Global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company says the metaverse has the potential to generate value equivalent to the world’s third-largest economy, Japan.
In a new report, McKinsey says that based on the metaverse’s consumer and use cases, the nascent sector could be worth $4 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030, divided up among multiple markets.
“We estimate it may have a market impact of between $2 trillion and $2.6 trillion on e-commerce by 2030, depending on whether a base or upside case is realized. Similarly, we estimate it to have an impact of $180 billion to $270 billion on the academic virtual learning market, a $144 billion to $206 billion impact on the advertising market, and a $108 billion to $125 billion impact on the gaming market. These effects may manifest in very different ways across the value chain, however.”
According to McKinsey, companies are now leveraging the metaverse could be building lasting competitive advantages. The report says executives currently consider cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and augmented/virtual reality as the top three metaverse technologies.
The report also says that along with cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), one sector in the metaverse space will remain volatile in the near term – the virtual real-estate asset market.
“Yet price increases are driven by scarcity that is designed into present-day platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox. That heightens the investment risk involved, even if organizations making the investments aim to derive utility from their virtual real estate by, for instance, using it as their metaverse base of consumer interactions.
Their bet is not only on mass adoption of the metaverse in the coming years but also on adoption of the specific platform that the virtual land is bought in (given near-zero interoperability between worlds for now).”
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