© studioEAST/Getty Min-Liang Tan, founder, chief executive officer and creative director of Razer, attends the Day 2 of the RISE Conference 2017 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on 12 July 2017, in Hong Kong. The concept of the "metaverse"—a sprawling shared online world—is now being fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, a top gaming CEO has said.
Min-Liang Tan, who leads the gaming company Razer, says the coronavirus pandemic, which left millions of people spending time indoors, appears to have resulted in an influx of new players—who will be needed to fill virtual communities of the future.
"COVID-19 has accelerated the path to the metaverse," the CEO told the South China Morning Post. "Those who typically would not have been a gamer, have now become gamers... and we believe the first citizens of the metaverse will be gamers."
It lacks a solid definition, but the metaverse is broadly viewed as a digital 3D world that is online, persistent and ever-growing, relying on technology such as virtual reality to let users live as avatars. It has its origins in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and was used as a theme through the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie Ready Player One.
It's a vision that is no longer limited to the realm of science fiction, with platforms such as Fortnite already blending gaming with other forms of media and entertainment, and normalizing shared experiences to its millions of users across the world.
While games like Minecraft and Roblox are also credited with accolades in the concept of shared universes, Fortnite has pushed boundaries in recent years with the use of live in-game events, including a world trailer premiere of the new Christopher Nolan movie Tenant, a scene debut for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and a music reveal of Travis Scott's Astronomical, watched by over 12.3 million concurrent players.
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Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, developer of Fortnite, has previously spoken of how he envisions the metaverse could evolve. In an interview with GameMakers in July, he noted the concept predates social media, and is largely being improvised.
He elaborated: "The metaverse is going to be some sort of real-time 3D social medium. Instead of sending messages and pictures to each other asynchronously you are together and in a virtual world, interacting and having fun experiences, which might span anything from purely games to purely social experiences.
"It will be a massively participatory medium of a type that we really haven't seen yet. Even though Fortnite and Minecraft and Roblox each manifest some aspects of it we are still pretty far from having the thing," Sweeney continued.
"It's not just one companies product or revenue stream. [It] needs to be an economy, if there's not an economy underlying this thing then companies won't be able to... create content that builds this world. People won't be able to profit from their work and it will just be yet another tech company extracting money from yet another business."
Speaking to the SCMP, Tan said his firm's digital gaming currency Razer Gold, used to purchase games and in-game products, may be another step in the right direction for the formation of a metaverse.
"Now with [hardware and software ready], you also have to think of the whole economy of the metaverse at the same time," Tan told the SCMP. "And that's where things like payments, digital currency and all that come in," the CEO added.
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