Redfinger | Metaverse Review 2022: Development, Stimulus, Regulations and Future

From the data of Google Trends, we can see that in the past year, the global influence and topic degree of the concept of “Metaverse” have declined all the way and not been talked about by too many people. This is mainly related to the international political and economic environment, the decline of the epidemic dividend and other factors.

In fact, there is no shortage of star products like Ready Player ME in the market. With round by round financing, it records the capital market’s preference for this concept. The Metaverse field is full of uncertainty. Summarize some new actions, new products, new transactions, etc. of major domestic and foreign companies in the Metaverse field in the past year, as well as the regulatory and policy means of governments in this field, so as to better grasp the development trend of the Metaverse field.

Metaverse Digital Identity Craze 

Ready Player Me, a metaverse avatar platform owned by Wolf3D, is the earliest star product in the metaverse field. It not only makes metaverse a prosperous start in 2022, but also drives the digital human in the concept of metaverse in recent years. Also because digital people are favored by capital, digital people company Ziva Dynamics. In January 2022, Unity officially announced its acquisition of Ziva Dynamics to foreign officials.

This phenomenon has led to the prosperity of digital commodity culture. According to a large report on global digital fashion in the Web 3.0 era released by the Virtue Futures team (hereinafter referred to as VF) under the US Vice Media in May 2022, two-thirds of the respondents are willing to purchase virtual fashion products as much as real fashion products, and even 37% of the respondents are willing to spend more on virtual fashion products. As many as 94% of respondents believe that digital fashion will become the mainstream.

Tough Development for Europe Firms 

In January 2022, Meta announced its new masterpiece – AI Research Super Cluster (RSC), which is the cooperation between its research team and Nvidia. Meta believes that by the middle of 2022, when the assembly is completed, RSC will become the fastest AI supercomputer in the world.

But then came the bad earnings report for February. To make matters worse, the VR social platform Horizon, the representative product of Meta metaverse, has only 300000 active users per month within three months after its launch. Desperately, at the end of October this year, the number even dropped to less than 200000.

This coincides with companies such as Unity and Roblox. In May 2022, due to the horizontal effect of the market at that time, Unity’s share price fell by 28% after announcing the results of the first quarter of 2022. Against the background of disappearance of epidemic dividend and slow growth of the platform, Roblox’s share price also fell 9.45% after it announced its profit in May.

According to Metaverse related stocks, since the beginning of 2022, Metaverse related stocks have generally declined, and the relevant Metaverse index has declined by 36%. The situation of the three companies mentioned above is still not good, and they have suffered huge losses in share prices to a large extent.

Lack of Stimulus for Korean Products

Different from the European and American markets, the enthusiasm of major companies for metaverse is rising in Japan and South Korea. Com2Us is the pioneer of this industry in South Korea in 2022. At the beginning of 2022, Com2Us cooperated with WYSIWYG Studio, a visual effects company, to show the prototype of its metaverse platform “Com2Verse” to global users.

In addition to Com2Verse, Play Together, developed by Korean game company HAEGIN in April 2022, has also gained large popularity. HAEGIN pointed out that one year after the launch of Play Together, the global cumulative download volume has exceeded 100 million (103.9 million), and the global daily active users have reached 4 million. At the same time, the second type of metaverse product #Me developed by Clover Games, a Korean game company, also opened its pre registration, attracting more than 1 million users worldwide in just one month.

Possibly, playing games on cloud can be achieved as well. In the second half of the year, Nexon, Naver and Netmarble roll out their own meta-universe platforms. Nexon’s metaverse Nexon Town was first released in September this year. NaverZ previously launched ZEPETO with 200 million users, and announced in early December that it had launched the metaverse platform ZEP in March 2022.

At the end of 2022, Metaverse World, a subsidiary of Netmarble in South Korea, released the second metaverse product, Grand Cross: Metaworld, which is based on the Sui blockchain network and developed using the illusion engine 5. It is reported that this product will be launched on PC and mobile platforms.

Regulations Come First Before Metaverse 

In terms of laws and regulations, China and South Korea must be in the forefront of the world. As early as January 2022, the Korean government announced that it was intended to provide assistance for metaverse related industries and layout to fully develop the concept.

At the same time, the Chinese government is also taking action. The 14th Five Year Plan for the Development of Shanghai’s Electronic Information Industry was released on December 30 last year. As a frontier emerging field, Metaverse has been 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 “Fourteenth Five Year” industrial plan.

In Europe and the US, the metaverse remains largely voluntarily bound by inter-firm trade associations, although there are exceptions. Since the EU has missed out on the Web 2.0 era of the Internet and is now suffering from an anti-giant monopoly, it is better to start regulating the metaverse first. In September of this year, in the “Status of the European Union” letter of intent submitted to the European Parliament, the European Parliament proposed that “virtual worlds including the metaverse” will be one of the key decision-making areas in 2023. This means that the European Parliament may take more legislative action in the metaverse area next year.

Metaverse’s Future Remained Doubted 

Today’s development speed is also a great opportunity for large companies and teams to decide how to position themselves in Metaverse in 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 be uncertain about the actions and development ideas of the industry. But it is certain that metaverse will continue to change the virtual world and real life of the Internet.