South Korea commits $51M to support metaverse development

• South Korea has announced an investment of $51 million to support the development of its metaverse industry.
• The latest investment comes barely a month after the country committed $185 million towards metaverse projects.

South Korea has recently announced a significant investment of 27.7 billion Korean won (US$21 million) into local services that aim to utilize the metaverse.

According to a press release by the South Korean Ministry of Science and ICT, the investment will support 13 new projects in sectors such as healthcare, education, and tourism that will leverage the metaverse to improve public services.

Funds will support 13 new metaverse projects

This announcement comes on the heels of news from earlier this week that South Korea will establish a $30 million metaverse fund to help startups expand their businesses.

The fund aims to encourage smaller enterprises in the metaverse sector to expand their operations globally through mergers and acquisitions. The press release read,

“In the field of industrial convergence, the metaverse healthcare platform that provides various health care services such as health management and psychological counseling, and the metaverse education platform that provides high quality public education services for students with health disabilities in elementary, middle, and high schools, are discussed.” 

South Korea has been actively investing in the development of the country’s metaverse ecosystem. In February 2022, the country invested approximately $185 million towards metaverse efforts.

These funds will be deployed to build metaverse labs, academies, and graduate schools in the country. Since then, both private and public sectors have launched various metaverse projects, including Seoul’s metaverse replica.

While South Korea is investing heavily in the metaverse, one of the world’s leading metaverse developers, Meta Platforms’ Reality Labs, reportedly lost US$13 billion last year as its virtual platform Horizon Worlds failed to attract a significant number of returning users.

Despite the excitement around the metaverse, Google Trends reports that netizens have been gradually losing interest in the term over the last year. The popularity of the term has decreased by 76% compared to its yearly peak in March 2022.