Paul Benjamin Lowry ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an Eminent Scholar and the Suzanne Parker Thornhill Chair Professor in Business Information Technology at the Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, where he serves as the BIT PhD and Graduate Programs Director. He is an AIS Fellow, and a member of the AIS College of Senior Scholars and the AIS College of Academic Leadership. He is a former tenured Full Professor at City University of Hong Kong and The University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona and an MBA from the Marriott School of Business. He has published 300+ publications, including 170+ journal articles in the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), Information Systems Research (ISR), MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), Information Systems Journal (ISJ), European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, Decision Sciences Journal (DSJ), various IEEE Transactions, and others. He is on the senior board of editors at JMIS. He is on the senior board of editors at the JMIS. He also is an SE at ISJ and an AE at ISR. His research interests include (1) organizational and behavioral security and privacy; (2) online deviance, online harassment, and computer ethics; (3) HCI, social media, and gamification; and (4) business analytics, decision sciences, innovation, and supply chains.
Wai Fong Boh ([email protected]) is President’s Chair Professor of Information Systems at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Nanyang Business School (NBS) in Singapore. She is Vice President for Lifelong Learning and Alumni Engagement for NTU. She is also Director of the Information Management Research Centre at NBS, and serves as co-Director for NTU Centre in Computational Technologies for Finance. She received her PhD from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Boh’s research interests lie in the areas of innovation and technology management. She has published in leading journals, including Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, and others. She has served as a Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly and Associate Editor for Management Science and Information Systems Research, and sits on editorial board of several leading Information Systems journals. She holds Singapore’s Public Administration Medal (Silver) and published a monograph Identifying Business Opportunities through Innovation. She received the AIS Fellow Award and AIS Sandra Slaughter Service Award.
Stacie Petter ([email protected]) is the inaugural Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs for Wake Forest University and the Peter C. Brockway Chair of Strategic Management and Professor of Management Information Systems at the Wake Forest University School of Business. Her research focuses on the impacts of information systems on individuals, organizations, and society, including how information technology can be used to counter human trafficking, how gamification can provide value in organizational settings, and how and why individuals use information technology for their personal or professional needs. Dr. Petter’s work appears in such journals as MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, and others. She has received research funding from the National Science Foundation and the IBM Center for the Business of Government. She has served in many editorial roles at journals, including Editor-in-Chief of The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems. She is a Fellow of the AIS and a recipient of the AIS Sandra Slaughter Service Award.
Jan Marco Leimeister ([email protected]) is Chair Professor and Managing Director of the Institute of Information Systems and Digital Business at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. He is also Director at the Research Center for IS Design at the University of Kassel, Germany, and an AIS Fellow. His work covers digital business, AI-driven value creation, digital service management, crowdsourcing, digital Work, digital learning services, and collaboration engineering. He has been internationally recognized for out-standing research, teaching, and education. He ranks repeatedly since 2009 among the top 1% of the most productive researchers and professors in Business Administration in the German-speaking area. He has served on the AIS Leadership Council, is Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Information Technology, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Management Information Systems and Information Systems Research. Dr. Leimeister is also an entrepreneur, and acts as senior advisor, board member, and keynote speaker for national and international organizations. His research has been funded by German, Swiss, and European Union ministries as well as by industry, foundations, and NGOs.
IntroductionIn the early 2020s, many organizations were excited about the promise of the increasing capabilities of technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), to allow individuals to work and play within what was envisioned as “the Metaverse.” Although the definition of the Metaverse is evolving and wide-ranging based on each stakeholder’s perspective and goals [26], one broad definition is a persistent, virtual representation of a world and its users accessed using technology. Although often referred to as the Metaverse, there is no singular Metaverse that individuals may access or experience. Instead, many metaverses exist for different purposes depending on the reason for creating the virtual world.
Organizations, groups, and individuals have recognized commercial and social opportunities within the Metaverse. Because physical and geographic boundaries are irrelevant within a Metaverse, the constraints of the physical world can be reimagined. Individuals can interact in similar or different ways than the physical world. Recognizing the potential of the Metaverse, many of the world’s leading technology companies invested tens of billions of dollars on related software and hardware to foster this market, including Meta (famously renamed from “Facebook” as an all-in bet on the Metaverse), Microsoft, Snapchat, Amazon, NVIDIA, Epic Games, Apple, among others [52]. Others are considering how Metaverse applications can improve an individual’s quality of life [66] or positively influence society [74].
A few years after Facebook renamed itself to Meta, the division focusing on the hardware and software to power its Metaverse has billions of dollars in losses each quarter, with more than $45 billion in losses between 2020 and 2024.1 The progress and momentum around the Metaverse that developed in the early 2020s appears to have stalled, mainly as firms now focus more on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The most ardent critics have questioned if the Metaverse is “dead” or mere marketing hype.
Rather than suggesting that the Metaverse is dead or stalled, we contend that the Metaverse is still in its nascent stages [42], as it continues to move through the usual hype cycle seen with breakthrough technologies. As hardware, software, and telecommunication advancements persist, the Metaverse will unleash a new wave of disruption. As information systems (IS) scholars, we should recognize the hype cycles inherent in any significant technological breakthroughs. We saw similar cycles with mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers (PCs), the Internet, and smartphones. Most recently, we observed this cycle with AI, which went through various phases to achieve its current disruptive state with GenAI. Many advances within GenAI will likely be fundamental enablers for many Metaverse applications.
What factors are at play in the Metaverse that, once addressed, will lead to a convergence toward disruptive breakthroughs? First, we need economies of scale and scope, especially concerning specialized hardware. Hardware and software that promotes immersive experiences in the Metaverse, such as VR and AR headsets and glasses, have made tremendous progress, but many are too expensive for mass adoption. Second, there must be highly profitable breakthrough markets and innovative business models where network effects and lock-in are possible on a large scale. The early dot-com bubble burst of 2000-2002 was due to massive investments and considerable increases in stock prices in conjunction with little profitability, as most business models were rehashed mainly from brick-and-mortar models. Although Amazon.com is a success story of the dot-com era, its original business plan did not offer much regarding a business model revolution. As Amazon scaled the volume and breadth of its offerings to achieve greater network economies of scale and scope, it also created a sophisticated technological infrastructure that it used for its core offering. Amazon has leveraged the primary infrastructure used for its original business model to innovate and diversify itself with Amazon Web Services (AWS), third-party fulfillment services, and Amazon Prime.
Likewise, the same pattern must be followed in creating Metaverse-specific business models, marketing strategies, and products [75]. Assuming that the physical hardware and network infrastructure will soon provide what is needed to make the Metaverse successful, information systems scholars should engage in research to consider new business models and designs to support the Metaverse and its applications. As an immersive and complex structure, the Metaverse imposes considerably greater demands than previous online businesses or platforms [37, 65, 93, 98] and requires more advanced technological ecosystem approaches [3]. Fostered by the virtually endless use cases in the Metaverse, organizations struggle to manage the increasing complexity and fail to capture this emerging technology’s broader business model and market potential [11]. Although these demands may cause short-term profiteers to pause, such demands should be considered exciting research problems for scientists to address. Likewise, the extensive array of business prospects in the Metaverse calls for entirely new combinations of online and offline business theories to generate sustainable profit streams [69].
As we emphasize in this article and throughout the corresponding special issue on the Metaverse, we encourage researchers to break down the Metaverse as a monolithic black-box idea into more specific markets, business models, and opportunities. We can provide discourse-specific theories, design artifacts, affordances, processes, methods, and empirical evidence to foster breakthrough innovations at these more meaningful levels. Thus, in this article, we first describe some of the foundational technological components of the Metaverse. Next, we identify some major markets, business models, and opportunities for the Metaverse. Of these, researchers in the sciences of the artificial should contribute by projecting ahead of these trends, not reacting to them. Some of these markets and models are more mature than others, and more advanced industrial and healthcare breakthroughs in the Metaverse will be built on the foundation of the consumer and commercial Metaverse. Understanding and focusing on specific contexts within these discourses will be crucial to making meaningful scientific contributions. Finally, we review each article in the accompanying special issue on the Metaverse and offer additional suggestions for future research to expand understanding and opportunities.
Notes
1.Ashley Capoot (2024) “Meta loses $200 billion in value, Zuckerberg focuses on AI, Metaverse“CNBC.com (published April 24, 2024; last accessed November 23, 2024).
2.Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992), Bantam Spectra.
3.Scott Porter, John Harrison, Adrian Ang, Rich Golich, and Sandeep Gupta (2022). “What’s possible for the gaming industry in the next dimension?“EY.com (published 2022; US SCORE no. 15854-221US, Ernst & Young LLP; last accessed November 18, 2024).
4.Bernard Marr (2022). “The future of social media in the Metaverse,” Forbes (published August 24, 2022; last accessed November 18, 2024).
5.Roblox (2021). “Ralph Lauren: The Winter Escape,” Roblox Wiki (Roblox event that started December 8, 2021 and ended January 3, 2022; site last accessed November 18, 2024).
6.Juniper Research (2021). “Digital Adult Content: Market Forecasts, Key Monetisation Models & Emerging Technologies 2021-2026,” (last updated August 2021; last accessed November 30, 2024).
Allied Research (2023). “Adult Entertainment Market By Type, By Gender, By Age Group, By Distribution Channel: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2023-2032,” (last updated June 2023; last accessed November 30, 2024).
7.Tanya Basu (2021). “The Metaverse has a groping problem already,” MIT Technology Review (published December 16, 2021; last accessed November 24, 2024).
8.Nokia (2024). “Meet the Metaverse generation,” Nokia (published 2024; last accessed November 18, 2024).
9.Mary K. Pratt (2024). “18 real-world use cases of the Metaverse, plus examples,” TechTarget (published March 27, 2024; last accessed November 18, 2024).
10.Jordan Ashley (2024) “All Fortnite Collabs - Every Crossover in All Five Chapters,” esports.net (published November 21, 2024; last accessed November 24, 2024).
11.Manuel Bronstein (2023) “Introducing Experiences for People 17 and Older,” Roblox (published June 20, 2023; last accessed November 24, 2024).
12.Mayumi Brewster (2022). “Annual retail trade survey shows impact of online shopping on retail sales during COVID-19 pandemic,” United States Census Bureau (published April 27, 2022; last accessed November 26, 2024).
13.McKinsey & Company (2023) “Unlocking commerce in the Metaverse,” McKinsey & Company (published June 8, 2023; last accessed November 23, 2024).
14.Kate Whiting (2023) “The 3 main ways we are using the ‘Metaverse’ explained,” World Economic Forum (published February 17, 2023; last accessed November 24, 2024).
15.Mark Purdy (2022) “How the Metaverse Could Change Work,” Harvard Business Review (published April 5, 2022; last accessed November 26, 2024).
16.McKinsey & Company (2023) “Unlocking commerce in the Metaverse,” McKinsey & Company (published June 8, 2023; last accessed November 23, 2024).
17.Gucci (2022). “ZEPETO x Gucci: The House partners with ZEPETO, the app and social media to personalize avatars and create virtual worlds,” Gucci (published 2022; last accessed November 18, 2024).
18.Cathy Hackl (2022) “Metaverse Commerce: Understanding The New Virtual To Physical And Physical To Virtual Commerce Models,” Forbes (published July 6, 2022; last accessed November 23, 2024).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2025.2455770
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Key words and phrases: Metaverse, consumer metaverse, commercial metaverse, industrial metaverse, healthcare metaverse, virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, extended reality, artificial intelligence, immersive systems