Metaverse projects continue to attract investment. German Flying Sheep Studios has announced that it has received $ 1.2 million to create the game Star Life. The money was given by the Federal Ministry of Economy and Climate Protection of Germany.
Metaverse
Everything related to the metaverse and the industry surrounding it. What different companies and developers think about this concept, as well as new metaverse products and innovations.
Epic Games is now one step closer to realizing its metaverse ambitions. The company will release the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, so players can release their own experiences directly into the world-famous battle royale game.
Last year, NetDragon Websoft appointed a new CEO who was not a human, but an AI bot. This non-trivial solution eventually helped the Chinese company increase the value of its shares.
American Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal are concerned that Meta* is rumored to want to expand the audience of Horizon Worlds and let teenagers into its metaverse. They turned to Mark Zuckerberg and called for the plans to be immediately curtailed.
Honkai: Star Rail, the upcoming game from Genshin Impact developer miHoYo, has already attracted millions of players in the months leading up to its launch. This is due to the recently launched pre-registration event.
Ambitions to create a metaverse are expensive for Meta*. In the latest financial report, the company reported that the losses of the Reality Labs division for 2022 amounted to $13.717 billion, which is 34.5% more than a year ago.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) has released the results of its annual survey about the current state of the games industry. Here are the key takeaways from the study, including devs’ views on the metaverse and consolidation.
The organizers of the Game Developers Conference have published an annual large-scale study on the state of the gaming industry. As part of it, over 2,300 developers were interviewed.
miHoYo’s ambitions go beyond Genshin Impact. The Shanghai-based company is aiming to build its own virtual universe with a user base of roughly 1 billion players.
This year, Americans spent 2% less on VR headsets compared to 2021, CNBC reports, citing data from the NPD Group. Their expenses decreased to $1.1 billion.
Andrew Bosworth, technical director of Meta*, wrote a post on the company’s blog about the work of the Reality Labs division.
Activision Blizzard has announced a change in its leadership team. Daniel Alegre, who has served as its president and COO since 2020, will leave the Call of Duty publisher in 2023.
Meta has cut around 13% of its workforce, which is the biggest round of layoffs in its history. Mark Zuckerberg took accountability for this decision and tried to explain how the company got to this point.
Actress Hellena Taylor refused to voice Bayonetta 3 because the fee was too low, the media found out that Meta*’s metaverse platform hardly attracts an audience, and ReportLinker released a forecast for the mobile gaming market – we tell you what happened in the gaming industry this weekend.
Konami did not specify when exactly the marketplace will open. Now she is looking for specialists who will help develop both the NFT business and the metaverse direction.
It is inconvenient and there are too many bugs in it.
The Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation announced the importance of regulating in—game currencies, Tencent decided to change its investment strategy, and ZA/UM studio lost several key developers of Disco Elysium, – we tell you what happened in the gaming industry this weekend.
According to the mobile developer and publisher, the first blockchain game should be released in the fourth quarter of 2022. BoomBit is working on it together with the company CherryPic.
The corresponding faculty will appear at the Nanjing University of Information Sciences and Technology, reports Modern Express. It will work on the basis of the Faculty of Information Engineering and will become part of the School of Artificial Intelligence.
Hilmar Pétursson stated this in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz . In his opinion, the history of the creation of MMO, metaverses and other large-scale game worlds can be traced back to the medieval Icelandic sagas. For example, before the “Younger Edda”, which reads like a script for video games.
Andrew Wilson told about this at the Goldman Sachs conference. The head of Electronic Arts (EA) said that there is a direct link between how long gamers play and how much money they end up spending. Therefore, the company is interested in having as much fascinating content as possible in its titles.
The developer under the nickname Fanfaron admitted that he started trading cryptocurrency in the hope of earning more money for the game, but chose the wrong time.
Meta has announced its decision to end support of the Facebook Gaming app. It was used as a hub for players, and now much of its functionality will be migrated to the main app.
Owners of VR headsets from Meta* will soon be able to no longer use social media accounts to log in. Yesterday, the company officially announced that special Meta accounts will be available to users in the near future.
Almost the entire amount went to the games. According to Sensor Tower calculations, they accounted for 94% of user spending in such applications for the first half of 2022.
Andreessen Horowitz, Endeavour, Konvoy Ventures and a number of other companies have also invested their money in the project.
Gallium Studios received this amount from the Griffin Gaming Partners venture fund. The money raised will be used to develop two projects — the VOXverse metaverse and the Proxi self-discovery AI simulator.
Perforce Software interviewed 300 developers from different countries. It turned out that almost half of them doubt that NFT will be able to change the gaming industry by 2025. At the same time, 56% of respondents believe in the potential of the metaverse.
Hadean specializes in creating virtual worlds. The startup has collaborated with Microsoft, Epic Games, Minecraft and the UK Ministry of Defense.
In the period from April to June, the number of new vacancies with the word “metaverse” in their description decreased by 81%. Such data is shared by the research company Revelio Labs.
As part of the MTV Video Music Awards, a new category has appeared — “best performance in the metaverse”. The organizers decided to add it after they noticed that artists are increasingly holding concerts in virtual worlds.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a complaint to block Meta’s proposed acquisition of Within Unlimited, a studio known for its VR app Supernatural. This deal, according to the regulator, will let the company kill competition and become a monopolist in the industry.
The Hand of Midas Foundation, opened by the founder of Xsolla, supported OnlySpace, a young publisher specializing in the metaverse and NFT. He invested $2.25 million in the startup. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Dubai wants to enter the top ten largest metaverse economies in the world. According to Bloomberg, the city authorities have launched a strategy under which the number of companies engaged in the metaverse and blockchain should grow fivefold in five years.
MetaX, a company developing VR and AR applications, has accused Meta* Corporation of violating the “META” trademark. She said that she had been developing this sign for more than 12 years “through blood, sweat and tears”, and because of the rebranding of Facebook* she faced serious problems.
Semenov&Pevzner Law Firm has prepared a global report on legal conflicts in the gaming industry over the past six months.
The analytical company YouGov, with the support of Globant, decided to find out what Americans think about the metaverse. She interviewed a thousand gamers from the United States aged 18 and older who spend more than three hours a week playing games.
Japanese game designer Tomonobu Itagaki will develop AAA-level blockchain games. He founded a studio called Apex Game Studios and has already announced the first project.
Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands has risen in price. The company specializing in NFT attracted new investments, after which its capitalization grew to $ 5.9 billion.
Shanghai continues to be seriously interested in the metaverse. The city authorities announced that they are going to create a fund for ¥ 10 billion ($ 1.49 billion), the money from which will go to the development of the metaverse direction. They hope that thanks to the financing, Shanghai companies will launch at least 100 “benchmark-level products and services” by 2025.
About this, with reference to the words of Alexey Goreslavsky, Director General of the Institute for Internet Development (IRI), writes the Kommersant newspaper, which also revealed the budget of the entire game in its entirety.
The companies organized the Metaverse Standards Forum. Within the framework of this forum, they will try to form standards for the open metaverse and develop a common terminology. The giants are also going to discuss project prototypes, hackathons, plugins and open source tools.
Manticore Games has agreed to cooperate with MetaMask and OpenSea. She announced that now Core platform users can use NFT in their games, and at the same time released several free guides.
The Chinese giant Tencent has taken another step towards creating its own metaverse. The company announced to employees the official launch of a division that specializes in XR. This is reported by Reuters, with reference to three people familiar with the issue.
David Chalmers shared his opinion in a conversation with the PC Gamer portal. He said that if people can recreate a full-fledged simulation of the human brain on a computer, they will get a consciousness similar to ours.
An unusual initiative from Azur Games. A developer and publisher of mobile games has announced a competition to create a concept for a new game mode for the Axes metaverse. The winning team will receive a grant for its implementation in the amount of $ 100 thousand, as well as 15% of all its future profits.
McKinsey & Co., a consulting company, believes that the concept of the metaverse has great potential. She predicts that in eight years the metaverse market will be valued at $5 trillion. However, only 2.5% of this amount will be spent on games.
The administration of St. Petersburg became interested in the metaverse. According to the vice-governor of the city Stanislav Kazarin, she wants to use metaverse technologies for state platforms.
Meta* together with the French company Simplon decided to independently train specialists who will be able to work in the metaverse. According to Agence France-Presse, they plan to open a so-called “metaverse academy” and train about 100 future professionals in the first year.
Over the past year, the concept of the metaverse has become one of the most discussed. And for a reason. Citigroup analyst Andre Lin believes that by the end of this decade, the turnover of the metaverse market could reach $8-13 trillion.
