Activision Blizzard CEO Says A Ready Player One-Like Metaverse Is Coming

The so-called Metaverse is coming, at least if you ask Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. He told GamesBeat in a new interview that he believes that, thanks to advancements to AR and VR, along with local processing power and distributed processing through the cloud, a legitimate, Ready Player One-like Metaverse might be here before you know it.

"Think back to the '70s and early '80s, people like Ted Nelson were articulating a vision for the meta-verse. Alan Kay, who was at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and then became chief scientist at Atari, had this project called Vivarium in the early 1980s that was the beginnings of the idea of a living, breathing simulation where you would have both the ability of user-generated content and professionally produced content, and that you would have this extremely rich simulation experience that you could live and play and potentially even work," Kotick explained.

For Kotick, he believes one of the most important aspects of the Metaverse will be the "continuous social connection" that it could deliver. To get there, advancements to AR and VR over the next decade, along with other growth in processing power, will allow for a genuine Metaverse to come about.

"I think we're starting to get much closer to the idea of an actual Metaverse where you have, what is the most important thing in my view, this continuous social connection. But when you think about what will happen with AR and VR over the next 10 years, and local processing power and distributed processing capability in the form of streaming, we're going to get to a place where that original vision that Neil Stephenson had in Snow Crash or what you see in Ready Player One is going to start to materialize as something that is very real," he said. "I think we're rapidly progressing towards that as a legitimate mass-market experience."

Activision Blizzard is not alone in its belief that a Metaverse is coming. Fortnite developer Epic Games is looking to create a Metaverse as well, recently raising more than $1 billion, including $200 million from PlayStation, to create a Metaverse. It remains to be seen if such a Metaverse will be used to escape the horrors of the real world or will just be a fun thing to use for video games.