Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg obviously wants everyone to be on the metaverse sooner or later, even if industry bigwigs have second thoughts about the concept (in its current form) or naming.

During Meta’s earnings call around results for Q3 2022, Zuckerberg addressed metaverse doubters. “Look, I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment, but from what I can tell, I think this is going to be a very important thing. People will look back a decade from now and talk about the importance of the work being done here,” he said.

Zuckerberg is talking about a decade here but for investors that could be a long time while user attention span may not be that long. Meta’s Reality Labs division lost $3.7 billion this last quarter compared with $2.6 billion a year earlier. “We do anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year,” Meta said in its earnings press release.

Meanwhile, Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s CEO of gaming, has taken a shot at Meta’s vision of the metaverse. At the WSJ Tech Live he was asked about the concept and he simply said it’s “a poorly built video game”. He continued: “When I think of video games, for years we have been putting people together in 3D spaces to go and save the world from invading aliens or conquer the castle. Building a metaverse that looks like a meeting room… I find that’s it’s not a place where I would spend most of my time.”

Equally discouraging has been Snap CEO Evan Spiegel who has defined the metaverse as “living inside a computer” at WSJ Tech Live. He added: “The last thing I want to do when I get home from work at the end of a long day is live inside a computer.”

At the same conference, Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak said that the metaverse is “a word I’ll never use.”