Deep Dive: Early Metaverse Players — Data on Demographics, Socializing, Playing, & Spending

The metaverse was undoubtedly one of 2021’s top tech buzzwords. With many of the world’s biggest companies getting involved — and even outright shifting their long-term strategies — 2022 is looking to be another year filled with developments for the metaverse.

We have also been getting involved, with our free Metaverse Report covering the ins and outs of all things metaverse and web 3.0.

Most of the current narrative about the metaverse has looked towards the future, ignoring the fact that gamers are already engaging with proto-metaverse games today. In this article, we’ll use our Consumer Insights — Game Franchises to zoom in on current metaverse players.

The data is based on 5,521 gamers within our nationally representative sample of 8,000+ respondents across the US, UK, France, and Germany.

Metaverse Gamers Skew Young and Male

While smaller niche metaverse games are starting to emerge, three of the biggest metaverse titles are undeniably Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. For the rest of this article, we’ll refer to players of these proto-metaverse games as ‘’metaverse players’’.

Let’s start simple: what kinds of people play metaverse games? To find out, we compared metaverse players to the average player who does not play any of these games.

With an average age of around 27, the metaverse players we surveyed were visibly younger than the average player who doesn’t play any of these three metaverse games (average age 38).

This makes sense, as Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are more child-friendly than many other popular games and are marketed to children. Metaverse players are also more likely to skew male compared to your average gamer.

It’s quite clear that younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha are already growing up in proto-metaverses. For example, 54.86% of Roblox daily active users were under 13 years old in 2020 (according to a Roblox Investor Day presentation). These positive early experiences mean they will grow into the residents and architects of future metaverses.

These high-value, young consumers are hard to reach via traditional marketing techniques and even on social media, so it’s no surprise to see consumer brands and big tech companies doubling down on all things metaverse.

Looking for more insights about how different generations interact with games? Download our free Generations Report.

Let’s move on to a vital part of metaverse engagement: socializing.

Metaverse Players Spend More Time Socializing in Games, and Social Gamers Play for Longer

Well over half of the metaverse players we asked said that they used games to socialize in the past three months, including 62% who played Roblox, 58% who played Fortnite, and 57% who played Minecraft.

Our Consumer Insights — Game Franchises also has franchise-specific playing and paying behavior for 80 franchises, so we took the opportunity to zoom in on this data for Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft. Players who said they socialized while playing spent more time in-game — in all three of these titles:

As is often the case, this increased engagement translates into spending. Socializing players spent more money on Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox than average gamers (in the past six months):

Simply put, metaverse players spend an average of two hours longer a month playing games. Each player spent an average of $1.28 more in the past six months. While this might not seem much on the surface, it is highly significant for publishers and developers — especially those with player counts in the tens of millions.

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Metaverse Players Are Less Likely to Use Facebook but More Likely to Use Other Social Media Platforms

Given our basic understanding of who the players are that are already engaged in the metaverse, we wanted to try and understand where else in the digital world they spend their time.

Let’s look at how else metaverse players engage with the digital world. When compared with all players not playing the three metaverse franchises, metaverse players are more likely to use the ‘newer’ social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat — while the opposite is true for Facebook.

As you can see below, the gap is especially wide for Snapchat and TikTok:

Naturally, the use of social media platforms is heavily influenced by age. Our data shows that in the West, Generation Z (and younger) consumers are more likely to use newer social media platforms like TikTok than older generations.

However, we found that metaverse players were still more likely to use these newer social media outlets than non-metaverse players, even after controlling for the effects of age.

When only looking at players aged 10–20, we found that metaverse players are 10% more likely to use Instagram, 18% to use TikTok, and 18% to use Snapchat. We also found that being a metaverse player had just as much influence on TikTok usage as age did.

For 21–35-year-olds, 42% of the metaverse players use TikTok, whereas only 24% of the average non-metaverse players use it.

On the other hand, while Facebook as a social media platform remains hugely popular in growth markets like India and Africa, its userbase is aging across the West. Therefore, Facebook’s rebrand to Meta is no surprise — nor is its new metaverse-first strategy.

Combined, the insights discussed in this article paint a clear picture for the West: younger generations are already engaging with proto-metaverses en masse.

One thing is certain: whether you like it or not, the metaverse has a significant part to play in the future of the games industry. Younger players are already in on the trend, and the biggest tech companies and brands are scrambling to get in on the ground floor.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing an in-depth article on Metaverse Trends to Watch in 2022. For now, check out our recent free Metaverse Report.

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