Forget skill-based gaming (as though we haven’t, already). Forget cashless gaming. Forget electronic table games.
Those technological advances are child’s play.
The future is about the metaverse.
The metaverse, in case you’ve been living under a rock recently and don’t know, is the combination of virtual reality and artificial intelligence and other tech goodies on the horizon to create virtual worlds in which people can live, work and play.
It’s become the hot item anticipated for our investment futures thanks in large part to chief cheerleader Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, er…Meta Platform.
It seems a perfect advancement for the world of gaming, both the gambling and nongambling kinds.
Imagine what live online gambling will be like when you can virtually stand at the craps table and join in the roar of your fellow players as the dice roll.
Want to take a break and see a show? Every show in Las Vegas is at your fingertips, and you get a great seat and never have to tip a waiter. Join in with your friends in reliving the night at a virtual bar.
In the metaverse, the entire casino experience is yours without ever leaving home.
And the idea that brick-and-mortar casinos will always thrive because people are social animals and will always want to interact will be seriously weakened when you can interact in the metaverse.
So, who makes money in the gaming metaverse? One answer is the technology companies that can make it happen. Evolution could revolutionize its live table games.
The casino companies will have a vested interest in converting the players in their databases into virtual customers just like they today intend to convert them to more conventional online gaming.
The great entertainment companies from Disney to Comcast to Netflix can create casinos or form partnerships with casinos. Indeed, the alliances being formed rapidly today between media, sports leagues, casino companies and gaming technology companies may be mere harbingers of vaster alliances to come.
Of course, living much of our lives in virtual worlds might have greater negative risks for society than even the omnipresent pitches on radio and television sports broadcasts for people to gamble their money away.
Even with today’s much less encompassing technology, we see worries that young people aren’t properly socializing and there are concerns that platforms from Tik Tok to Instagram are having harmful effects on the social and psychological development of children. There’s a reason China is imposing time limits and schedules on when young people can play online games.
Imagine how much socializing will be disrupted and relationships terminated or never formed when an irresistibly alluring metaverse is created.
The old saying is that demographics is the future. We’re seeing that today with plunging birth rates and people in consumer societies wanting to consume, not have families. Though the worry has long been that population will grow past the planet’s carrying capacity, population decline is starting to become the new worry.
China wants people to have more children or it sees crisis ahead. A plunging American birthrate is increasingly cited as a risk to prosperity.
A Pew Research survey shows that 56 percent of Americans under 50 do not want to have children or more children.
Imagine what that figure will be when people can satisfy so many of their needs and desires in the metaverse and never have to form bonding relationships in the real world.
And imagine the consequences for a world of continuing population decline. It’s hard to make a profit when your customer base withers away.
