There was a period during the pandemic when it felt as though everything was on Fortnite or Roblox, Twitch or Discord. These platforms became home to everything from music concerts to theatre productions, runway shows to club nights, brand activations to customer communications. Interest turned to customisable avatars and virtual fashion and beauty. Brands suddenly seemed to care about gaming, which itself kicked into overdrive. Technology innovations that would have once seemed the remit of specialists – the metaverse, NFTs and cryptocurrency – went mainstream. For most, it was completely uncharted terrain.

It is hard to separate the enormous growth of these sectors from the pandemic, when people and companies sought different forms of entertainment and communication under lockdown. This inflated demand stimulated jobs markets, investments, and entire sectors, but as we’ve witnessed, it wasn’t necessarily sustainable. Little by little, the world reopened, and interest waned. While there’s a confluence of factors at play, the growth they experienced three, four, or five years ago has mostly slowed down dramatically or otherwise backtracked.

The global gaming industry experienced double-digit growth between 2017-2021 and swelled to its highest revenues during Covid-19. After that, growth dropped to just 1% the following year, dovetailing with mass layoffs – in 2024, more than 10,000 games industry workers lost their jobs by June – partly attributed to companies overstretching themselves to meet with the surge in demand in lockdown. Of course, nothing exists in a vacuum. A recent report linked the gaming industry’s struggles to factors like rising interest rates. But it also identified a key issue arising from the post-pandemic reality affecting the entire virtual tech sector: that “players [were] heading back to the office and classroom”.