Chinese business raises $760 million to develop metaverses

The global development of the metaverse is encouraging major Chinese tech giants to raise millions of dollars to create virtual ecosystem content.

Chinese business, with the support of the authorities, is rapidly developing the market for virtual worlds. The Chinese metaverse market is projected to grow to $5.8 trillion by 2030. In addition to 160,000 companies and start-ups, about 20 provinces and cities already support the metaverse.

Right now, media giant Tencent and top video game maker Netease Yaotai are competing to find ways to develop the metaverse. While Tencent is focused on supporting the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with the real economy, Netease Yaotai is focused on using cloud gaming and AI to create a system that improves interaction in the virtual world.

Tencent vice president Wu Yunsheng said the company will not make a clear distinction between business services and customer services when creating content for the metaverse.

“Our technology has two scenarios for using metaverse content for each market segment. For example, in the B2B sector, these are Baowu and Steel. In addition, there are many attempts to use the metaverse in the QQ messenger for the B2C segment. Therefore, when we go deep into the development of the metaverse, we will not make strong distinctions in the orientation of products for B2B and B2C, but we will show what real value and convenience our technology can bring to the lives of people and companies,” said Wu.

Liu Bai, CEO of Netease Yaotai, assured that his company has various kinds of activity scenarios and nearly “100 kinds of personalized shells” to be used for in-depth modeling.

“The key areas in the development of the metaverse are research and development, product planning and art,” says Liu.

In the next three years, the Chinese government of Shanghai intends to implement a program to support projects in
virtual reality for $52 billion.