To follow up on our part 1 article on trending projects and activities in Metaverse, we have picked gamification and mainstream adoption as the two anchors for Metaverse growth in 2023.
Key Components of Metaverse Gamification
According to the Report, about 8 in 10 i.e. 79% of active users in the metaverse have made a purchase. In the next 5 years, it is projected that more than 15% of corporate revenue is expected to come from the metaverse. Businesses such as SMEs which are looking to harness the potential of the metaverse to enhance sales, brand awareness, and customer loyalty can do so through gamification. Some of the gamification components which can be deployed by SMEs are:
- Challenges: This component entails the setting up of gamification challenges which are tailor-made to motivate customers to take the necessary actions to get from where they are to where the businesses want them to be.
- Progress Bars: This component entails the boosting of customer engagement and brand loyalty through the use of progress bars which stimulate customers to complete gamification challenges whereby these bars would serve as indicators for the level of completion of these challenges.
- Rewards: This component entails the provision of badges, points, levels, special discounts, account credits, free gifts or free shipping vouchers as rewards for the completion of gamification challenges by customers.
- Virtual Environment: This component entails the creation of an augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) environment to boost sales conversion rates by allowing customers to interact with the goods and services offered by businesses in a manner which involve the use of gamification elements.
- In-Game Currencies: This component entails the incorporation of in-game currencies to boost customer retention and engagement through the use of these currencies as cash-back instruments to influence the behaviour of customers in a gamified virtual environment.
Key to the Mainstreaming of Web3
The key challenge for the mainstreaming of web3 lies in bridging web2 whereby this can be done by unlocking the metaverse through the harnessing of the following aspects of the metaverse:
- Creator Economy: Web3 can harness the creator economy of the metaverse to engage creators by providing a platform through which they can monetize their creations.
- User experience: Web3 can acquire more web users by providing an environment in which users can have a unique digital experience by discovering the metaverse through engagement with games, social experiences and live music etc.
- Economic Benefits: Web3's permissionless, distributed and democratized structure can benefit from the economies of scale and scope arising from the integration of the structure with metaverse-based use cases.
If recent data is anything to go by, the metaverse is progressively decoupling from cryptocurrencies. The prime indication of this is the resilience of the metaverse as exemplified by its rising investment fundings notwithstanding the crypto downturn. The resilience of the metaverse is due in no small part to its wide range of use cases particularly in the areas of e-commerce and retail as reflected in the key trends of its virtual spheres. The unlocking of the metaverse could be the key to the mainstreaming of web3.
