Bain & Company: The Global Metaverse Industry Will Reach $900 Billion by 2030

Author: Consulting.us, Compiler: Heart of the Metaverse

According to Bain & Company’s “Taking the Hyperbole out of the Metaverse ” report, By 2030, the size of the Metaverse industry will reach $900 billion.

Though Mark Zuckerberg’s fall 2021 “Meta” metaverse project – complete with clumsy avatars and a half-baked ecosystem – is pretty interesting. But Bane believes that the metaverse will not die.

Still, the fully immersive virtual worlds of Ready Player One and Avalanche are a long way off, and the near-to-medium-term Metaverse remains a series of discrete interactive environments interacting with smartphones and computer screens.

While Zuckerberg hyped up the concept two years ago, simplified forms of the Metaverse have existed in video games for decades. Today’s most popular games – Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft – allow users to create virtual characters and virtual worlds.

Bain believes that the Metaverse is still in its initial “seed” stage and will likely remain so for at least the next 5-10 years. To scale, there must be compelling use cases, and those use cases take time to mature: It took more than a decade for smartphones and game consoles to emerge from their infancy, and nearly 20 years for the Internet and personal computers.

Companies need to get in early if they want to profit in a market projected to be worth $700-$900 billion by 2030. The ultimate winners are often found in the early stages of development, such as Microsoft and Apple in personal computers, Nintendo in video games, and Apple in smartphones.

Companies can take a vertical approach (spanning multiple parts of the technology stack) or a horizontal approach (focusing on a single layer). Meta is leading the way in vertical integration, bringing together hardware, app stores and virtual content in pursuit of broad user adoption.

Apple has also taken a vertical approach, announcing in June a pricey mixed-reality headset that uses an Apple-designed chip and operating system and connects to Apple’s app ecosystem.

Nvidia and Epic Games are taking a horizontal approach, offering chips and content creation tools, respectively, that are used by many companies in the metaverse.

Bain says that a single large Metaverse platform is unlikely; instead, existing consumer and enterprise applications will become more immersive. Companies have strong incentives to maintain “walled gardens” for profitable proprietary datasets and purchases within the ecosystem.

In the estimated 2030 market, virtual experiences will hold 65% of the market, followed by app stores and operating systems (10%), devices (10%), computing and infrastructure (10%), and content creation tools (5%).