Just earlier this month, we discussed the litany of esports organisations such as Fnatic, G2 Esports, and Natus Vincere that have joined forces with blockchain companies to create NFTs for fans to purchase.
But recently, there’s another video game company that’s throwing its hat into the ring.
Video game publisher Bandai Namco announced on March 29 that it is creating a metaverse around its famous Gundam franchise. The metaverse community will house several categories of interests, including anime, music, video games, and Gunpla, the Gundam franchise’s model kits.
The different categories will act as “colonies,” all converging together in a central hub. Bandai Namco even promised that users would be able to set up their own businesses using the Gundam brand and make their own content to sell in the metaverse’s market.
“By building a metaverse in which character rights are preserved and implementing this initiative,” Bandai Namco said in a statement, “it expects that new Gundam businesses will be created and that this will lead to further expansion of Gundam IP co-created with fans.”
With the video game Elden Ring, published by Bandai Namco in 2022, gaining massive popularity, this potential metaverse should see a swarm of video game fans lining up at the virtual door to join in the fun. This can provide video game players with a new way to express their fandom and even make money off of the content that they create.
The video game company is also investing hundreds of millions of dollars into a separate “IP Metaverse.” It’s apparent that Bandai Namco is looking to bring all of its intellectual property such as Dark Souls and Dragon Ball Z into a new era of the internet.
But this isn’t the only piece of big news to come in the metaverse industry. On April 12, New York-based esports conglomerate RektGlobal, known for owning the League of Legends team Rogue, agreed to merge with metaverse company Infinite Reality Inc. for 470 million USD.
“The way I like to say it is that we are a metaverse, social media entertainment and gaming company,” RektGlobal founder Amish Shar said to The Esports Observer. “Nothing like that exists right now. If you take our assets, and you take what they’re building and put it together, that’s how we whip up something special. And I think that’s how we see the next five years.”
These two developments not only prove video game and esports companies are increasingly interested in the metaverse’s growth, but it also shows the potential of the metaverse.
In Bandai Namco’s virtual vision, gamers can interact with the franchises and brands they love in an open market. In RektGlobal and Infinite Reality’s vision, the metaverse can be a crossroads between video gaming, social media, content creation, and entertainment. These two perspectives show that there are many hypothetical paths the metaverse can take in its development.
No matter how you look at it, this metaverse push is promising a lot of new, exciting changes, despite not being a fully fleshed-out thing just yet.
GosuRabbit is a marketing agency that specialises in providing entertainment, esports and gaming marketing services for brands, businesses and agencies across the globe.
If you enjoyed this article, follow us onLinkedIn for regular updates in the future!
