Microsoft Plans Gaming Metaverse

Microsoft is making its own play in the metaverse with an eye toward gaming.

The company, which is just ahead of Apple for largest market cap in the world at $2.5 trillion, announced an integration with its office-focused Microsoft Teams software and metaverse platform Mesh. 

Launched in March, Mesh creates virtual environments that people can move through as avatars and interact with “shared holographic experiences.” The integration with Teams seeks to create a virtual office, complete with Microsoft’s productivity tools.

A Mesh gaming experience may be next. 

“You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming,” CEO Satya Nadella told Bloomberg. 

“If you take ‘Halo’ as a game, it is a metaverse,” he explained. “‘Minecraft’ is a metaverse, and so is ‘Flight Sim.’ In some sense, they are 2D today, but the question is, can you now take that to a full 3D world? And so we absolutely plan to do so.”

• Microsoft’s Xbox hardware sales grew 166% year-over-year in its fiscal quarter ending Sept. 30.
• Microsoft’s More Personal Computing segment, which includes Xbox, took in $13.3 billion in the quarter, 29.4% of its $45.3 billion total revenue.
• The company last released a VR headset, the HoloLens 2, in November 2019.

This latest chapter in Microsoft’s gaming ambitions comes as it approaches the 20-year anniversary of the first Xbox release on Nov. 15.