According to statistics from Google Trends, compared with the mania at the end of last year, the decline in Metaverse’s global influence and topic is very low. Of course, this is closely related to international politics, economy, the fading dividend of the epidemic and other factors.

In fact, there are a bunch of products like Ready Player ME on the market to show investor favor. But at the same time, it cannot be ignored that the metaverse is also full of failures, even by major manufacturers. Movements, products, investments, and regulatory policies can be displayed in the following content so that you can better grasp the trends in the metaverse.

Metaverse Digital Identity Craze 

Ready Player Me – Wolf3D’s metaverse avatar platform – is a great example of a well-known product in the industry in 2022. This product paved the way for the development of the metaverse and allowed people to talk about the concept often. Ziva Dynamics, which specializes in digital identities, also invested this year. In January 2022, Unity officially announced the acquisition of Ziva Dynamics

This phenomenon is also associated with the flourishing of digital commodity culture. A report on global digital fashion in the Web 3.0 era released by Vice Media’s Virtue Future Team in May 2022 shows that two-thirds of the respondents are as willing to buy virtual fashion products as they are real fashion products, and 37% Respondents are more willing to spend money on virtual fashion products. Furthermore, some 94% believe that digital fashion will become mainstream.

Tough Development for Europe Firms 

In January 2022, Meta announced its new masterpiece, the AI Research Supercluster (RSC), a collaboration between its research team and Nvidia. Meta believes that by mid-2022, when assembled, the RSC will be the fastest AI supercomputer in the world.

But then came a poor earnings report in February. To make matters worse, Horizon, the representative product of the Meta metaverse, a VR social platform, only had 300,000 monthly active users within three months of its launch. Desperately, at the end of October this year, the number even dropped to less than 200,000.

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

According to Nasdaq metadata, since the beginning of 2022, Metaverse-related stocks have generally fallen, and the related Metaverse Index has fallen by 36%. The three companies mentioned above are still in bad shape and have largely suffered huge losses in their share prices.

Lack of Stimulus for Korean Products

Unlike the European and American markets, the enthusiasm of major companies for the metaverse is emerging in Japan and South Korea. Com2Us is the pioneer of this industry in Korea in 2022. At the beginning of 2022, Com2Us cooperated with its visual effects company WYSIWYG Studio to present 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 “Play Together” has been online for one year, and the cumulative global downloads have exceeded 100 million (103.9 million), and the global daily active users have reached 4 million. At the same time, #Me, the second type of metaverse product developed by Korean game company Clover Games, also opened for 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 this September. NaverZ previously launched ZEPETO with 200 million users, and announced in early December that it has launched the metaverse platform ZEP in March 2022.

At the end of 2022, Metaverse World, a subsidiary of South Korea’s main Netmarble, released its second metaverse product, Grand Cross: Metaworld, which is 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 laws and regulations, China and South Korea in East Asia have undoubtedly taken the lead in the world. As early as January 2022, the Korean government announced that it aims to provide policy help for the relevant industries and layout of metaverse, provide comprehensive help for the construction of Korean metaverse, and increase the size of metaverse from the perspective of the government.

At the same time that South Korea strengthened the guidance and supervision of metaverse, Chinese governments also launched relevant actions. As early as December 2021, the “Fourteenth Five Year Plan” for the Development of Shanghai’s Electronic Information Industry issued by Shanghai, China, pointed out that it is necessary to “strengthen the forward-looking research and development of the underlying core technology infrastructure of metaverse, promote the development of new terminals that deepen perceptual interaction and systematic virtual content construction, and explore industrial applications.”

In Europe and the United States, metaverse is still largely under the voluntary restraint of industry associations among enterprises, but there are exceptions. As the EU has missed the Web 2.0 era of the Internet and is now suffering from anti giant monopoly, it is better to start first for the regulation of metaverse. In September this year, in the letter of intent on the “status quo of the European Union” submitted to the European Parliament, the European Parliament proposed that “virtual world including metaverse” would be one of the key decision-making areas in 2023. This means that the European Parliament may take more legislative actions in the metaverse field in the next year.

Metaverse’s Future Remained Doubted 

In 2022, all major enterprises and governments will try and explore in the field of metaverse, from personal virtual identity to the development of digital economy, social networking, games, high-tech hardware and technology. Metaverse is more pervasive. Today’s rare pace of development is also a great opportunity for major enterprises and teams to decide how to position themselves in the future of metaverse.

In 2023, how many actions and developments will Tencent, Meta, Epic, Sony, NetEase, Microsoft and other major enterprises, as well as governments and official departments around the world take on the concept of metaverse remains to be revealed. The future of metaverse also looks uncertain in this unknown environment. But we can be sure that we have stepped out of metaverse from the starting point and will continue to change the virtual world of the Internet and its related real life.