Rerun Quick Take: major media companies are staking their claim in the metaverse

Last year, Facebook rebranded as Meta to show its commitment to a virtual future of social media. Earlier this year, Microsoft started the process of acquiring games company Activision Blizzard to give it a strategic advantage in the gaming metaverse, and in February, Disney appointed a top entertainment executive to lead its metaverse strategy.

The promise of the metaverse as ‘a single, universal virtual world’ holds huge potential for lots of different sectors. But can one company really dominate the entire landscape?

So far, the metaverse has been growing organically, and taking on lots of weird and wonderful shapes, with Gen Z leading the way in shaping its landscape. Almost 50% of leading metaverse platform Roblox’s reported 50 million daily active users are under 13 years old.

With so much metaverse technology being built at the same time by separate companies, it is unlikely that the eventual metaverse will be one destination shaped by one entity, but instead, lots of different virtual spaces that people visit for different types of experiences. According to our Top Pick this week from Forbes, enterprises should focus their efforts towards one type of activity to create a winning metaverse strategy, whether that’s in gaming, entertainment, shopping, or productivity applications.

At Axonista, we’re excited about the potential the metaverse holds for entertainment and shopping, and looking forward to participating in shaping the creative ways that this will unfold.

First published in Rerun, our newsletter about the future of interactive video – sign up here.