I woke up this morning groggy and turned on my news app.

I then I was immediately wide awake.
For the second link was this one:

Microsoft Makes a USD 69B Gaming & Metaverse Bet

WHAT?!

Jumped out of bed... wide awake... holy hell...

As a kid, Blizzard was my favorite game company by a huge margin. I discovered them randomly in some random computer store (back when those existed). In the games section, separated by MAC and PC (because no way in hell were those two things ever gonna be compatible).

_{I still have the original box and manual, which is badass and crazy high quality.}

On the shelf sat both Warcraft and Warcraft 2. I thought, "Hm, this looks interesting, I should buy one of them." I figured I'd buy Warcraft 1 first to see if I liked it because it was $30 and Warcraft 2 was $50 (oops, big mistake). I took Warcraft 1 home and tried it out. I liked it, but it was very difficult to play. The controls were tough and some of the missions required you to kill every single baddy on the map (which might take 10 minutes after you had already won). You could also only select 4 units at a time, and you could only build next to roads (which cost gold to make) which made base management pretty weird and condensed.

A couple years ago I actually tried to play Warcraft 1/2/3 all in succession. I couldn't force myself to play Warcraft 1 again, the controls are just too terrible and the game mechanics way too archaic. I did make it through Warcraft 2 and 3 though. Takes a while, but we stoner gamers have nothing but time, amirite?

Sexy.

In any case, I was very much hooked to Blizzard games ever since Warcraft 1. I've bought and played them all. Warcraft 1/2/3, Diablo 1/2/3, WOW, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Starcraft 1/2, HOTS, all the things. So I was shocked when Blizzard allowed themselves to be bought by Activision, and even more shocked today that Activision/Blizzard is allowing themselves to be bought by Microsoft themselves.

It's all about resources & profit sharing.

Why allow your super profitable company to be sold to a bigger company? Money! DUH! Let's say if you want to scale up your operations, but you need billions of dollars to do it... how are you gonna get the money? Apply for a loan? Lawls.

At the end of the day corporations make razor thin profit margins compared to total overhead cost, so the amount of money it takes to scale up is often WAY MORE than they can make in profits over a short period of time. Often better to just bite the bullet and bow down to some other agent with a shit-ton more money than you.

Corporations of this size get bloated.

When Activision bought Blizzard, it was pretty much all downhill from there. Blizzard was already becoming too corporate and ridiculous, and it got exponentially worse. I have to assume that this Microsoft acquisition is going to make the problem even worse.

I blame World of Warcraft!

Great game! Ruined my life! You haven't lived until you've played WOW 16 hours a day for a month straight, baby! Longer than a month? Who's counting? Not me! Easily over 10,000 hours played of that game; enough time to master two different instruments :D

I never thought my gaming mastery would ever get me anywhere, but here we are with gaming as the next frontier of crypto, so yeah, all those hours I put into WOW probably gonna pay off somewhere in the six figures range. I'll take it.

The thing that really sucks about Blizzard (and all corporations really) is that they are greedy little goblins that incessantly try to control everything. If they see you selling World of Warcraft gold, you are banned. You don't own that property, you rent it from Blizzard. You don't own your account. Anyone who has tried to make money playing video games knows this.

That's why when I see this Microsoft acquisition and supposed "METAVERSE" play... I just can't help but laugh. Who do these assholes think they are going to fool? Ah probably a lot, but not me. The inherent nature of crypto and WEB3 and the metaverse and everything else runs totally contrary to the entire environment BIG TECH is used to. They aren't going to be able to maneuver well in this new realm.

"This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft’s gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse."

Come check out our bitchen metaverse!

Proving once again that none of these people even know what Metaverse even means. Facebook can't build the Metaverse. Microsoft can't build the Metaverse. If anyone tells you they are building a Metaverse they are totally 100% full of shit.

Again, the Metaverse is basically THE INTERNET. No one can build or capture the Internet. The Internet is bigger than everyone. That's what the Metaverse is. These fake ass 'metaverses' big companies like Facebook and Microsoft are talking about are intranet/extranets. They are trying to do "Enterprise Blockchain" all over again like total know-nothing dipshits. It's going to fail, just like it always has in the past.

And this is all incredible news.

Companies like Facebook and Microsoft and Blizzard and whoever else are going to be training developers. They're going to be building modules and codebases that can't be patented. They're training a workforce that's going to jump ship the second the real Metaverse pays them more money. We've already seen this happen with Enterprise Blockchain, and it's happening again now. Fabulous!

Again, think back to torrents and entertainment. It took over a decade for the industry to pivot and recover from that "disaster", and they are still scooping far less a percentage of the revenue than they were before (which is fine because the total pie is way bigger).

How will I know the Metaverse when I see it?

It's quite simple really. The only valid and scalable projects are going to be the ones owned and developed by the community itself. If a corporation owns it, it's garbage. If the community can't help develop the game and mint NFTs to represent that ownership, again, it's hammered dog shit. There is no other way around this fact.

Think about it...

How could a corporation ever compete with a community? How can developers who hate their job compete with creative enthusiasts who enjoy doing what they are doing? How can 100 employees compete with a million fanatics? This is the future of gaming, crypto, and the Metaverse in general. Community run, community owned. If it's not that, it's going to fail. Guaranteed.

These corporations are trying to carve out their corner of the market, but the market has no corners. This infinite borderless digital landscape is not going to suffer the same walled gardens we saw in WEB2. So many patents are being created, and none of them are going to be respected in a borderless digital world. IP is a thing of the past, and corporations haven't gotten the memo yet.

I guarantee they learn the hard way.

They can't seem to see the writing on the wall.

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