'The Metaverse is ours to lose,' he argued in the memo, obtained by CNBC. Exec Jason Rubin, a game industry veteran of almost 40 years who now leads Metaverse Content for Meta, wrote in 2018 that 'the right way to break through consumer indifference to VR' was to deliver an all-encompassing, 'fully baked' metaverse.But in the years since, VR has failed to take off with mainstream consumers, despite Meta's massive financial investments in the space. The earliest sign that Zuckerberg and his leadership team were plotting for a post-mobile future was the Oculus acquisition in 2014. Oculus is evidence that money alone can't usher in new paradigms. Whether it's just one, a handful or even many companies that end up owning the future of computing, it seems incredibly unlikely it will be a place marked by corporate harmony and social bliss. Say whatever you like about Ernest Cline's 'Ready Player One,' but the novel mapped the contours of the tech history alarmingly well when it forecasted a dystopian metaverse created by a game developer who ultimately wanted nothing to do with it.But Zuckerberg's call for interoperability and improved universal standards feels hollow and impractical, and his answers on the subject haven't inspired confidence that the metaverse of tomorrow will be much different than the internet of today, especially when Meta appears to be betting its entire financial future on reaping profits from it.Much of this vision hinges on Zuckerberg's insistence that this new internet being built will be a better, healthier, more privacy-minded space than the internet now controlled by a small handful of gigantic corporations.But now the company wants to architect a future where it stays dominant, and in very public fashion, too. Meta itself is a benefactor of this historic happenstance, having ridden an early wave as a college dating site. Many of the biggest advancements in technology have happened by accident, through a confluence of luck, good timing and unforeseen consequences. Meta has a bold vision, but it doesn't exist yet. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg made clear, underneath the euphemisms, that his ambitions are to own as much as possible of what he sees as the newest frontier poised to replace the smartphone as our primary mode of communication, play, work and online expression. It's starting with a rebrand, from Facebook to Meta.

The social networking giant shed its trappings as a stodgy tech firm and instead embraced a new identity marked by a fusion of next-gen computing, optical hardware, futuristic gaming and all the social and commerce components threaded in between. The flag-planting keynote delivered by Meta, née Facebook, last week was a major turning point for the metaverse movement, and one we'll remember for years to come. Meta wants to own the metaverse, but it's still anyone's game

New meta game