Former Nintendo of America President Says Smaller Companies, Not Facebook Will Advance Metaverse

Reggie Fils-Aime, a gaming industry veteran and former president and chief operating officer of Nintendo of America, has reservations about the metaverse, Bloomberg wrote Saturday (March 12).

He compared it to the cloud five years ago and the internet when it was starting to catch on, as it seems that every company is now trying to get in on the metaverse.

Speaking at the South by Southwest event in Austin, Texas, on Saturday, he said Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is not likely to be the main innovator — instead, smaller companies that are “really innovating” will probably do it. He called Epic Games one of the companies doing so.

“Facebook itself is not an innovative company,” Fils-Aime said. “They have either acquired interesting things like Oculus and Instagram, or they’ve been a fast follower of people’s ideas. I don’t think their current definition will be successful.”

Fils-Aime also pointed to Microsoft’s recent bid for Activision Blizzard, calling it a “fantastic purchase.”

A long-term gaming executive, Fils-Aime also said there could be more consolidation coming, with more smaller firms now going through seed or funding rounds. He also pointed to TakeTwo Interactive Software’s acquisition of Zynga and Microsoft’s recent bid for Activision Blizzard, which he called a “fantastic purchase.”

See also: Microsoft to Buy Activision Blizzard for $75B, CEO Expected to Step Down

Fils-Aime, whose Haitian parents fled the Duvalier regime in the country before settling in New York, also said the gaming industry wasn’t succeeding as well as it could at addressing diversity problems.

“This is a global industry touching 3 billion people across the world; it’s a $200 billion business,” Fils-Aime said. “The representation in the game and in leadership is not at all where it needs to be.”

PYMNTS recently wrote that retail interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as well as the metaverse in general, hasn’t been doing so well.

Related: Retail Investor Interest in NFTs, Metaverse Lowest Since October, Report Says

NFTs were a hot product in 2021, but Google Trends search data indicates that both NFTs and the metaverse, which got popular last October when Facebook changed its name to Meta and began focusing more on that aspect of its business, have been trending down.