Virtual Platforms and the Metaverse
For the foreseeable future, most of us will interface with the budding Metaverse via consumer-facing, interactive and immersive virtual platforms. These will be accessible from a variety of devices, such as a web browser and VR headset, and it‘s here that we’ll hangout, buy things and show them off, collaborate and build, learn and perform, work and relax, consume in and experience the Metaverse. Today, the most popular virtual platforms are Roblox and Minecraft, and, to a lesser extent, Grand Theft Auto Online and Fortnite Creative Mode (as theyre just a subset of their master games). And just as the leading indicators of the mobile internet were smartphone penetration and usage, alongside the number of app developers and their total revenues, the growth of these virtual platforms is easy to track: total active users and engagement, as well as total active-user spending, and developer revenues. All of these are way up over the past decade — and, at least thus far, sustainably so post-pandemic. It‘s no coincidence that all of the leading virtual platforms today originated in gaming. Games have long been the most complex, scaled, and diverse simulations, as no other consumer-grade experience required a comparable amount of computing power. And