I was asking the other day whether it is better or worse that my children play video games rather than watch movies, and the reaction was: time moves on. It surely does. The gaming industry is now bigger than Hollywood and music combined, so what do I know?
According to a report by SuperData Research, the global gaming market was valued at $159.3 billion in 2020 … to put that in perspective, the music industry was valued at $19.1 billion in 2020, while the movie industry was valued at $41.7 billion.
Source: Gamer Hub
Then we add AI to the mix. More than $40bn in venture capital flowed into ai firms in the first half of this year alone, according to The Economist, and Amazon has just invested $4 billion in Anthropic, an AI start-up company, all boosted by the success of Microsoft’s acquisition of OpenAI and ChatGPT.
Interesting times, as they say.
If you combine gaming with AI you get this: an AI generated K-pop group
Or you get Lisa, an AI-generated news anchor:
Or you get this
The Creator released tomorrow, is a movie all about a future war between the human race and artificial intelligence.
Interesting times.
Then you add the metaverse, where we can all jump into an AI gaming world and immerse ourselves in an alternative reality, and it gets interesting.
My kids tried Oculus the other day, and they absolutely loved it. In fact, we had an argument where my son was crying and non-stop screaming “I want virtual reality”. It kind of worried me.
I guess it is the culmination of gaming, AI and virtual reality that leads to a complex conclusion: will we end up as a human race that is living outside Earth?
This is the vision of the technocracy movement, co-founded by Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman. The vision is one where people live in a Matrix-styled world, and the real world moves around them. They believed that the world should be run by a totalitarian regime of engineers and scientists based in North America.
Hmmm ... interesting idea ... reality? Is this where humanity is going? We live in a Holodeck, and reality is ignored? Possibly for some of us but, for most of us, we will carry on working, doing jobs, travelling and sight-seeing and living life. Otherwise, the alternative is not the best choice.
Around all of this, we then need to consider commerce, trade, money and finance … or I do anyway.
What will be the bank of the AI-driven, gaming-based metaverse?
Well, you may think this is irrelevant but banks like JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank are very serious about creating the virtual banks of tomorrow in the metaverse.
Tim Alexander, who heads Global Brand and Marketing at Deutsche Bank, makes this clear:
“The metaverse is where our target group of tomorrow is. We want to find out how we need to present ourselves as a brand here in order to be relevant to these people in the virtual world. Because in the future, more and more clients might visit us in virtual worlds.”
Hmmm … interesting times.
[Checkout metaverse-bank.com and metaverse-coin.com]
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...
