Author: Zen, PANews
The "metaverse," which was repeatedly hyped up two or three years ago, is now becoming clearer in its true industry form as the narrative subsides. As 2025 draws to a close, the global metaverse industry presents a complex picture of "uneven development."
After experiencing the boom in 2021 and the cooling off in 2022, the metaverse ecosystem did not entirely fade away in 2025. Instead, certain sectors have seen recovery and breakthroughs.
However, some areas still struggle with sluggish growth, creating a stark contrast. Some have reached new heights in user scale and engagement, while others face declining activity or even user loss. This divergence between hot and cold has become a central observation point for the metaverse industry in 2025.
Immersive Gaming Platforms: Over 100 Million Users but Shedding the "Metaverse" Label
Immersive gaming, which provides virtual worlds, is currently the most mature and active area of the metaverse. In 2025, immersive UGC (User-Generated Content) gaming platforms continued to grow, with leading platforms performing notably well.
Roblox, as an industry bellwether, set new records in both user numbers and revenue: In Q3 2025, Roblox's average daily active users reached 151.5 million, a massive 70% year-on-year increase, with quarterly revenue growing 48% to $1.36 billion. Its vast user base indicates that the UGC metaverse model, blending gaming and social interaction, still possesses strong stickiness and appeal.
However, Roblox's official communications do not heavily emphasize the concept and narrative of the metaverse. It primarily articulated its metaverse vision during the peak hype in 2021. Nowadays, Roblox prefers frameworks like the "global gaming market," "platform and creator ecosystem," and "virtual economy" to tell its story, not placing the "metaverse" label in the most prominent position.
In contrast, Epic Games, the developer behind the game ecosystem Fortnite which also boasts hundreds of millions of monthly active users, still positions its platform as a key vehicle towards an open metaverse and an interoperable digital ecosystem. In November 2025, Epic Games announced a collaboration with the cross-platform game engine Unity. Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, stated that companies need to collaborate as they did in the early days of the internet to build an open metaverse in an interoperable and fair manner. According to Sweeney, 40% of Fortnite's playtime occurs in third-party content, i.e., the "metaverse" portion.
Fortnite's Festival, an original rhythm-based music game experience, collaborated this year with Hatsune Miku, Sabrina Carpenter, Bruno Mars, and BLACKPINK's LISA, bringing a virtual large-scale music festival experience to millions of players and fans. Additionally, Roblox also partnered with Icelandic-Chinese-American musician Laufey and K-pop girl group aespa for performances in its official music venue "The Block." Such events also prove that immersive platforms still have the potential to become new "digital third places," hosting new forms of entertainment and social interaction.
Besides these two, Minecraft was previously widely regarded as a metaverse gaming giant. However, this gaming platform rarely packages itself as a metaverse ecosystem; its core strategy focuses on community and creation. More crucially, Minecraft's support for immersive hardware like VR and MR also came to an end this year. The official Minecraft Bedrock update logs stated that support for VR/MR devices would no longer receive updates after March 2025, noting that after the final update, play would only be possible in non-VR/MR mode.
Overall, the immersive gaming platform sector in 2025 is characterized by "the strong getting stronger." Leading platforms like Roblox continue to expand their user base thanks to their massive ecosystems and creator communities, while smaller and medium-sized platforms face pressure from reduced user engagement or consolidation and elimination. The reduction, or even strategic abandonment, of metaverse concept promotion by leading ecosystems has undoubtedly significantly weakened the public awareness of the metaverse.
Metaverse Social: Old Bottles Waning, New Wine Brewing
Compared to immersive gaming, metaverse-style virtual social interaction had few highlights in 2025, with more reflection and exploration of new directions. Some early players have quieted down, while others are undergoing difficult transformations.
As a major flag-bearing platform, Meta Company gradually adjusted its strategy between 2023-2024, no longer developing VR social applications in isolation but attempting to integrate its metaverse social products with existing platforms boasting huge user bases like Facebook and Instagram.
However, Meta's Horizon Worlds has struggled to gain traction, with monthly active users still below 200,000—minuscule compared to Facebook's billions of users. In late 2024, Meta began opening Horizon Worlds to mobile and web platforms to lower the barrier to entry and expand its user base, claiming mobile users grew fourfold within a year. But as a platform primarily reliant on VR devices, Horizon remains limited in user adoption, far from experiencing explosive growth.
Meta's CTO admitted at the Connect 2025 conference that the company needs to prove that metaverse social can deliver sufficient user retention and profitable models; otherwise, sustaining massive investments would be difficult. To this end, Meta is ramping up the introduction of AI creation and NPCs to enrich Horizon's content while emphasizing integration with real social networks to reduce user acquisition costs.
Other new virtual space platforms focused on virtual socializing and entertainment present a mixed picture. The veteran VR social platform VRChat maintained steady growth driven by its core community, with user activity hitting new highs in 2025—the peak concurrent users on VRChat across all platforms exceeded 130,000 during the New Year's period in 2025, reflecting its vitality as an open community platform. Furthermore, user-generated content热潮 (boom) in markets like Japan drove over 30% growth for VRChat users between 2024-25.
In contrast, the social VR platform Rec Room, once valued at $3.5 billion, hit a growth bottleneck and announced layoffs of more than half its workforce in August 2025. Rec Room initially attracted capital favor with its cross-platform UGC gameplay and creator economy. However, as it expanded into mobile and console gaming, a flood of low-quality content entered, and the high-quality creation ecosystem failed to keep up, leading to user retention and revenue falling short of expectations. Rec Room's co-founder admitted that mobile and console users find it difficult to create content that attracts others, and efforts to bridge the gap, such as introducing AI creation tools, have not been effective.
2025 also saw some noteworthy explorations of new virtual social spaces. For example, AI technology began to be used to enhance virtual social experiences, such as introducing AI-driven virtual characters to accompany users in VR chatrooms or using GPT models to generate personalized virtual spaces for users. These innovations are still in the experimental stage but show the evolution direction of metaverse social: smarter environments, virtual characters with more emotional interaction, and tighter integration with real-world content.
Overall, metaverse social in 2025 is in a period of low tide and adjustment. The novelty of purely virtual socializing has worn off for mainstream users, and demand has returned to rationality: virtual spaces without quality content and genuine social value cannot retain users for long. This is evident from the situations of Horizon and Rec Room. The remaining players are also clearer about the direction of their next efforts: start by improving content quality and community culture, and find clever points of integration with real-world social interactions.
Hardware & Spatial Computing: AR Glasses Rise, VR Transforms Under Pressure
2024 was considered one of the "years of spatial computing" by the industry, with the release or push of several heavyweight XR (Extended Reality) hardware products reigniting interest in this sector.
The most notable in the first half of the year was Apple's Vision Pro—this high-end mixed reality headset was launched in limited quantities in the US in early 2024 and gradually rolled out to more regions in 2025. Priced at $3,499 and with limited production capacity, Vision Pro sales volume is limited. Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that Vision Pro is currently "not a product for the mass market," only satisfying early-adopter geek users.即便如此 (Even so), Apple continued investing in ecosystem building in 2025: releasing visionOS updates, and rumors emerged of possible improved hardware, including upgraded M-series chips and improved head straps.
Beyond the high-end market, Meta's Quest series still dominates the mass-market VR sector. The Meta Quest 3, released in late 2023 with improved performance and comfort, was a bestseller during the 2024-2025 holiday seasons consecutively. According to IDC data, Meta held about 60.6% of the global AR/VR headset + smart glasses market share in the first half of 2025, far ahead of the second tier.
Sony's PlayStation VR2, launched in early 2023, underwent significant price cuts and market repositioning in 2025. First-year sales were only around a few million units, below expectations. Starting March 2025, Sony reduced the official price of PS VR2 by approximately $150-200, down to $399.99, hoping to increase install base with a more affordable price. The price reduction strategy brought a sales boost during the holiday season, and cumulative PS VR2 sales are expected to approach around 3 million units by the end of 2025. However, compared to Quest's wireless portability, PS VR2 is still tied to the console platform, and its content ecosystem is mainly confined to the core console player circle.
Another highlight of XR hardware in 2025 was the rise of consumer smart glasses. Meta's collaboration with Ray-Ban on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses (second generation) was released that year,首次引入 (introducing for the first time) an integrated display, enabling basic AR functionality. Shipments of these "light AR glasses" without full immersive displays surged this year. An IDC report indicated that global AR/VR headset + smart glasses shipments are expected to reach 14.3 million units in 2025, a 39.2% year-on-year increase.
Meta's Ray-Ban model, because its外形接近普通墨镜 (appearance is close to regular sunglasses) and offers practical functions like photography and AI, was highly favored by urban young users. Overall, the XR hardware market in 2025 presented a pattern of "hot at both ends, cold in the middle": the ultra-high-end Vision Pro sparked innovation heat but had limited sales; the low-to-mid-end Quest and smart glasses volume sellers captured the bulk of the market; while traditional PC VR, expensive HoloLens 2, Magic Leap 2, and other enterprise AR devices had relatively平淡 (subdued) influence, mainly used in small-scale applications within the industry.
At the Meta Connect 2025 conference, Meta emphasized integrating generative AI into XR, allowing users to generate virtual scenes and objects through voice commands. Apple is also exploring the combination of Vision Pro with AI assistants and more natural human-computer interaction. This suggests that AI+XR will become a new investment hotspot in 2026. Secondly, industry collaboration and standards are accelerating: for example, the OpenXR standard gained wider support in 2025, with different brand headsets gradually becoming compatible in terms of content and accessories. Microsoft, Valve, and others are also酝酿 (brewing) new device entries into the market.
It is worth mentioning that applications of XR hardware outside the industry continue to expand: XR solutions in healthcare and education saw significant growth in 2025. More and more hospitals are using VR for psychological therapy, and schools are using AR to辅助教学 (assist teaching). These successful cases in professional fields will, in turn, prove the value of XR technology and lay the foundation for the long-term普及 (popularization) of the devices.
Digital Humans & Avatars: Technological Advancement and Commercial Exploration
The field of digital identity and virtual humans (Avatars) in the metaverse continued to develop in 2025, with several companies globally offering services to create and manage virtual avatars. Among them, South Korea's NAVER Z's ZEPETO and European startup Ready Player Me (RPM) are typical representatives.
As of 2025, ZEPETO's cumulative registered users have exceeded 400 million, with monthly active users around 20 million. While this scale is not as large as gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, it is quite considerable among vertical metaverse communities. ZEPETO's user base is primarily Gen Z, especially females. Users utilize it to create personalized 3D avatars, change into virtual fashion, and socialize and take photos in various scenes within the app.
In 2025, ZEPETO continued to attract numerous fashion and entertainment brands, including collaborations with luxury brands like GUCCI and Dior to launch limited edition digital clothing, as well as virtual fan meetings with multiple K-Pop idol groups. These activities boosted platform engagement, helping ZEPETO stabilize a post-pandemic user decline. Official data from NAVER Z shows that including ZEPETO and sticker tools, its overall product line月活 (monthly active users) reached 49.4 million, maintaining a growth trend in 2025.
Ready Player Me (RPM), as a cross-platform avatar creation tool, attracted external attention when it was acquired by Netflix in late 2025. Since its founding in 2020, RPM raised approximately $72 million from investors including a16z. RPM allows users to create 3D avatars that can be used across multiple virtual worlds and was earlier integrated into many games and applications. Prior to the acquisition, RPM had been adopted by over 6,500 developers who used its SDK to support RPM avatars in their products.
After acquiring RPM, Netflix plans to use its team and technology for Netflix's expanding game business, allowing Netflix users to have a unified virtual identity across various games. Additionally, RPM announced it would shut down its independent public avatar service in early 2026 to focus on internal integration.
Meanwhile, Snapchat, a veteran player in the social media领域 (field) with over 300 million daily active users, is also trying to further enrich Bitmoji's metaverse functions, such as testing the application of generative AI on avatars and launching the Bitmoji Fashion Store. Bitmoji is an application and service where "users turn themselves into cartoon avatars and use them as stickers"; most Snap users use it to customize their形象 (image).
On Meta's side, it is also investing in building its own Avatar system: in 2025, Meta introduced more realistic "Codec Avatars" in Quest and social applications, allowed cross-use across Facebook, Instagram, and Quest, and launched a series of AI-powered avatars endorsed by celebrities to interact with users in Messenger, striving to create a digital identity system贯穿 (permeating) its social and VR platforms.
Industrial Metaverse: Most Practical Significance, Accelerating Value Realization
Compared to the consumer-facing products like games and VR glasses mentioned earlier, the industrial and enterprise-grade metaverse, primarily面向B端 (targeting the B2B sector), became the most practically significant and growth-potential direction within the metaverse field in 2025. After the initial concept炒作 (hype), industries such as manufacturing, engineering construction, and medical training became the first adopters of industrial metaverse technology. In terms of market size, research reports indicate the industrial metaverse market was approximately $48.2 billion in 2025, expected to grow at a high compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.5% from 2025 to 2032, reaching a scale of around $600 billion by 2032.
A typical representative in this industry is NVIDIA's Omniverse platform, widely used by large enterprises for digital twins and simulation in 2025. According to reports, manufacturing leaders like Toyota, TSMC, and Foxconn are using Omniverse to build factory digital twins to optimize production line layout and AI training. The broad collaboration within the Omniverse ecosystem also reflects the commitment of industrial giants—industrial software companies like Ansys, Siemens, and Cadence deeply integrated with NVIDIA,打通 (breaking through) data and visualization standards.
Traditional industrial software vendors like Siemens themselves also actively promoted the industrial metaverse concept in 2025. A joint survey by Siemens and S&P Global claimed that 81% of global companies are already using, testing, or planning to implement industrial metaverse solutions. This indicates that the industrial sector places high importance on technologies like digital twins, IoT+AI, and immersive training.
In specific cases, BMW expanded its virtual factory project in 2025, using digital twins to simulate new model production line debugging, reducing time-to-market for new products by 30%; Boeing used HoloLens and digital twin technology to design and assemble complex aircraft parts, claiming to reduce design error rates for new aircraft models by nearly 40%. In healthcare and training, VR/AR applications also became more mature: several US hospitals adopted VR therapy (e.g., RelieVRx system) to help patient rehabilitation (康复) in 2025, and 84% of medical professionals believe AR/VR will positively change the industry.
Furthermore, multinational energy companies began using VR for hazardous condition training, and logistics companies used AR glasses to assist in warehouse picking, both achieving good ROI. For example, a French nuclear power company reported that VR training reduced accident rates among new employees by over 20%. This year also saw the launch of government-supported urban digital twin projects in some countries, such as Singapore upgrading its national 3D digital model for planning and Saudi Arabia creating a large-scale metaverse sandbox for the NEOM new city, all falling under the category of industrial metaverse落地成果 (landing achievements).
Therefore, the industrial metaverse has largely moved beyond hype and become a natural extension of digital transformation. However, its development also faces significant obstacles: solutions from different vendors are incompatible, and data silos exist, causing some companies to take a wait-and-see attitude; during the process of connecting production systems and cloud simulations, data security and confidentiality are corporate concerns. Addressing these pain points takes time. Thus, although the application proportion is high, many remain at the PoC (Proof of Concept) or small-scale stage, still far from full industry普及 (popularization).
Crypto, NFT Metaverse: Heavy Historical Baggage, Difficult to Stage a Comeback
After the bubble burst in 2022-2023, the speculative frenzy around NFT virtual land and链游 (blockchain games) subsided. However, "core players" in this track have not given up exploration; new projects and technological integration are attempting to revitalize this sector. Veteran decentralized virtual worlds like Decentraland and The Sandbox continue to operate, but user activity is incomparable to peak times.
DappRadar data shows that in Q3 2025, the total NFT trading volume for all metaverse projects was only about $17 million, with Decentraland's quarterly land交易量 (trading volume) at just $416,000 across 1,113 transactions. Compared to land sales worth millions of dollars per transaction during the 2021 peak, this represents a significant contraction. In terms of user activity, as early as 2022, DappRadar data showed Decentraland's daily active users were below 1,000, with concurrent users typically numbering in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, only reaching tens of thousands during major events.
This "ghost town" phenomenon also exists in The Sandbox and others. However, project parties strive to maintain the community through DAOs and events: Decentraland established a Metaverse Content Fund in 2025, with the DAO allocating $8.2 million to fund events like Art Week and Career Fair, hoping to attract creators and businesses back. The Sandbox partnered with Universal Studios and others to establish dedicated zones, launching IP-themed virtual areas like "The Walking Dead" in an attempt to attract new users.
Furthermore, the biggest event in the crypto metaverse in 2025 was arguably the launch of Yuga Labs' Otherside. As the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Yuga's long-awaited virtual world Otherside, in development for 3 years, officially opened for web access in November 2025, not requiring NFT ownership to enter. On the first day of service, it attracted tens of thousands of players into the new "Koda Nexus" area, creating a rare moment of high popularity for the Web3 metaverse. It is reported that Yuga also integrated AI world-generation tools into Otherside, allowing users to create 3D game scenes through conversation, enhancing UGC richness.
Compared to other metaverse paths, ecosystems integrating cryptocurrency and NFT carry heavier historical baggage. During the previous cycle's peak, excessive financialization and speculative narratives dominated product dissemination and user expectations, ultimately causing significant real losses for many participants.
The result is that metaverse ecosystems built on crypto assets and NFTs face more significant trust barriers at the public perception level. This track struggles to shake off the stereotypes of "asset speculation," "divorced from real需求 (needs)," and "poor experience." Even though some teams are still trying to return to a content and experience-focused approach, in the short term, it is almost impossible to escape the situation of being neglected and to win the trust and broad participation of mainstream user groups.
