Google searches on the term “metaverse” have increased 50x in the last month. Microsoft have announced their metaverse vision for team collaboration. And Facebook outlined their vision for a social metaverse by literally renaming to Meta.
But what is the metaverse, and why should we care?
In the words of venture capitalist Matthew Ball, author of the extensive Metaverse Primer: “The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.”
It is a new version, or vision, of the internet, where people can communicate, create, explore, work and share with other people without the need for physical presence. If you’ve seen or read Ready Player One you’ll get the idea.
These new worlds are built upon a new digital infrastructure, powered by VR/MR, but also facilitated by new ownership mechanisms brought by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain and crypto.
This vision of the future might be hard to grasp, but there is a place where billions of people are already engaging in behaviour pretty similar to this envisioned future – in gaming.
Gaming is a global $180B dollar industry, bigger than music ($23B) and movie box office ($43B before the pandemic crash) combined. But it’s also an area that non-gamers have a huge blindspot towards, and where change is already afoot.
Funding into blockchain gaming companies has already reached $2.3B in 2021, up 60x since last year. This has mainly been driven by investment info NFT gaming companies.
Discover 250+ startups and companies around NFTs, including 80+ NFT gaming ones.
