Your Own Metaverse for Business: Insights, Tips, and More | Program-Ace
The recent craze about the metaverse doesn’t ensue exclusively from the rebranding of Facebook to Meta. Moreover, it has been hovering in the air of the IT industry since the mid-1990s and especially after the launch of Second Life in 2003, the first alleged metaverse in history. Though it didn’t make use of XR technology, 5G, IoT, blockchain, and so forth.
Nowadays, more and more international brands like Gucci and Nike take advantage of metaverse development services not only to increase their media presence and expand the scope of influence on the market but also to multiply the value for consumers. That’s why all modern businesses with a focus on sustainable growth must pay attention to the metaverse.
So, what makes the metaverse concept so unique? Is it only about innovative technology or it’s a new digital-oriented mindset? Well, this article will provide comprehensive answers to these and other questions related to how businesses may leverage the metaverse technology. Prepare for the insights that will boost your performance!
What Does the Metaverse Mean for Businesses?
Prior to estimating the value of all these innovative technologies for businesses, let’s answer the question of what the metaverse is. Although the term isn’t yet specified in a dictionary and presupposes a vague meaning, fundamentally, the metaverse is a virtual world accessed via smart devices where users can live as if it were real life. Simple as that.
Still, what does it all imply and how to use the metaverse for business? Conceptually, enterprises can employ immersive technology, blockchain, 5G, IoT, and other solutions that facilitate the existence of metaverses to build their own digital environment providing a wide range of services or products that respond to the digital consumer demand.
Despite broader media coverage and better marketing opportunities, the metaverse offers a more convenient workspace, travel cost savings, almost infinite business expansion prospects, quicker employee onboarding and training, as well as improved networking. Greater user accessibility and immersive experience will also come in handy for businesses.
Metaverse Business Opportunities and How Not to Lose Them
So, what are the metaverse opportunities for business, after all? First and foremost, they revolve around promotion, marketing, and advertising in addition to gamified interaction options. Customers inside your virtual world will be able to communicate, play, buy, and sell items made for the metaverse. By the way, these can be traded for NFTs and cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, which, along with blockchain, ensure decentralization.
More specifically, business opportunities to consider before developing your own metaverse include:
- Gaming. Metaverse gaming built over decentralized blockchain platforms and play-to-earn concept will undoubtedly become one of the most profitable businesses.
- Virtual real-estate. Just like Roblox and Decentraland, you’ll be able to buy and sell digital land inside your metaverse, which is another curious business model.
- NFT marketplaces. The role of the NFT in the metaverse already implies a better understanding of ownership inside virtual environments as well as how digital items must be treated. The same goes for businesses based on cryptocurrencies.
Now let’s talk about other benefits of metaverse for business in a more precise manner so that you could understand how you can put immersive technologies to good use.
Metaverse E-Commerce
With immersive e-commerce, your customers will gain access to virtual retail stores where they will be able to buy any digital items for, say, cryptocurrency, considering that metaverses are expected to rely on blockchain. Be it digital food or clothes, it’s a beneficial opportunity to seize for businesses that intend to expand their presence virtually.
Besides, according to the 2022 survey, Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X are the demographic groups proven to be the most interested in visiting virtual worlds. Especially given that these generations will make up the bulk of all the future audiences targeted by enterprises, investing in the metaverse right now is an endeavor that ensures long-term value.
Already today selling digital in-game items for NFTs has become a global trend. Considering the pace of technological advancement, it’s a matter of time when running a metaverse e-commerce business will bring profit comparable to the same activity conducted in real life.
Metaverse Entertainment
Among all other metaverse industries, entertainment unquestionably occupies a special place. 72% of employees confirm that gamification encourages them to put more effort into whatever they do, confirming that the role of entertainment in business and management is difficult to overestimate.
Therefore, by gamifying various aspects of work inside a company, employers improve onboarding, increase employee motivation, and attract more metaverse users in the long run. Blockchain-based games are foreseen as one of the most beneficial models to engage new players in the metaverse thanks to the play-to-earn philosophy.
By allowing people not only to buy and sell in-game items in the form of NFTs but also earn them through gameplay, metaverse owners will provide users with extra value. There’s no denying that the GameFi concept will serve as a prerequisite for the future approach to gaming. The industry is already witnessing it in present-day NFT games like Axie Infinity.
Metaverse for Business Meetings
Following Meta, Microsoft announced to improve Mesh for Microsoft Teams to bring the metaverse business meetings closer to the company’s corporate culture. Aside from gamified activities and e-commerce, businesses will be able to carry out online meetings inside a corporate metaverse, with 3D avatars replacing actual employees.
Such an approach to discussing internal corporate processes refreshes the activities to which team members have been accustomed, which is likely to facilitate better motivation as well as more in-depth workflow analysis. Notably, this initiative may also be regarded as a kind of gamification, inasmuch as employees use avatars to represent themselves in a virtual environment.
Beyond question, it will take time before all people involved get used to similar online meetings, but metaverse training will smooth this process. Furthermore, the application of metaverses for these purposes is likely to help resolve a lot of workflow-related issues, such as decreased engagement during long meet-ups or the lack of staff motivation.
Metaverse for Social Networking
No one would argue today that the upcoming metaverse will become the extension of what we now call social media. Inside a virtual environment, users are expected to communicate and interact with each other without any need to type in some text. As one of the most long-anticipated Web 3.0 manifestations, the metaverse for social networking is about to change the entire market game thanks to interoperability and interconnectedness.
Since such a social network rests on the pillars of blockchain, another huge benefit of this solution is going to be cybersecurity and a high level of protection from data leaks. Do you know how many data breaches occurred, for example, in 2019? Well, the answer is 3,813 leaks in the first half of the year, having affected about 4bn records, with 68 of them being stolen each second. These stupefying numbers can be reduced with decentralization.
Metaverse as a Marketplace
What we today call NFT marketplaces will soon be integrated into metaverses owned by various corporations, each having its own. And, by the way, you can become one of them by merely starting to develop such a platform. In any event, your users will need this marketplace to buy and sell NFTs or other cryptocurrencies when they earn them after participating in various virtual activities, including games, competitions, etc.
The launch of a metaverse marketplace opens a whole bunch of opportunities for businesses, whether you are planning to sell virtual land or essential in-game items. In the future, chances are that digital objects will hold more value than physical ones. The whole NFT craze in the modern world already proves it. Consequently, the sooner businesses begin to build their own metaverse marketplaces, the broader audience they attract.
Companies in the Metaverse: 5 Cases
The presence of global organizations in the metaverse is a hot topic today. A high number of companies working on metaverse already envision how the industry will profit from the application of this technology. Let’s discuss the 5 metaverse development companies.
Meta. The modern leader and pioneer of the metaverse, what we’ve previously referred to as Facebook, is currently building a virtual world powered by a supercomputer. It’s expected to encompass gaming, trading, social networking, working, and other online activities.
NVIDIA. Just like Meta, this company is working on its own Omniverse, a platform for creating metaverse-ready assets. Nowadays, NVIDIA provides support for artists and content creators contributing to the existence of future virtual realms.
Epic Games. Fortnite, the company’s most profitable product, is already known as a prerequisite for the future metaverse. For instance, Epic Games arranged a few concerts of real singers to take place inside Fortnite’s digital world, one of them being Ariana Grande’s virtual tour.
Decentraland. Another company is preparing its own metaverse platform for various content creators and businesses willing to use it as a marketplace of digital products as well as services. Also serving as a game, Decentraland offers its players to express themselves and become a part of the virtual universe.
Roblox. Operating as an open gaming platform, Roblox arranges virtual events, one of which is the Lil NasX concert, which has taken place inside the already functioning gaming world. That’s why more and more businesses are taking advantage of the metaverse for the event industry, making platform solutions versatile.
Rely on Program-Ace to Create a Metaverse for Business
Although there are already pioneering large-scale companies like Epic Games that harvest the perks of owning a metaverse, there’s still plenty of room for startups and smaller studios to join the race. With the help of a reliable partner like Program-Ace, you can build your own metaverse for any purpose, including e-commerce, staff training, education, etc.
In order to start achieving your business goals as soon as possible, contact us, and we’ll discuss every single detail related to your future project, offering all of our expertise.
Originally published at https://program-ace.com.