Over recent months, metaverse has become a term so ubiquitous that it very nearly claimed the top spot in Collins Dictionary’s word of the year after being pipped to the post by its close cousin, NFT. However, the very idea of a metaverse is somewhat misleading for many newcomers, as the fact it’s often referred to as “the metaverse” implies there’s only one. Even relatively early in the game, already it’s evident that the metaverse is a blanket term applied to many different metaverses.
On the centralized side, there’s the well-profiled effort of Meta to move social networking into the virtual realm, while competitors like Epic, Microsoft, and even now Walmart map out their own metaverse ambitions. In the decentralized world, some metaverse projects have been established for years already, including Decentraland and Somnium Space. However, thanks to the open-source nature of blockchain, many new metaverse projects are emerging each week, fueled by record investment flowing into the space and predictions of a $1 trillion market opportunity.
But do we really need so many different metaverses? Isn’t it inevitably going to settle into a situation as we see with social media platforms, where a few of them dominate, and we end up not being able to leave because everyone else is using the same platforms?
Many Metaverses, Many Opportunities
Thinking about it in these terms may be tempting, but it doesn’t grasp the scale and scope of how the metaverse will be used and the fact that the multi-metaverse is the only model that makes sense. While Facebook is trying to build a metaverse focused on social interactions, many of the decentralized metaverses are games, or more correctly, gaming-centric metaverses. Considered from the gaming angle, it makes sense to have separate metaverses hosting different games.
Decentraland is perhaps the closest to a virtual world with multiple purposes, although mostly focused on commerce and entertainment, hosting brands like Samsung, Sotheby’s, and Domino’s pizza. In this sense, Decentraland is akin to a kind of virtual mall.
