Why the Metaverse Isn't Dead... hey... where'ya going? LISTEN!!!
Seriously, this still means something to your craft... or at least mine...
Okay, why this topic?
Well if you’ve taken the time (why would you?) to follow a bit of my career you’d know that I still have a Metaverse show in the works in the US, (funded to the tune of low-six figures) and that I’ve been paid fairly handsomely to write “things” for this space.
(My partner was also one of the few courted and considered for those short-lived CMO positions [Chief Metaverse Officer]… so we’ve been in and around this media/technology for a while.)
I’m gonna assume by now you know what the Metaverse (terribly named) kinda is. If not here’s a primer.
Next… what the actual fuck happened?
🚀 Why the Metaverse Hype Took Off in the First Place
Unfortunately the metaverse hype wasn’t born from tech innovation—it was born from corporate panic.
After the slow-motion car crash that was the late arrival of many legacy companies to Web 2.0 (think: Blockbuster missing streaming, retailers sleepwalking past Amazon, publishers fumbling social media), executives were terrified of being late again. When Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to Meta in 2021 and declared the metaverse “the next chapter of the internet,” companies stampeded—not because they understood it, but because they didn’t want to miss the next internet gold rush.
Suddenly, banks, fashion houses, and fast food chains were buying virtual land and launching branded NFTs, all while bleeding press releases that screamed: “Look, we get it now!” And most of the efforts were absolute DREK.
Crap no one wanted or even asked for. All with a corporate sheen of incompetence in charge of blind panic.
The result? A bubble inflated by buzzwords and boardroom’s sweaty FOMO. And when the hype didn’t convert into revenue overnight, everyone yelled “It’s dead!”
Alrighty! ON with the actual stuff…
🧟♂️ The Metaverse Isn’t Dead. It’s Just Not Wearing a Zuck Suit Anymore.
TL;DR: The Metaverse didn’t die. It just left the hype cycle, shed its corporate cosplay, and got back to work. While pundits declared it dead, billions in infrastructure, innovation, and creativity are quietly moving forward.
💀 Reports of Its Death Have Been Greatly Monetized
Headlines like “The Metaverse Is Dead” (Insider, 2023) and “RIP Metaverse”(WSJ, 2023) helped harvest clicks—but missed the point entirely. They were gleefully beating on Meta (not that Meta didn’t deserve it) and not reporting on what was actually out there.
They weren’t wrong about Meta.
They were wrong about the Metaverse.
🌍 Real Work, Real Money, Real Metaverse
🔹 $3 trillion – That’s the projected economic impact of XR technologies globally by 2031, across industries like health, defense, manufacturing, and yes, entertainment (Analysis Group, 2022).
🔹 600M+ creators earned money on Roblox in 2023. The "dead" Metaverse paid out $680 million to developers. (Roblox Investor Report, 2023).
🔹 Epic Games, creator of Fortnite (arguably the most functional Metaverse), just raised $2B more to keep building persistent, cross-platform digital worlds. (Epic Games PR, 2022).
✍️ Storytellers: This Is Your Opening
The Metaverse isn’t a product. It’s a canvas. And, you my storytellers, are its nervous system.
Playable worlds need narrative. Even sandbox spaces like Fortnite or VR Chat benefit from embedded world rules, character arcs, and emotional stakes.
Digital identities need authorship. Avatars and persistent personas are storytelling tools waiting for backstory, growth, and connection.
Immersive UX needs emotional architecture. Whether it’s a VR drama, a multiplayer narrative, or a persistent character in a branded space, someone needs to write why it matters.
Branded Metaverse experiences fail when they forget story. This is where you come in. Not to shill—but to structure, to imagine, to provoke. And branded experiences (live and digital) continue apace.
If you can write nonlinear paths, build interactive narratives, or scaffold emotional hooks into explorable environments—you’re not just relevant. You’re essential.
🎮 The Metaverse Was Never…
The Metaverse is not a single app, brand, or headset. It’s a shift in how we live, work, and play digitally —persistent identity, interoperable platforms, shared space, user-driven economies. (And for a lot of people, they are there already, in a fragmented digital self across platforms.) It’s the understructure of our digital lives and identities.
It’s Zoom + Roblox + Fortnite + Spatial + Decentraland + your work Slack channel + the next thing we haven’t seen yet. It’s already here, just unevenly distributed and not quite connected… yet…
🪦 Long Live the Metaverse
So yeah—Meta’s version flopped. But that’s like saying the internet failed because AOL died.
The Metaverse isn’t dead. It just stopped pretending to be a fashion show in Horizon Worlds and got back to what it always was: a place we’re already living in.
Interested? Resources:
Rob Morgan’s Storytelling for Spatial Computing
Stephanie Riggs’ Quantum Narratives
Get on Roblox
If you wanna start building… get yourself to the Unreal Engine