Virtual Worlds and Virtual Economies

Most of today’s consumer tech giants monetize through ads: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snap, YouTube. Virtual worlds are the next generation of consumer tech, and they’ll monetize through commerce—through virtual economies and marketplaces.

One digital world, Upland, recreates the real world and auctioned off Trump Tower to the highest bidder.

Today, virtual worlds are microcosms of the physical world. Eventually, the two will bleed into one another. This is already starting to happen:

It’s possible to place a phone call through a digital cell phone in Minecraft, and call someone on their real world phone.

The pandemic is accelerating one of the most important trends of the Internet: the creation and normalization of virtual worlds and virtual economies.

MMOs already make money this way. A common insult on Fortnite is to call someone “Default”, which means that the person is using free skins (free outfits and weapons). The cool players, meanwhile, pay for exclusive, sought-after skins; buying skins is a way of buying status in the game world.

Today, virtual worlds mostly take the form of multiplayer online games: Roblox players average nearly 3 hours per day in Roblox; Fortnite has been collectively played for 10.4 million years—about 52x the time that humans have occupied the Earth.

Most importantly, virtual worlds will level the playing field. We’re living through unprecedented income inequality, with global wealth concentrated at the top. In the analog world, talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. In virtual worlds, everyone will have equal access to opportunity: all a participant needs is Internet access. Vir... See more