What will the metaverse economy look like?

The poten­tial of meta­verse ser­vices is still largely unknown; a situ­ation that can be com­pared to the inter­net bubble at the end of the 1990s. At that time, many people dreamed of new forms of e‑commerce, but did not have the tech­no­logy to put them into prac­tice. Many cloth­ing start-ups prom­ised cus­tom­ers vir­tu­al booths where they could try on their next shirt or shoes. Most have since dis­ap­peared, and many scep­tics believed that people would nev­er buy clothes online. Times have changed, as have mind­sets and tools.

The oth­er major event with which the emer­gence of the meta­verse can be com­pared is the advent of the third-gen­er­a­tion mobile net­work UMTS in the mid-2000s. This was a time when 3G prom­ised to cre­ate new ser­vices worth hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars. But most of them did not see the light of day or did not catch on with the gen­er­al pub­lic. Yet, 3G has non­ethe­less been a suc­cess with the emer­gence of social net­works, the app mar­ket, and the explo­sion of mobile advertising.

Today, it seems that we are on the verge of a sim­il­ar upheav­al with the meta­verse. At some point in the near future, people will devel­op new uses, unaware of the tech­no­logy behind their new prac­tices. If today almost all of us use smart­phones, tomor­row we will undoubtedly have oth­er devices for access­ing the meta­verse via aug­men­ted or vir­tu­al real­ity. When these devices become more user-friendly, the time will come for the mass mar­ket. A whole new range of ser­vices will emerge, and we will exper­i­ence a new digit­al revolution.

The first of these revolu­tions was that of the com­puter con­nec­ted to the Inter­net through search engines or web browsers. It had two dis­ad­vant­ages: it required a wired con­nec­tion, and then you had to be at home. The second revolu­tion was the touch­screen smart­phone, where we moved from a browser approach to an applic­a­tion approach. It led to a sig­ni­fic­ant change in the way we use our devices, and in our rela­tion­ship to con­sump­tion, social­isa­tion, enter­tain­ment, etc.

But fore­cast­ing remains a com­plex sci­ence. The next revolu­tion, fol­low­ing on from the smart­phone, was sup­posed to be the voice revolu­tion with the craze for con­nec­ted speak­ers. But in the end, this did not really gen­er­ate any innov­at­ive uses. The next revolu­tion will per­haps be that of the meta­verse – a more immers­ive access to vir­tu­al worlds that will no longer be lim­ited to the sur­face of a touch screen. With the meta­verse, this phys­ic­al­ity will disappear.

There are already sec­tors at the cut­ting edge of this field, such as the video game industry, which has had a foot in the meta­verse for almost twenty years, pro­du­cing game exper­i­ences that enable immer­sion in vir­tu­al envir­on­ments. Oth­er innov­a­tions will also come from the porn industry, always at the fore­front of digit­al innov­a­tion. It is the first sec­tor to have launched pay­wall or sub­scrip­tion-type eco­nom­ic mod­els for con­sum­ing stream­ing con­tent. With proven success.

In the com­merce sec­tor, the main chal­lenge of the meta­verse will be its abil­ity to cre­ate a uni­verse equi­val­ent to shop­ping malls, meta-envir­on­ments where con­sumer plat­forms, enter­tain­ment ser­vices and prob­ably many oth­er uses that we have not yet ima­gined will be aggreg­ated, wheth­er or not irrig­ated by crypto-cur­ren­cies, NFTs and the blockchain.

But this sec­tor is still largely depend­ent on the phys­ic­al con­straints of logist­ics and prox­im­ity. Before the emer­gence of the inter­net, in-store shop­ping was intrins­ic­ally linked to geo­graph­ic­al prox­im­ity. Today, dis­tance is less of a con­straint, but it has not dis­ap­peared, con­trary to what one might think at first glance. The large plat­forms in the sec­tor have for the most part remained nation­al plat­forms. Trad­ing sites are not always the same from one coun­try to anoth­er and loc­al spe­cificit­ies per­sist. How­ever, if there are some dif­fer­ences in con­sump­tion, we can see that these glob­al plat­forms can adapt to region­al tastes and pref­er­ences. If we take the example of Net­flix, they have developed an offer that can be adjus­ted to each indi­vidu­al country.

It is also very likely that the meta­verse will be the entry point to the same eco­sys­tem, wheth­er it is the Amazon, Meta or Apple eco­sys­tem. This explains the fierce struggle between the GAFAMs and cer­tain Chinese giants such as Alibaba to become the future cham­pi­on of the com­ing revolu­tion. Faced with Asia and the United States, European play­ers are not in a pos­i­tion to mas­ter all these tech­no­lo­gies. In France, for example, we have very suc­cess­ful com­pan­ies in cryp­to­graphy or cyber­se­cur­ity, but this is not enough to dom­in­ate this emer­ging market.

On the oth­er hand, what is more or less cer­tain is that there will be no single glob­al meta­verse. There is bound to be a Chinese meta­verse, for example, which will not allow its cit­izens to vis­it vir­tu­al ter­rit­or­ies not sub­ject to cen­sor­ship. State reg­u­la­tions will neces­sar­ily cre­ate lim­its or bor­ders, even with­in these vir­tu­al spaces. It will also be neces­sary to pro­tect con­sumers, organ­ise rela­tions between Inter­net users and plat­forms, etc. And not everything will hap­pen exclus­ively on the meta­verse. We can very well ima­gine a mixed use between the smart­phone, a vir­tu­al uni­verse and even a phys­ic­al shop. The suc­cess of online shop­ping has not killed off shops. And oth­er forms of com­merce have emerged that allow us to go back and forth between the phys­ic­al and online worlds.

Finally, the ques­tion of access­ib­il­ity to these tech­no­lo­gies is, in my opin­ion, fun­da­ment­al. How are we going to appro­pri­ate these tech­no­lo­gies col­lect­ively and har­ness them without cre­at­ing new digit­al divides? If I take the example of a job inter­view on the meta­verse, will the can­did­ate who has mastered its codes have an advant­age over the neo­phyte? These are all ques­tions that this nas­cent meta­verse will have to answer if it is to become the next digit­al revolution.