Second Life is trying to get people to re-engage with it.
Second Life is trying to get people to re-engage with it.
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The DeanBeat: Will the metaverse bring the second coming of Second Life?

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

The idea of the metaverse is getting more buzz than ever. I gave a speech on it yesterday to Sharad Devarajan’s class of MBA students at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University. (I advised them to buy Bitcoin.)

In my research for the class, I checked the metaverse’s status on Google Trends, which measures the number of searches on different subjects, and I saw an explosion in the past year or so. Big companies such as Facebook, Roblox, and Epic Games are jockeying to be the arbiter of the metaverse, and many companies are talking about their metaverse strategies.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.