THE COMING WORLDS
THE U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION REPORTS that in the first six months of 2022, the word metaverse appeared in regulatory filings more than 1,100 times. The entire previous year saw 260 mentions. The preceding two decades? Fewer than a dozen in total. It increasingly feels as though every corporate executive must mention the metaverse—and, of course, how it naturally fits the capabilities of their company better than those of their competitors. Few seem to explain what it is or exactly what they’ll build. The executive class also appears to disagree over fundamental aspects of this new platform, including the criticality of virtual reality headsets, blockchains, and crypto, as well as whether it’s here now, might be soon, or is decades in the future.
None of which has constrained investment. Much has been written of Facebook’s name change to Meta and the more than $10 billion it now loses each year on its metaverse initiatives. But six more of the largest public companies in the world—Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tencent—have also been busy preparing for the metaverse. They are reorganizing internally, rewriting their job descriptions, reconstructing their product offerings, and prepping multibillion-dollar product launches. In January, Microsoft announced the largest acquisition in Big Tech history, paying $75 billion for gaming giant Activision Blizzard, which would “provide building blocks for the metaverse.” In total, McKinsey & Co. estimates that corporations, private-equity companies, and venture capitalists made $120 billion in metaverse-related investments during the first five months of this year.
Nearly all of the aforementioned work has, thus far, remained invisible to the average person. Rather like the metaverse itself. There isn’t really a metaverse product we can go buy, nor “metaverse revenue” to be found on an income statement. In fact, it might seem as though the metaverse, to the extent it ever existed, has already come and gone. Crypto has crashed. So too has Facebook’s market
