerning the tech big, Fils-Aimé bluntly mentioned it was “not an innovative company.”

“I don’t think that their current definition [of the metaverse] is going to be successful,” Fils-Aimé told Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang at SXSW. “You have to admit that Facebook itself is not an innovative company. They have either acquired really interesting things, like Oculus, like Instagram, or they’ve been a fast follower of other people’s ideas. Inherently, they are not an innovative company other than the very original social platform that was created many years ago.”

Oculus, bought by Meta (previously Facebook) in 2014, is the main maker of digital actuality {hardware}, and its Quest 2 headset is extensively thought of one of the best product of its variety. Strong gross sales figures and glowing critiques are encouraging indicators for Meta’s imaginative and prescient, however its rocky historical past with {hardware} launches makes Fils-Aimé doubt whether or not these early successes will proceed as different opponents enter the market. He claims the Facebook Portal “wasn’t a big idea” and says the 20 million or so VR headsets offered so far would have been a superb single-year gross sales determine throughout his time at Nintendo.

“The last number I saw was that, in total—and not just Oculus—in total, about 20 million VR devices have been sold,” he mentioned. “When I was running Nintendo, that was a good year, one year, in terms of hardware sell-through.”

While the previous Nintendo government believes the metaverse will grow to be a bigger a part of our lives—and says some parts exist already (citing Fortnite and Roblox)—Fils-Aimé doesn’t suppose Meta shall be main the way in which. He says that to be with a view to be modern, firms must prioritize clients and convey recent concepts into {the marketplace}, however that as an alternative of doing so, Meta has put advert income above all else.

Fils-Aimé mentioned he favors augmented actuality over digital actuality when requested about what gadgets we’ll be utilizing sooner or later. The ultimate product, in his eyes, is a light-weight set of glasses that allow you to work together with a “digital experience,” one thing the previous exec finds extra compelling than a cumbersome VR headset.