The Father of PlayStation Doesn’t Like Metaverse or VR Headsets

As the idea of the metaverse — bringing together different gaming worlds and economies under one cohesive secured virtual umbrella — crystalizes in the collective consciousness of gamers, one of the best-known figures in the industry has come out against it.

• In an interview with Bloomberg, PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi called the metaverse “isolating” and VR headsets “annoying”.

• “Being in the real world is very important, but the metaverse is about making quasi-real in the virtual world, and I can’t see the point of doing it,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. “You would rather be a polished avatar instead of your real self? That’s essentially no different from anonymous message board sites.”

• Sony has struggled with VR headset sales, selling around 5 million headsets, or an attachment rate of around 4% to the PlayStation 4 since the launch of the PSVR in 2017 suggesting that console gamers are lukewarm to the idea of VR.

• “Headsets would isolate you from the real world, and I can’t agree with that,” Kutaragi said. “Headsets are simply annoying.”

• At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Sony announced that a VR headset for the PS5 is in the works. On the other hand, Microsoft has said that “VR for console is not a focus for us at this time,” dismissing the idea of a VR headset for the Xbox.

• John Carmack, the creator of Doom and CTO of VR headset maker Oculus (which was purchased by Meta, then Facebook, in 2014), is also a skeptic of the current iteration of the metaverse.

• "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse," he said in an October keynote, adding that he doesn’t believe there will be a totally open crypto economy in Meta’s version of it.

• In a recent note, technology research house IDC said that while the metaverse concept will have real-world technology implications today’s hype is “overblown” and everything is still years away.

Read more: A Crypto Guide to the Metaverse