Will a Metaverse Cricket League Take Off?

The Metaverse seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue nowadays. It’s going to revolutionize everything from your weekly shopping and your weekly office meeting.

But will it revolutionise cricket? It’s hard to make cricket any better. Will a virtual version make things more amazing? We explore here.

Will the Metaverse take off?

Well, this is the real question, isn’t it? There is definitely a space for virtual reality, but the Metaverse is not one and the same. Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg intends to use the tech of virtual reality to create a virtual reality social media platform.

Virtual reality can be used for lots of things: simulating dangerous situations for the sake of training, like a surgeon, or for the sake of entertainment, like a horror game, tourism, flight simulation, etc. but those are niche areas where the participant is very willing to learn how to use the VR headset for the sake of what they are doing.

Social media platforms, on the other hand, rely on going mainstream, which means your mother, your grandmother, your high school friends, and everyone in between needs to be using the virtual reality space. Think about the time you had to explain to your mother what Facebook was and what a struggle that was and then imagine handing her a headset.

However, there is an argument for gaming in virtual reality spaces to take off.

Will gaming on the Metaverse take off?

There are a lot of fights ahead of Mark Zuckerberg in his attempt to make the Metaverse mainstream, but gaming is not one of them. VR headsets were initially marketed to and crucially accepted by gamers. If the Meta CEO wants the Metaverse to be the next step in the development of the internet, he’s going to have to incorporate some gaming entertainment.

As a comparison, look back at the start of the internet. As the worldwide web was finding its footing, gaming was some of the first platforms to really take off. Browser-based options like Runescape, crafting fantasy worlds, were popular. Indeed, it didn’t take long for traditional sports to receive adaptations. Sites like ggpoker.co.uk offered poker, others offered soccer, others tennis, and more.

It’s easy to predict the virtual reality space, going the same way. The Metaverse is likely to have its own pocket of games, much like it already did. There was a time in Facebook’s history when users couldn’t get away from all the requests for extra goodies to use in their farming simulator games that were on the Facebook site.

Does that mean a Metaverse Cricket League is on the horizon?

It might take a while to gain momentum, but there is too much money in gaming and too many fans in cricket to not have a Metaverse Cricket League. Maybe it will need to wait until developers have exhausted all the soccer and basketball ideas in the Metaverse, or maybe something akin to Wii Sports in the virtual world will make an appearance, where a wide range of sports will be included in the one package.

But much like how we started with FIFA, then Madden and eventually got EA’s Cricket series, there is bound to be an area in the virtual world that has its place for cricket.

Maybe it won’t even take that long. Zuckerberg might have trouble convincing Mrs Brown down the street to chat to her neighbours with a headset or office manager Jenny to conduct meetings on the Metaverse, but gamers are ready and willing for everything that gets thrown at them. The cricket fan gamers are ready for a virtual game, and the rest they can worry about when their team managers start handing out headsets.