A recently published report by Citibank (the consumer division of financial services multinational Citigroup) is creating headlines on the back of its prediction that the Metaverse could be worth “between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030, with total Metaverse users numbering around five billion.”
It’s worth noting that Citibank’s "Metaverse and Money” report caveats this revenue estimate as being based on their “broad definition” of the Metaverse, which is anyone using 5G or broadband. Citibank’s “narrow definition” (based on Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality headset users) reduces this revenue estimate to between $1 trillion and $2 trillion by 2030, with total Metaverse number around one billion. Regardless, these are still very big numbers.
Citibank also point out the barriers to achieving this level of market growth. They highlight similar challenges to those highlighted by senior vice president and head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics, Raja Koduri, in his December 2021 opinion piece titled “Powering the Metaverse”. In it, Raja posits that “computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable [the Metaverse].” And that: “Truly persistent and immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time” will require “a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from today’s state of the art.”
Even if we choose to overlook the technical barriers for those seeking to profit from the Metaverse, achieving a user base of billions of people will be no mean feat. Back in February, Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR Platform surpassed 300,000, averaging 100,000 new users every month since its launch in December 2021. If the company manages to maintain this rate of growth, its user base will hit around 10 million in 2030. However, if Meta can realize the kind for growth Roblox achieved between December 2016 and December 2020, when it was adding over 8 million users a month, then a quarter of a billion users could be on Horizon Worlds by 2030, roughly 15% of Citibank’s addressable user base.
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