Redfinger | Review 2022 of the Metaverse: Development, Stimulus, Regulations & Future
According to the statistics of Google Trends, compared with the fanaticism at the end of last year, Metaverse’s global influence and topics declined very little. Of course, this is closely related to international politics, economy, the decline of epidemic dividend and other factors.
In fact, there are a series of products like Ready Player ME in the market to show the preference of investors. But at the same time, it cannot be ignored that the metaverse field is also full of failures, even if it is produced by major manufacturers. Mobile, product, investment and regulatory policies can be displayed in the following content, so that you can better understand the trend of metaverse.
Metaverse Digital Identity Craze
Ready Player Me Wolf3D metaverse avatar platform is a good example of well-known products in the industry in 2022. This product paves the way for the development of metaverse and allows people to talk about this concept frequently. Ziva Dynamics, a company specializing in digital identity, also invested this year. In January 2022, Unity officially announced the acquisition of Ziva Dynamics.
This phenomenon is also related to the prosperity of digital commodity culture. A report on global digital fashion in the Web 3.0 era released by Virtue Future Team of Vice Media in May 2022 shows that two-thirds of respondents are willing to buy virtual fashion products as much as real fashion products, and 37% of respondents are more willing to spend money on virtual fashion products. In addition, about 94% of people believe that digital fashion will become the mainstream.
Tough Development for Europe Firms
In January 2022, Meta officially announced the new masterpiece of its research team’s cooperation with Nvidia, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC). At that time, Meta said that when the assembly was completed in the middle of 2022, RSC would become the fastest AI supercomputer in the world.
However, the bad financial report in February also started metaverse’s dilemma in 2022. What’s worse, as a representative product of Metameterverse, Horizon, a VR social platform, has only 300000 active users per month three months after it was launched, and this number even decreased to less than 200000 at the end of October this year.
Also frustrated with metaverse are Roblox and Unity. In May 2022, due to the horizontal effect of the market at that time, Unity’s share price fell 28% after the first quarter of 2022 financial report was released. In the same period, Roblox’s share price also fell 9.45% after the financial report was released in May due to the negative effects of the disappearance of epidemic dividends, the slowdown of platform growth, and the expansion of losses.
According to the metadata of NASDAQ, since the beginning of 2022, the relevant stocks of metaverse have generally declined, and the relevant metaverse index has also fallen by 36%. However, the situation of these three companies is still not ideal. In 2022, the share price of Unity has dropped by 80%, that of Meta by 65.13%, and that of Roblox by 72.93%.
Lack of Stimulus for Korean Products
Different from the European and American markets, in Japan and South Korea, the enthusiasm of major companies for metaverse and the number of popular products should be better. The first Korean company to emerge in the metaverse field in 2022 should be Com2Us. At the beginning of the new year in 2022, Com2Us will deeply cooperate with WYSIWYG Studio, its visual effects company, to show the prototype of its metaverse platform “Com2Verse” to users around the world.
In addition to Com2Verse, the mobile game Play Together, a metaverse “playground” developed by the Korean game company HAEGIN in April 2022, also shines brightly. On the first anniversary of the launch of the game, HAEGIN said that the global cumulative download of Play together has exceeded 100 million times (103.9 million), and the global daily active users (DAUs) have reached 4 million. At the same time, the anime style metaverse product “# Me” developed by Clover Games, another Korean game company, also opened the game reservation, and won more than one million reservation users in the world in just one month.
Maybe playing games on cloud can also be realized. In the second half of the year, three Korean companies, Nexon, Naver and Netmarble, also launched their own metaverse platforms. Among them, the MetaverseNexon Town of Nexon was first released in September this year. NaverZ, which had previously launched ZEPETO with 200 million users and a valuation of more than $1 billion, announced in early December that it would launch a beta version in December 2021 and an official version of the metaverse platform ZEP in March 2022.
Finally, at the end of 2022, Metaverse World, a subsidiary of Netmarble, a Korean giant, announced a anime metaverse product, Grand Cross: Metaworld, based on the Sui blockchain network and developed by Unreal Engine 5, and released PV. It is reported that this product will be launched on PC and mobile phone platforms, and will enter beta testing in the first half of 2023, with the goal of full release by the end of 2023.
Regulations Come First Before Metaverse
In terms of regulations, China and South Korea are definitely at the forefront of the world. As early as January 2022, the South Korean government announced that it aimed to provide assistance to metaverse-related industries and layouts to fully develop the concept.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government is also taking action. On December 30 last year, the “14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Shanghai’s Electronic Information Industry” was released. As a cutting-edge emerging field, Metaverse is listed as the development focus of Shanghai’s electronic information industry. This is also the first time that Metaverse has been written into the local “14th Five-Year Plan” industrial plan.
In Europe and the United States, the metaverse is still largely within the voluntary constraints of trade associations between companies. In September of this year, the European Parliament proposed that the metaverse will be one of the key decision-making areas in 2023 in the “EU State” letter of intent submitted to the European Parliament.
Metaverse’s Future Remained Doubted
Today’s pace of development is also a great opportunity for large corporations and teams to decide how to position themselves in the metaverse for the future.
In 2023, Tencent, Meta, Epic, Sony, NetEase, Microsoft and other major companies, as well as governments and official departments around the world, will still have uncertainty about the actions and development concepts of the industry. But what is certain is that the metaverse will continue to change the virtual world and real life of the Internet.