Gaming giant Activision Blizzard’s earnings call Thursday (Feb. 3) was a happy event, despite financial results that included missing Q4 revenue and earnings-per-share targets. Over the past 30 days, its ATVI stock was up 17% before the results were announced, thanks to news that Microsoft had agreed to purchase it for $68.7 billion.
That’s on top of ongoing sexual discrimination and harassment claims, an SEC fine, and news that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is launching an antitrust investigation into the Microsoft deal.
It’s been a good couple of weeks for businesses at the intersection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), gaming and the metaverse.
See also: What’s a Metaverse, and Why is One Having a Fashion Show?
NFT developer Immutable X saw its native cryptocurrency token, IMX, more than double on Feb. 3 after it announced a deal to build an NFT marketplace for GameStop — which announced that it was also creating a $100 million grant fund for metaverse developers, presumably in the gaming sphere.
It’s not an isolated thing. Roblox, a metaverse game developer whose platform dates to 2006, is seeing one in five of its 42 million players update their avatars daily with NFT accessories, Morgan Stanley noted recently.
Read more: PYMNTS NFT Series: In the Metaverse, NFTs Can Buy Experiences, Luxury and Eyeballs
If you’re noticing a trend here, you’re not alone.
Still, it’s probably too early to say the metaverse is taking over gaming — the concept is still more than a bit amorphous and the 3D goggle technology needed isn’t there yet — the gaming world is certainly diving in headfirst.
Read also: Gaming Platforms Betting On ‘The Metaverse’ As Next Internet
The best example is the hugely popular Fortnite MMO — massively multiplayer online — game, which has announced plans to turn its 2D-immersive gaming world into a metaverse world that just happens to have an enormous gaming world inside it, fueled by a couple of hugely successful concerts by Travis Scott and Ariana Grande that attracted millions of attendees.
Do you know another MMO game with a huge, well-developed and intricate virtual world? Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, with an estimated 4.75 million players. Where do you think Microsoft is looking for the infrastructure of the metaverse it revealed its plans to build during the Activision Blizzard purchase announcement?
Web 3.0 Chases Metaverse
While NFTs — non-fungible tokens that carry one-of-a-kind media ranging from art and music to real estate deed — are still the current next big thing, they’re already being mixed into the next, next big thing, the metaverse. Which is in turn being smooshed into the next, next, next big thing, Web 3.0.
Web 3.0 and the metaverse are different things. However, the crypto-ideal version of a decentralized, peer-to-peer metaverse — such as Decentraland and the Sandbox rather than heavily centralized Meta version — would be a good fit with Web 3.0.
Still, the two are so intertwined these days that the biggest crypto news site, CoinDesk, was moved to run an article titled, “Web 3 and the Metaverse Are Not the Same.”
Web 3.0 is a project to create an open-source, privacy-centric, peer-to-peer next generation of the world wide web itself on a blockchain backbone. The idea is to return control to users instead of the dominant tech giants.
In December, Reddit creator Alexis Ohanian launched a $200 million Web 3.0 fund in partnership with Polygon, which is developing a Layer 2 scaling solution to speed up Ethereum. Polygon is experiencing big growth in NFT-based games.
“We are still in the early days of Web 3.0, and the most obvious opportunities right now are in gaming and social,” Seven Seven Six Founder Ohanian said on Dec. 17. “This initiative will do just that, with a focus on gaming properties and social media platforms built on Polygon’s scalable infrastructure. We’ve already seen some of the best product founders in our portfolio start building on Polygon.”
That follows Seven Seven Six’s November announcement of a $100 million investment in developing Web3.0 social media projects on the Solana blockchain, an Ethereum competitor.
And keep in mind, Mark Zuckerberg is so sold on the idea of the metaverse, an immersive virtual reality world where people can interact via avatar, that he took Facebook’s name off of his company and renamed it Meta, and got socked by a $200 billion stock drop after a less-than-stellar Q4 earnings report that disappointed analysts — and coincidentally (or not) revealed that the company spent $10 billion last year on its Metaverse projects.
It kind of makes you look at the gaming world and wonder, who’s next?
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