On Oct. 18, news broke that Meta Platforms (META -10.56%), which was then called Facebook, planned to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to start building its version of the metaverse. Then on Oct. 28, the company went a step further by announcing its name will no longer be Facebook, but rather Meta Platforms -- an announcement that clearly signals the company's primary priority.
The metaverse is a digital world where people interact and transact just like they do in the real world. And Meta isn't the only company investing in it -- many are. Fool analyst Sanmeet Deo and contributor Jon Quast tackled the subject on Motley Fool Backstage Pass in this clip recorded on Oct. 18, talking about how patient investors might need to be when investing in this concept.
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Jon Quast: For our viewers, I got the name of the company now. It's Niantic. They're a private company. You can't invest in them.
What is interesting about Niantic is they do have a vision for the metaverse, since you brought it up, I want to go this way. And for AR/VR [augmented reality/virtual reality], this kind of thing. One of the things that one of our viewers brought to our attention a few weeks ago was that inside the Pokémon Go app, sometimes they are having their users scan things with their phone. It's hard to overlook that. It seems like the company is definitely trying to build its data base of real-world objects so it can pursue more of their metaverse aspirations.
Since we're talking about metaverse, I did want to share this news, Facebook to create 10,000 European Union jobs over five years with the metaverse in mind. This news, when did this break? Today. That's what I thought.
They're hiring all these people, and it's over the next five years. I think that as we talk about metaverse, you're going to hear a lot about metaverse in coming weeks, months, quarters about these companies talking about metaverse. I think it's going to be very tempting to get too excited about it in the short term. When you realize that these companies, they haven't even hired their staffs yet to build this out over the next five years, right?
I'm actually really bullish on the metaverse concept over the long term. Think 10 years. I think I'm bullish on the metaverse over 10 years. This whole digital world where people are interacting with things in the digital world and they are buying and selling things, in 10 years, I'm very bullish on that. On the next three years, not so much, because we're so early to the game. But you're going to hear a lot of people talking about it Don't get caught up in the buzz of it. Don't rush out and throw everything that you have in a metaverse stock.
However, it is something that is trending a certain direction, and realize that yes, this could be a very big thing over 10, 15 years, maybe not so much over the next six quarters to three years.
Sanmeet Deo: Yes, absolutely. That's where a company like Unity (U -1.06%) is something that I like a lot because you're not just playing the metaverse or AR/VR trend. They do mobile games in general as it stands now. You get more of an optionality for them, which excites me, because with that optionality, it gives them the potential to grow their business from the size they're at now to a much bigger business, which can become a multibagger from now until then if you have a very long-term outlook on things.
