05 Jun 2022 03:00 Last update: 03:10
(Sing Tao Daily reported) In 2021, Facebook will be renamed Meta, and the metaverse boom will emerge. In early 2022, American gaming giant Take-Two acquired social gaming company Zynga for $12.7 billion, and Microsoft invested another $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard (Activision Blizzard), the metaverse craze is starting to hit the gaming industry. More and more technology and media companies hope to use the game platform to lay out the metaverse. In May of this year, it was reported that the game giant Electronic Arts (EA) is seeking to sell, and Apple, Disney and Amazon are all interested in acquiring; and another game company The giant Ubisoft was also named by Bloomberg, saying it was already in talks with potential buyers. According to the latest research from investment bank Drake Star Partners, in the first quarter of this year, a total of 387 merger and acquisition transactions occurred in the gaming industry, with a total value of 98.7 billion US dollars, a record high. Li Zhaobo, an honorary teaching and research scholar at the Asia-Pacific Business Institute of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School, pointed out that the restrictions on activities caused by the epidemic gave birth to the concept of the metaverse, and also brought the game industry into a major turning point. In the short term, the epidemic is unlikely to end, people’s activities will continue to turn upward, and the Metaverse still has a lot of room for development. According to Citi forecasts, the size of the global metaverse economy will increase to $13 trillion by 2030. In the short term, the trend of mergers and acquisitions in the game industry will continue. Li Zhaobo also pointed out that the sense of live event experience obtained in the game is very similar to the concept of the metaverse. Games may be the closest thing to a Metaverse immersion experience that can be commercialized until the Metaverse vision is truly realized. According to Goldman Sachs statistics, the global game market will reach 220 billion US dollars in 2023. The changes in life and social modes brought about by the epidemic have caused the game to begin to interact with other fields, further expanding the functions of the game. There are many examples of the possibility of video games as the beginning of the metaverse. In 2020, the famous singer Travis Scott held a virtual concert in the game “Fortnite” with the concept of the metaverse, and 12.3 million gamers around the world became the virtual concert audience; in the same year, the top AI academic conference ACAI, in Nintendo In 2021, the University of California, Berkeley recreated the campus in the sandbox game “Minecraft”, and graduates participated in the graduation ceremony in virtual images. Unlike Meta CEO Zuckerberg, who sees the Metaverse as a “more like the Internet.” Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella believes that the Metaverse is essentially about creating games. It’s putting people, places, and things in a physics engine, and then connecting people, places, and things in the physics engine to each other. Nadella revealed in February this year that Microsoft’s future goal is to develop the game metaverse, and its major games are all prototypes of the metaverse. In January 2022, when Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, it became the third largest gaming group in the world after Tencent and Sony. “Financial Times” once commented that the main reason for Microsoft to spend huge sums of money to acquire Blizzard is to be optimistic about Activision Blizzard’s player share and stickiness, pointing out that if Microsoft can successfully integrate its own 25 million users in the future, and Blizzard’s existing 400 million users Players, will become a huge game giant, able to enter the metaverse more smoothly. Sony transforms into a metaverse entertainment giant. As one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors, Sony sees games as part of the metaverse. In May 2022, Sony CEO Kenichi Yoshida stated at a press conference that Sony is ready to transform from a consumer electronics manufacturer to a metaverse entertainment giant, and will build across multiple platforms of games, music, movies and animation in the future. Metaverse business. In February 2022, after Microsoft’s acquisition of the business, Sony acquired game developer Bungie for $3.6 billion, and said it plans to launch 10 games by 2025, some of which will be related to the Metaverse. Sony invested another $1 billion in Epic Games, the developer of the popular game “Fortnite” in April this year, and said it will deepen its cooperation with Epic Games in the metaverse in the future.
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