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

According to the statistic from Google Trends, Metaverse has a low decline in global influence as well as the topic, compared to the frenzy at the end of last year. For sure, it is closely related to international politics, the economy, the receding epidemic dividend, and other factors. 

As a matter of fact, there is a list of products like Ready Player ME in the market to indicate favor by investors. But at the same time, it cannot be ignored that the metauniverse sector is also full of failure, even if produced by major manufacturers. Moves, products, investments, and regulation policies can be shown in the following content to allow you to better grasp the trend of the metaverse. 

Metaverse Digital Identity Craze

Ready Player Me - Wolf3D's metaverse avatar platform – is a great example when concerning the well-known product in the sector in 2022. The product paves the way for the development of the metaverse and allows people to talk about the concept frequently. Ziva Dynamics – the firm that specializes in digital identity - also is invested in this year. In January 2022, Unity officially announced its acquisition of Ziva Dynamics to the public

The phenomenon is also associated with the boom in the culture of digital goods. According to a report on global digital fashion in the Web 3.0 era released by Vice Media's Virtue Futures team in May 2022, two-thirds of the respondents were no less willing to buy virtual fashion products than real fashion products, and 37% were even more likely to spend money on virtual fashion products. In addition, roughly 94% of them believe that digital fashion will become mainstream.

Tough Development for Europe Firms

In January 2022, Meta announced its new masterpiece - AI Research Super Cluster (RSC), a collaboration between its research team and Nvidia. Meta thinks that RSC would be the world's fastest AI supercomputer by the time the assembly was completed in mid-2022. 

But then came the bad earnings report in February. To make matters worse, the VR social platform Horizon, the representative product on Meta's metaverse, had only 300,000 monthly active users within three months after its launch. And desperately, the number even decreased to less than 200,000 at the end of October this year.

It coincides with the firms like Unity and Roblox. In May 2022, Unity's share price fell 28% after the announcement of its first quarter 2022 results due to the sideways effect of the market at the time. Against the backdrop of the disappeared epidemic dividend, and the slow platform growth, Roblox also saw its share price fall 9.45% after reporting earnings in May.

Metaverse-related stocks have generally declined since the beginning of 2022, as per Nasdaq metadata, and the related metaverse index has fallen 36%. These three firms mentioned above are still not in good shape, which suffers from a great loss in stock price to a large extent. 

Lack of Stimulus for Korean Products

Unlike the European and American markets, the enthusiasm of major companies for the meta-universe is emerging in Japan and Korea. Com2Us is a pioneering player in this industry in Korea in 2022. At the beginning of 2022, Com2Us cooperated with WYSIWYG Studio - its visual effects company - to present the prototype of its metaverse platform "Com2Verse" to users worldwide.

In addition to Com2Verse, Play Together, developed by Korean game company HAEGIN in April 2022, has also gained large popularity. Launching for one year, the cumulative global downloads of "Play Together" have exceeded 100 million (103.9 million), and the global daily active users have reached 4 million, HAEGIN noted. Meanwhile, #Me, a secondary genre meta-universe product developed by Korean game company Clover Games, was also open for pre-registration and took over one 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, which previously launched ZEPETO with 200 million users, announced in early December that it had launched its metaverse platform ZEP in March 2022.

At the end of 2022, Metaverse World, a subsidiary of South Korean major Netmarble, announced a secondary meta-universe product, Grand Cross: Metaworld, based on the Sui blockchain network and developed using Unreal Engine 5. It is reported that the product will be launched on PC and mobile platforms. 

Regulations Come First Before Metaverse

In terms of regulations, China and South Korea have certainly come to the forefront of the world. As early as January 2022, the South Korean government released that it aims to provide help for metaverse-related industries and layouts for developing the concept in a full manner. 

At the same time, 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 was listed as the development focus of the electronic information industry in Shanghai. This is also the first time that Metaverse has been written into the local Fourteenth Five-Year" industrial plan.

In Europe and the United States, the metaverse is still mostly in the spontaneous restraint of the industry association between enterprises. In September this year, in the "State of the EU" letter of intent submitted to the European Parliament, the European Parliament proposed that metaverse will be one of the key decision areas in 2023. 

Metaverse's Future Remained Doubted

The pace of development today is also an excellent opportunity for major companies and teams to decide how they will position themselves in the future of the metaverse.

In 2023, Tencent, Meta, Epic, Sony, NetEase, Microsoft, and other major companies, as well as governments and official departments around the world, will remain uncertainties about actions and development philosophies in the sector. But what is certain is that the metaverse will continue to change the virtual world of the Internet and real life.