The $200 billion gaming industry is fast becoming an important interface between Web2 and Web3. Recently, several gaming companies have integrated support for digital wallets and non-fungible token (NFT) reward systems, and even launched their own metaverses.
The growing importance of GameFi in the Web3 economy has led companies like Animoca Brands to believe that it will be the starting point for the Metaverse. During the Future Blockchain Summit, Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu said his focus is on the gaming industry, as it is closer to the metaverse than any other industry. He noted that GameFi will be “an entry point to the metaverse and introduce people to digital real estate.”
Related: Animoca Brands continues to make purchases with the acquisition of mobile developer MotoGP
Siu noted that currently, most of the $200 billion gaming ecosystem is not for players or even game companies, but mainly for promoters and advertisers such as Facebook and Apple. He added that the advent of Web3 could end that monopoly and return power to players and gaming companies.
“More than half of the value created in the gaming industry comes from Apple, Facebook and Google. How much of that goes to the gaming industry? Zero. This is today’s problem, and it makes the ecosystem unhealthy.”
Sioux noted that the Metaverse would not be a single or central entity, but a combination of multiple Metaverses. He said Metaverse will be “a construct of the new economy and is entirely dedicated to digital real estate.” He further explained:
“Metaverse for us is an entire economy. We don’t want to measure the future of these companies by PNL, we want to measure it in terms of GDP. In the same way that we cannot determine the value of Ethereum by how much gas it generates, but rather from its usefulness in general, in the same way the metaverse is an all-encompassing image. So thematically it is a metaverse; but in practice digital property of ITU2019.”
