$2000 bn – that’s the story
We have shown that the gaming industry is a $200bn industry predicted to top $500bn in the next 5 years. This exposes the real story behind the “Mateverse”. Greed. The huge tech giants in Silcon Valley see flat lining revenues in their world of devices and apps and have decided that the 3bn gamers and all their money is an appropriate target.
The positive way to spin this is lets take all this potential and open it up to “normal” people and turn $500bn into $2000bn. That differential is why Microsoft, Facebook and others are snapping up gaming companies as looked at this way they are cheap to buy.
If you love gaming, the idea of the perfect 16k metaverse with superb alternative realities is a dream come true. You spend on averge 9 hours a week online, some as much as 12 -20 hours. Gaming as an industry clearly works, and provides fulfilling entertainment for billions. Talking to gamers I was constantly told, the smaller companies are the most innovative and produce the best games. As big commercial organisations buy them up we fear that real gaming will suffer.
Roblox one of the top gaming/metaverse players claims 60m active daily users, 13bn hours used and 3.5 m creators. Its almost all gaming but thats a lot of users and hours! But diving in its full of really basic games, and the figures given do not seem to match the users for the games which are often as low as 3! The graphics quality is primitive cartoon Mario style. The images below give you an idea of the real versus the hype.
What about those that do not play games? Can the gaming industry be “opened” up for the other 4bn humans on planet earth?
Thats the $1500bn question
I asked Bings AI other than gaming what value has the metaverse for me. She seemed to get a bit miffed and said well doctors and patients can use it to visualise their illness? Seriously? My follow up question was this is a tiny number of humans what about the rest? Reply, well I am convinced all humans can benefit…hmmm
4bn Humans – Who are they?
In the TV series Peripheral one of the people who benefitted from living in a virtual world was a US Army veteran who lost his legs in a bomb attack, There are an estimated 1.3bn disabled people world wide who may benefit from the virtual world ability to be free of their disability for a while, particularly in socialising. Of course they may not, and I am not sure if any real serious research has been done.
There are an estimated 1bn elderly who may benefit from metaverse allowing them to do things they can no longer do, or things that they always wanted to. Climb Everest, fly a plane, walk to the North pole. Again no serious research just a hope at this point.
The rest of the 4bn is us. Normal people who work and play in the real world. We do use a screen to watch entertainment and if the benefit was shown might move towards a more real experience. Certainly we love high resolution and 4k is better than HD. Instead of flying 3000 miles we might join a conference or meeting in virtual space, after all we have all got used to Zoom.
Conferencing
Back to the real world. Conferencing is a bit of virtual we know something about with real figures. Zoom, Microsofft Teams and Google Meet are ways in which mainstream business technology has tried to create an app to reduce physical presence, cut carbon footprint and air miles.
During Covid Zoom grew to be the worlds way to talk to their family and friends. Fortune Business says that this is a $6bn industry with around 1.5bn a month using conferencing of some form. This is massively exceeded by chat apps with 5bn users on Whatsapp, weChat, and Messenger. Its estimated that the chat market is valued at less than $1bn, however the rise of chatbots is interesting with an estimated value of $102bn by 2026.
The advantage of Zoom and others is its really you, so your expressions can be seen by others. We have found it great for family and group meetings when it was impossible to get together. But going back to a previous article about a VR trip down Nice France promenade, it a sterile kind of environment, and as soon as our religious group for example could meet in physical form again we did, and found the experience so much more rewarding.
My old computer sales mentor told me, shake their hand, look in their eyes and when you see them sold stop immediately and thank them. Hard to do that in VR!