It’s easy to take delight in the schadenfreude of one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world taking L after L—especially when they’re attempting to create something that seems like a ludicrous pipe dream at best and an absolute waste of time, money, and resources at worst.

However, the truth is the metaverse is inevitable. Not only that but, in many ways, it’s already here—and has been here for decades.

Even Neal Stephenson, who first coined the term metaverse in his 1992 book Snow Crash to describe a fictional virtual reality world, has alluded to this. In a tweet from June, he said that when he first came up with the term, he didn’t conceive of the fact that a metaverse might not be through VR—but then came along a video game called Doom.

Stephenson touched on a key component of any successful metaverse that many folks within the web3 (a term used to describe the next evolution of the world wide web) and metaverse space tend to miss: video games—or even just gaming in general.

“It’s not so much that the metaverse is the future of games. The future of the metaverse is games,” Jon Radoff, the writer of the Building the Metaverse blog and founder of metaverse consulting firm Beamable, told The Daily Beast. “Games are going to be what the metaverse is all about.”

What do you think is the future of the metaverse? Will Mark Zuckerberg's vision become reality?