Entertainment and gaming are overlapping – roadmap to the Metaverse?

Entertainment and gaming are becoming one and the same and point to a future that is a strange but exciting mixture of both.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings hinted at gaming as a new direction for the company and already entertainment companies are thinking that immersive gaming type content will be more compelling and therefore profitable in the longer term.

The question is whether the melding of entertainment and gaming will be major building blocks of the Metaverse.

The answer is probably yes, although it also highlights the fact that, at this stage at least, the Metaverse is a label that is useful in describing a still nebulous concept of where things are heading.

As more and more high-vis brands put a stake in the ground for their share of the Metaverse (Disney just appointed an executive to oversee its Metaverse strategy) we need to bear in mind that we are in danger, once again, of creating so much hype over this ‘label’ of the future that the reality will sour and everyone will focus on the bad things and ignore the benefits.

Better, perhaps, to largely ignore the term Metaverse and concentrate on trends that are happening now, like the merging of entertainment and gaming.

This is indeed happening now. In fact, the way we consume news and entertainment has already changed out of all proportion over a few short years.

The Olympics is an event that obviously attracts huge attention and as such is a reliable indicator of how people want to consume news and opinion about large events. And this year the change was huge.

15 million fewer people tuned in to traditional broadcast coverage than four years ago.

NBC is ‘broadcasting’ the opening and closing ceremonies in virtual reality. So, given that you own a VR headset, you can get a 180 degree view of what is going on. Beijing itself partnered with a company that produces short form, snack sized content, via an app that has been downloaded a billion times. Alibaba has produced some NFTs for the event, but we won’t go into that.

Entertainment and gaming is changing. Our viewing preferences are changing. Our digital world of content is becoming immersive and interactive to the point that user generated content is now the ‘big thing.’