While the highest profile move in the evolution of the metaverse was Facebook’s rebranding as Meta, the fate of the sector will be determined by longer and more subtle digital content and services market trends, according to a metaverse market forecast from ABI Research.
The good news for the sector is that these trends look like they “will create a healthy runway for the metaverse to properly takeoff within the consumer markets,” ABI said.
Metaverse Market Forecast
The firm says that these underlying digital content and services markets — streaming video, social, gaming, and broader digital advertising – will be worth more than $2 trillion by 2030, though it cautions that several factors could make the most optimistic predictions fall short. These potential headwinds are external political and economic factors and “inner-market perceptual issues.”
Beyond these variables, the fate of the metaverse will be tied to the arrival of mainstream and consumer-targeted smart glasses, according to Michael Inouye, ABI’s Metaverse Markets & Technologies Principal Analyst. He said in a press release that glasses will lead to transformative changes in the metaverse and the digital content and services markets overall. Currently, ABI says that this will not occur until the 2030s, but that an acceleration could “shift forecasts and market expectations.”
Much seems uncertain. The key takeaway seems to be that the metaverse is still very young and its future up in the air. A positive note is that the Metaverse Standards Forum has been founded. However, volatility in the cryptocurrency market and economic and political uncertainty could lead investors to be more conservative. An economic downturn could reduce spending on multiple SVOD subscriptions and other precursor type sectors.
“While there are high expectations for the metaverse, based on what we can see today, it looks just as likely for growth to occur more incrementally as it is to accelerate beyond our current expectations,” Inouye said in the press release. “Efforts around standardization, interoperability, better consumer education, and broader interest in facets of the metaverse like NFTs will go a long way in shaping the growth curve.”