The 'metaverse,' which was repeatedly hyped two to three years ago, has become clearer in its true industry appearance as the narrative has waned. As 2025 approaches its end, the global metaverse industry presents a complex situation of 'uneven heat.'
Author: Zen
Source: PANews
After the explosive growth in 2021 and the cooling down in 2022, the metaverse ecosystem in 2025 has not completely declined; instead, it has shown signs of recovery and breakthroughs in certain sectors.
However, in the meantime, some areas still struggle with growth, forming a stark contrast. Some users have reached new highs in scale and participation, while others face declining activity and even user attrition. This differentiation between hot and cold has also become a core observation point for the metaverse industry in 2025.
Immersive gaming platforms: Over 100 million users yet need to 'remove the metaverse' label
The virtual worlds provided by immersive games are currently the most mature and active areas of the metaverse. In 2025, immersive UGC gaming platforms continue to grow, with leading platforms performing brilliantly.
Roblox, as an industry benchmark, has achieved new highs in user scale and revenue: in the third quarter of 2025, the average daily active users of Roblox reached 151.5 million, a year-on-year increase of 70%, with quarterly revenue growing by 48% year-on-year to $1.36 billion. Its large user base indicates that the UGC metaverse model, which integrates gaming and socializing, still has strong stickiness and appeal.
However, Roblox's official stance has not emphasized the concept and narrative of the metaverse; it only articulated its vision for the metaverse during the period of its popularity in 2021. Now, Roblox prefers to use frameworks such as 'global gaming market', 'platform and creator ecosystem', and 'virtual economy' to tell its stories, without placing the 'metaverse' label in the most prominent position.
In contrast, Epic, the developer behind the game ecosystem Fortnite, which also has over 100 million monthly active users, still regards its platform as a key vehicle for the open metaverse and interoperable digital ecosystem. In November 2025, Epic Games announced a partnership with the cross-platform game engine Unity, with Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney stating that companies need to collaborate like 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 game time occurs in third-party content, referring to the 'metaversal' portion.
Fortnite's music festival is an original game experience centered on music and based on rhythm; this year, it successively collaborated with Hatsune Miku, Sabrina Carpenter, Bruno Mars, and BLACKPINK member LISA to bring virtual large-scale music festival experiences to millions of players and fans. In addition, Roblox has also collaborated with Icelandic-American singer Laufey and K-pop girl group aespa to perform in its official music venue 'The Block'. Such events also demonstrate that immersive platforms still have the potential to become a new 'digital third space', carrying new forms of entertainment and socializing.
Besides the two mentioned above, another giant widely regarded as a metaverse gaming ecosystem is Minecraft. However, this gaming platform rarely packages itself as a metaverse ecosystem; its core strategy focuses on community and creation. More importantly, Minecraft's previous support for immersive hardware like VR and MR also came to an end this year. Minecraft's official Bedrock update log states that support for VR/MR devices will no longer receive updates after March 2025, indicating that users can only continue to play in non-VR/MR modes after the final update.
Overall, in 2025, the immersive gaming platform sector demonstrates a 'stronger get stronger' trend, with leading platforms like Roblox continuing to expand their user base due to their large ecosystems and creator communities, while smaller platforms face user activity declines or pressures of consolidation and elimination. Moreover, the decreased promotion of the metaverse concept by leading ecosystems, or even strategic abandonment, has significantly weakened public recognition of the metaverse.
Metaverse social: Old bottle in decline, new wine waiting to rise
Compared to immersive games, metaverse-style virtual socializing has not made much remarkable progress in 2025, focusing more on reflection and exploration of new directions. Some early players have ceased operations while others are struggling to transform.
As a giant platform waving the flag against giants, Meta has gradually adjusted its strategy in 2023-2024, no longer developing VR social applications in isolation but attempting to integrate its metaverse social products with existing platforms like Facebook and Instagram that have a huge user base.
However, Meta's Horizon Worlds has struggled to develop, with its monthly active users still less than 200,000, which is negligible compared to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users. At the end of 2024, Meta began opening Horizon Worlds to mobile and web to lower barriers and expand its user base, claiming that mobile users grew fourfold within a year. However, as a platform primarily relying on VR devices, Horizon still faces limitations in user adoption, far from explosive growth.
Meta's CTO admitted at the Connect 2025 conference that the company needs to prove that metaverse socializing can bring sufficient user retention and profit models; otherwise, it will be difficult to continue investing heavily. To this end, Meta is intensifying the introduction of AI creation and NPCs to enrich Horizon content while emphasizing integration with real social networks to lower user acquisition costs.
Other new virtual space platforms positioned for socializing and entertainment present a stark contrast. The established VR social platform VRChat has maintained steady growth driven by its core community, with user activity reaching a new high in 2025—during the New Year of 2025, the peak number of simultaneous users across all platforms of VRChat broke 130,000, reflecting its vitality as an open community platform. Additionally, the user-generated content boom in markets like Japan has driven over 30% growth in VRChat users between 2024 and 2025.
In contrast, the social VR platform Rec Room, which was valued at $3.5 billion, encountered growth bottlenecks and announced layoffs of more than half its workforce in August 2025. Rec Room was initially favored by capital because of its cross-platform UGC gameplay and creator economy, but as it expanded into mobile and console gaming, a large amount of low-quality content flooded in, and the high-quality creative ecosystem failed to keep pace, leading to user retention and revenue falling short of expectations. The co-founder of Rec Room 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 also been ineffective.
In 2025, some explorations of new virtual social spaces are also worth noting. For example, AI technology begins to be used to enhance the virtual social experience, such as introducing AI-driven virtual characters to accompany users in VR chat rooms, or using GPT models to generate personalized virtual spaces for users. These innovations are still in the experimental stage but show the evolutionary direction of metaverse socializing: smarter environments, more emotionally interactive virtual characters, and tighter integration with real-world content.
Overall, metaverse socializing in 2025 is in a period of low tide and adjustment. The novelty of pure virtual socializing has worn off for the general public, and demand has returned to rationality: users will not stay long in virtual spaces that lack quality content and real social value. This is evident from the situations of Horizon and Rec Room. The remaining practitioners are also clearer about the next steps: starting from improving content quality and community culture, finding clever points of integration with real socializing.
Hardware and spatial computing: The rise of AR glasses, VR under pressure to transform
2024 is seen by the industry as one of the 'years of spatial computing', with several heavyweight XR (extended reality) hardware products being released or gaining traction, causing the sector to heat up again.
The most notable development in the first half of the year is Apple's Vision Pro—this high-end mixed reality headset was released in limited quantities in the U.S. in early 2024 and will gradually be promoted to more regions in 2025. With a high price of $3,499 and limited production capacity, the sales of Vision Pro are limited. Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that Vision Pro is currently 'not a product aimed at the mass market', catering only to geek users looking to try new things. Nevertheless, Apple continues to invest in ecosystem development in 2025: launching updates to the visionOS system and rumors of potential new hardware improvements, including upgraded M-series chips and improved headbands.
Outside the high-end market, Meta's Quest series still dominates the mass VR market. Launched at the end of 2023, the Meta Quest 3 has improved performance and comfort, selling well during the holiday seasons of 2024 and 2025. According to IDC data, Meta occupied about 60.6% of the global AR/VR headset + smart glasses market in the first half of 2025, far ahead of the second tier.
Sony's PlayStation VR2, launched in early 2023, underwent significant price reductions and market positioning adjustments in 2025. Due to its sales of only a few million units in the first year, which was lower than expected, Sony officially lowered the price of the PS VR2 by about $150-200 to $399.99 starting in March 2025, hoping to boost sales with a more affordable price. This pricing strategy brought a wave of sales boosts during the holiday season, with PS VR2's cumulative sales expected to approach around 3 million units by the end of 2025. However, compared to the wireless portability of Quest, the PS VR2 is still constrained by its console platform, and its content ecosystem remains primarily limited to the core console gaming audience.
Another highlight of XR hardware in 2025 is the rise of consumer-grade smart glasses. The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses (second generation), developed in collaboration with Ray-Ban, were released that year, introducing integrated displays for basic AR functions for the first time. The shipment of these 'lightweight AR glasses' without full immersive displays skyrocketed this year. An IDC report indicates that global shipments of AR/VR headsets + smart glasses are expected to reach 14.3 million units in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 39.2%.
Meta's Ray-Ban model is favored by urban young users due to its design resembling ordinary sunglasses and its practical features like photography and AI. Overall, the XR hardware market in 2025 presents a pattern of 'hot at both ends, cold in the middle': the ultra-high-end Vision Pro sparks innovation but has limited sales; mid-to-low-end Quest and smart glasses dominate the market; while traditional PC VR, expensive HoloLens 2, Magic Leap 2, and other enterprise AR devices have relatively muted influence, primarily applied in small-scale settings within the industry.
At the Meta Connect 2025 conference, Meta emphasized bringing generative AI into XR, allowing users to generate virtual scenes and objects through voice, while Apple is also exploring the integration of Vision Pro with AI assistants for more natural human-computer interaction. This indicates that AI + XR will become a new investment hotspot in 2026. Secondly, industrial collaboration and standards are accelerating: for example, the OpenXR standard received broader support in 2025, with different brand headsets gradually becoming compatible in content and accessories, and companies like Microsoft and Valve are also brewing new devices for market introduction.
It is worth mentioning that XR hardware applications beyond the industry are constantly expanding: in 2025, XR solutions in the medical and educational fields have grown significantly, with more and more hospitals using VR for psychological therapy and schools using AR to assist in teaching. These successful cases in professional fields will, in turn, prove the value of XR technology, laying the foundation for the long-term popularity of the devices.
Digital humans and virtual images: Technological elevation and commercial exploration
The field of digital identity and virtual humans (Avatars) in the metaverse continues to develop in 2025, with several companies worldwide providing services for creating and managing virtual images. Among them, South Korea's NAVER Z's ZEPETO and European startup Ready Player Me (RPM) are typical representatives.
By 2025, ZEPETO had accumulated over 400 million registered users, with around 20 million monthly active users. This scale, while not as large as gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, is still considerable within the vertical community of the metaverse. The user base of ZEPETO is primarily composed of Generation Z, especially females, who use it to create personalized 3D avatars, change into virtual outfits, and socialize and take photos in various scenes within the app.
In 2025, ZEPETO continues to attract a large number of fashion and entertainment brands, including collaborations with luxury brands like GUCCI and Dior to launch limited-edition digital apparel, as well as virtual fan meet-and-greets with various K-Pop idol groups. These activities boost platform activity, allowing ZEPETO to stabilize after a wave of user decline post-pandemic. Official data from NAVER Z shows that including ZEPETO and sticker tools, its overall product line has 49.4 million monthly active users, maintaining a growth trend in 2025.
Ready Player Me (RPM), a cross-platform avatar creation tool, attracted external attention after being acquired by Netflix at the end of 2025. Since its establishment in 2020, RPM has raised approximately $72 million, with investors including a16z. RPM allows users to create 3D avatars that can be used across multiple virtual worlds and has been integrated into numerous games and applications. Prior to the acquisition, RPM had already been adopted by over 6,500 developers using its SDK to support RPM avatars in different products.
After acquiring RPM, Netflix plans to use its team and technology to expand its gaming business, allowing Netflix users to have a unified virtual avatar traversing various games. Additionally, RPM announced that it will close its independent avatar service to the public in early 2026 to focus on internal integration.
At the same time, Snapchat, an old player in the social media field with over 300 million daily active users, is also trying to further enrich the metaverse functionalities of Bitmoji, such as testing generative AI applications on virtual images and launching a Bitmoji clothing store. Bitmoji is an application and service that allows users to create cartoon avatars of themselves and use them as stickers, and most of Snapchat's users use it to customize their images.
Meta is also investing in building its own avatar system: in 2025, Meta introduced more realistic 'Codec Avatars' in Quest and social applications, allowing cross-usage across Facebook, Instagram, and Quest, and launched a series of celebrity-endorsed AI virtual images to interact with users on Messenger, aiming to create a digital identity system that spans its social and VR platforms.
Industrial metaverse: Most meaningful reality, value realization accelerates
Compared to the previously mentioned C-end products like games and VR headsets, the industrial and enterprise-level metaverse, mainly targeting the B-end, has become the most meaningful and growth-potential direction in the metaverse field in 2025. After the initial hype, industries such as manufacturing, engineering construction, and medical training have become the early adopters of industrial metaverse technology. From a market size perspective, research reports show that the industrial metaverse market is approximately $48.2 billion in 2025, expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.5% from 2025 to 2032, reaching a scale of $600 billion by 2032.
A typical representative in this industry is NVIDIA's Omniverse platform, which in 2025 was widely used by large enterprises for digital twins and simulations. Reports indicate that leading manufacturers like Toyota, TSMC, and Foxconn are utilizing Omniverse to build digital twins of factories to optimize production line layout and AI training. The broad cooperation within the Omniverse ecosystem also reflects the investment of industrial giants—industrial software companies like Ansys, Siemens, and Cadence are deeply integrated with NVIDIA to streamline data and visualization standards.
Traditional industrial software vendors like Siemens are also actively promoting the concept of the industrial metaverse in 2025. A joint survey with S&P Global shows that 81% of companies worldwide are already using, testing, or planning to implement industrial metaverse solutions. This indicates a high level of attention in the industry toward digital twins, IoT + AI, immersive training, and other technologies.
In specific cases, in 2025, BMW expanded its virtual factory project, using digital twins to simulate the production line debugging of new models, achieving a 30% reduction in the time to market for new products; Boeing utilized HoloLens and digital twin technology to design complex aerospace parts, claiming to reduce the new model design error rate by nearly 40%. In the medical and training fields, VR/AR applications are also more mature: several hospitals in the U.S. adopted VR therapy (such as the RelieVRx system) in 2025 to assist patients in rehabilitation, with 84% of medical professionals believing that AR/VR will have a positive impact on the industry.
Additionally, multinational energy companies have begun using VR for training in hazardous conditions, and logistics companies use AR glasses to assist in warehouse picking, achieving good ROI. For example, a French nuclear power company reported that VR training reduced the accident rate of new employees by over 20%. Furthermore, some government-supported urban digital twin projects have been launched this year, such as Singapore upgrading its national 3D digital model for planning and Saudi Arabia establishing a large-scale metaverse sandbox for the NEOM new city, all of which belong to the tangible achievements of the industrial metaverse.
Therefore, the industrial metaverse has largely detached from speculation and become a natural extension of digital transformation. However, its development also faces significant obstacles: incompatibility of different vendor solutions and the existence of data silos lead some enterprises to take a wait-and-see attitude; in the process of connecting production systems and cloud simulations, data security and confidentiality are concerns for enterprises, and solving these pain points will take time. Thus, even though the application ratio is high, many are still at the PoC (proof of concept) or small-scale stage, far from widespread adoption across the industry.
Crypto and NFT metaverse: Heavily burdened by history, difficult to make a comeback
After the bubble burst in 2022-2023, the speculative frenzy for NFT virtual land and blockchain games has receded. However, the 'core players' in this track have not given up on exploration; new projects and technological integrations are trying to rejuvenate this sector. Established decentralized virtual worlds like Decentraland and The Sandbox continue to operate, but user activity and peak times are not comparable.
DappRadar data shows that in Q3 2025, the total NFT trading volume of all metaverse projects was only about $17 million, with Decentraland's quarterly land trading volume being only $416,000, with 1,113 transactions. Compared to the peak in 2021 when single land sales reached millions of dollars, this has significantly shrunk. In terms of user activity, data from DappRadar showed as early as 2022 that Decentraland had daily active users of less than a thousand, with daily simultaneous online numbers ranging from a few hundred to several thousand, only reaching tens of thousands during major events.
This 'empty city' phenomenon also exists in The Sandbox. However, the project team works hard to maintain the community through DAO and activities: Decentraland established a metaverse content fund in 2025, with a DAO grant of $8.2 million to sponsor events like Art Week and Career Fair, aiming to attract creators and businesses back. The Sandbox has also established cooperative zones with Universal Pictures and launched IP-themed virtual scenic areas like The Walking Dead to attract new users.
In addition, the biggest event in the crypto metaverse in 2025 is undoubtedly the launch of Yuga Labs' Otherside. As the company behind BAYC, Yuga has prepared for three years for the Otherside virtual world, which officially opens web access in November 2025 without requiring an NFT for entry. On the first day of service, tens of thousands of players flocked to the new area 'Koda Nexus', creating a rare moment of high popularity in the Web3 metaverse. It is reported that Yuga has also integrated AI world generation tools into Otherside, allowing users to create 3D game scenes through dialogue, enhancing the richness of UGC.
Compared to other metaverse paths, the metaverse ecosystem integrated with cryptocurrency and NFTs carries a heavier historical burden. During the previous peak phase, excessive financialization and speculative narratives dominated product dissemination and user expectations, ultimately causing significant financial losses for many participants.
The result is that the metaverse ecosystem based on crypto assets and NFTs faces more significant trust barriers at the public recognition level. This sector finds it challenging to shake off the stereotypes of 'asset speculation', 'disconnect from real demands', and 'poor experiences'. Even though some teams are still trying to return to content and experiential fundamentals, in the short term, it is nearly impossible to win the trust and widespread participation of mainstream user groups and break away from the situation of being ignored.