Is Gaming the Metaverse's Best Shot at Success?

• Published date: 02 February 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

Alot can change in a year and there are few better examples of this than the last 12 months. Look back to the fall of 2021 and there was still hype around NFTs and meme coins, and Facebook was still in the process of changing all its company signage to Meta.

Fast forward to today and the entire crypto world has seen prices depressed by a whole multitude of factors, including the collapse of several exchanges and investment firms, a decline in interest for NFTs, and alleged rug pulls in some projects forcing blockchain enthusiasts to be more cautious.

From a value of around $44,000 in November 2021, Bitcoin is now worth less than half that at around $14,000. This is just one example of many in the space as just about every token has followed the same trajectory.

The Metaflop

The metaverse has followed suit. By March 2022, Google recorded a notable decline in the number of people searching for it which has only continued as the year has progressed.

At the same time, a new genre of YouTube videos was forming which involved people exploring different metaverse products and describing how bad the overall experience was. In this space, videos with titles like 'I Joined the Metaverse so You Don't Have To' and 'Zuckerberg's Metaverse Is A Total Ghost Town', or even simply 'The Metaverse is Lame' are representative of the general sentiment online.

For the metaverse to be turned around, it needs a way to attract more users and offer them a quality product that makes them want to stay.

So far, the social interaction elements designed to let people just hang out online have failed to achieve this as they've been plagued with spammers, scammers, and harassment. Instead, could gaming be the answer?

VR Gaming is Growing

Virtual reality gaming isn't new. Nintendo made its first VR headset called the Virtual Boy in the mid 1990s; however, it was an idea ahead of its time and became a commercial flop.

Today, though, things are very different. VR gaming has been slowly growing an engaged following that enjoys the immersiveness, interactivity, and ingenuity of the medium. One of the biggest reasons for this has simply been the fact that there are many unique titles available for VR headsets, such as Beat...