ResearchAndMarkets Forecasts Metaverse in Entertainment Market Growth

The report attributes the expected expansion to investment by gaming companies, media platforms, streaming providers and technology vendors. For builders in tokenised games, the relevant signal is narrower: immersive entertainment is still attracting infrastructure and content budgets. The market estimate does not distinguish between open virtual economies and closed-platform experiences.

XR spending is not an ownership stack

The report places extended reality at the centre of the projected market, grouping AR, VR and mixed reality as the technical layer for interactive digital environments. It also identifies mixed-reality devices as the fastest-growing segment, citing their use across gaming, live events, concerts and interactive storytelling.

That is a hardware and interface thesis. It says little about the underlying state model.

A virtual item can appear in an XR world without being portable, tradable, or user-controlled. An avatar can persist within one operator’s database while remaining inaccessible outside it. Blockchain, NFTs and virtual assets are included among the technologies and features cited in the report, but their presence in a market definition is not evidence of a functioning open economy.

The critical question remains architectural: where does ownership state sit, who validates transfers, and what happens when a publisher changes the rules? If the answer is still a single platform backend, the metaverse label changes the rendering layer, not the control plane.

Gaming remains the demand test

The forecast connects expansion to demand for interactive, real-time digital experiences across games, sports, music, live events and virtual cinemas. Gaming is therefore one contributor inside a wider entertainment bundle, not a standalone measure of Web3 game adoption.

That distinction matters. Entertainment formats can bring users into shared virtual spaces, but they do not automatically create sustained game economies. A large event can raise concurrency. It does not establish throughput for trading, low-friction onboarding, balanced sinks for virtual assets, or reliable settlement between players.

The accompanying market narrative points to investments in immersive hardware, platforms and content ecosystems. For Web3 studios, the practical test is whether that spending lowers the cost of reaching players without forcing each game into another closed identity, wallet and marketplace silo. Community acquisition mechanics also deserve scrutiny: teams choosing incentives should compare tiered and flat referral rewards for Web3 growth against the actual friction of their onboarding flow, rather than treating referrals as a substitute for product retention.

A forecast is not a scalability verdict

North America is expected to hold the largest share of the market, according to the report, supported by technology firms, gaming platforms, entertainment providers, digital infrastructure and investment in spatial computing. Apple, Meta, Microsoft and NVIDIA are named in the source text as participants advancing immersive hardware or content ecosystems.

Those are distribution and compute signals. They do not resolve the game-layer bottleneck: a persistent economy needs systems that can handle player activity, asset state and transactions without degrading latency or moving every meaningful decision back to a central operator.

The market can expand while most virtual worlds remain walled gardens. For Web3 gaming, the forecast is constructive only if new entertainment demand translates into lower friction and verifiable player control. Until then, the scalability verdict is binary: more immersive screens, yes; proven open virtual economies, no.