Next for the metaverse: Not just for kids

Parents pay attention when a video game company only kids have heard of goes public at a $39 billion valuation.

Adults pay attention when Microsoft’s CEO uses the phrase metaverse economies on an earnings call.

When Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta declares he will spend billions of dollars building a new virtual reality, Adults tend to pay attention.

This year most people paid attention to the metaverse, which became a mainstream concept with tech investors offloading cash and futurists being pessimistic about the prospect of fiction becoming a reality.

This year, some of the most intelligent people worldwide came out to say the next big thing would be the metaverse. It also birthed a market for many executives, who missed the trend. Now they are running to capitalize on all things connected to the metaverse.

Overview

Several companies are bonding with the metaverse, but those companies are not Big Tech names. Online gaming companies Epic Games and Roblox are top of the list. They have already designed virtual realms, where millions of people play, socialize, and participate in a digital economy. Some players even make a living with this by selling their digital products.

Overall, the metaverse is already here in many ways. It just hasn’t grown enough and spread outside the major group of kids and teenagers, who play games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox as many of their parents and adults scroll social media and watch Netflix.

For now, the challenge of the metaverse is to get older generations to realize the advantages of the metaverse.

In an interview over Zoom, Craig Donato, Roblox’s Chief Business Officer, said that in his opinion, this shift to the metaverse is very generational because mainly kids who grew up in interactive gaming understand this idea.