Metaverses: Transition to a new business model or the image of the future?

Over the last decade, the phenomenon of network goods has been the driving force behind the economic development. The further evolution of business organization is seen as a transformation of traditional and platform models into metaverses. However, theoretical developments in this field lag behind practice. The article presents a formalized scientific review of research studies on metaverses as a technological, economic and social phenomenon. The concepts of business models, platform economy and digitalization constitute the theoretical basis of the work. The research method is based on taxonomy and further clustering of the most cited publications using the VOSviewer software tools. The empirical data include a set of works indexed in Scopus and selected by the subject area and keywords. The authors analyze the terminological essence of the notion “metaverse” and perform the clustering of the publications. We identify the taxonomic avenues for investigating metaverses, which tackle a number of issues: attracting public attention to this phenomenon, scrutinizing the technological mechanism of metaverses’ functioning, and considering their perceived benefits. The analysis of the most cited articles on metaverses indicates that the research agenda focuses primarily on the technological aspect. A metaverse is viewed as a special technological system that uses a set of technical means for space virtualization. At the same time, there is an evolutionary transition to interpreting metaverse as business model: from a fantasy virtual world or a technological system to a unique social mechanism that provides new economic and social effects, as well as innovative ways of monetization and value creation for users.