Coming here to Marina Bay Sands for the META Expo one weekday afternoon I found myself wondering how different things would have been had it been held at, say, a year or so ago.
See, crypto, blockchain, gamefi or defi (for that matter) has not had the best of years.
This isn't bias..
It's in the news.
How far it's affected the metaverse and the worlds linked to it, I don't know, but from the looks of it, there's definitely a bit of lull and much of the crowd that I saw seemed slightly more cautious, less woke, and maybe a tad more severe.
It's not just crypto or defi.
META hasn't had the most fantastic of years either.
Perhaps it affected the layman's general interest in the metaverse.
Perhaps not.
That's not to say that the metaverse and multiverse and blockchain is solely influenced by META.
Of course not.
Multiverses, parallel universes, and the concept of it have been around for a very long time.
That being said, I'm not being biased against Horizon Worlds either.
They're there.
They will continue to be there.
Except that, perhaps, at some point or another there'll be the expected competition, the expected directions and the expected definitions.
No one's really sure how the year(s) ahead for metaverse and multiverse will be, but if there's one thing they're doing, they (and the crew) are definitely keeping their heads up working hard to maintain its flow.
I liked some of the opinions that were shared.
Didn't matter that I'd heard some of them before.
Didn't matter either that they were a little vague about their thoughts.
I just liked the fact that they were continuing to develop gamefi, continuing to develop material and content to keep the gamefi, and not undermining efforts to what the technology, and markets were about.
Would've been better, of course, had there been more people to discuss the present situation, the possible solutions. their opinions and trending views.
They just weren't there this year.
(I guess that's why there wasn't coffee...)
But it's a season of caution.
And so we saw a conference (about future tech) with a very, very different atmosphere.
I wouldn't consider it a bad thing, however.
There were sharings I valued- like how the term Web 3.0 had been coined by (someone) in Microsoft more than twenty five years ago,
You know, there's hardly an industry in the world that has never seen a lull.
Maybe the speakers and the sponsors might have mostly come from one territory this year, but there's no saying that there won't be more sponsors next year, and there's no saying that they won't be coming from other territories in another year.
