China’s Tech Giants to Invest in $8 Trillion Metaverse Opportunity

China’s tech giants are moving forward with an $8 trillion metaverse opportunity, which will be highly regulated. 

China’s tech giants Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, are investing in the metaverse. 

U.S. firms such as Facebook’s parent Meta are moving entirely towards the metaverse, while Microsoft has already considered the proposed acquisition of gaming company Activision as a play on this theme.   

Analysts said the processed legislation will be used to adjust the metaverse applications, even as new ones are developed.  

“The sheer diversity of metaverse applications means developing a ‘one-fits-all’ set of policies will not be feasible for Beijing,” Hanyu Liu, China market analyst at Daxue Consulting, said.  

Tencent CEO Pony Ma said, “the metaverse will be an opportunity to add growth to existing industries such as gaming. Tencent is the world’s largest gaming company with a strong portfolio of PC and mobile games.” 

Also, Tencent-owned WeChat, a messaging service with over a billion users with social media aspects. Pony Ma emphasized that the company has “a lot of the technology and know-how building blocks” to explore and develop the metaverse.  

In addition, more specific regulation elaborated on what analysts stated could be used to manage the metaverse. For example, authorities passed a set of regulations on January that govern how internet firms can use recommendation algorithms.  

This process was followed by draft rules regarding so-called “deep synthesis” technology. At the same time, this is connected to a software that is used to generate or edit voices, video or images or virtual settings.   

“Each specific application would receive its own unique set of regulations that build upon existing legislature, China also continues to censor content on its tightly controlled internet,” the reports said.  

“We should also expect to see strict censorship, meaning there will most likely be an isolated, Chinese metaverse that is separate from the international,” Liu said.  

Given that the metaverse is the future of social networking, the main Chinnese tech giants must engage fully in the new technology to find new ways to enroll the youngest generation of internet users,, Winston Ma, managing partner at CloudTree Ventures, noted. “This is critical at the time when their business models on smartphones and mobile internet are matured.”