Governments, Users, and Virtual Worlds: Institutional Strategies in the Age of Big Data and IA

In recent years, several countries have introduced strategic plans aimed at promoting metaverse ecosystems. While these initiatives highlight the metaverse as both a technological frontier and a policy priority, the underlying rationales and metaverse approaches remain insufficiently understood. This gap raises the need to critically examine why governments are investing in the metaverse ecosystem and how metaverse is being approached as an innovative platform for digital public services and businesses. An inductive and deductive content analysis was conducted on various regional, national and supranational metaverse strategic plans (n = 7). Virtual worlds can be understood as persistent, immersive, and interactive digital environments that integrate 3D visualisation, simulation, and real-time data to support activities across social and economic domains. The findings indicate that the metaverse is a virtual space shaped by the dual imperative of addressing societal needs—such as public service delivery and stakeholder engagement—and fostering business opportunities within the evolving digital ecosystem. The analysis revealed four main reasons to promote the social and industrial metaverse ecosystem: sustainability; digital sovereignty; competitive advantage and stakeholder building relationship. The results indicate that the metaverse operates mainly through both transactional and connected approaches, where digital twins, artificial intelligence, and extended reality converge to enable user experiences in ways that transcend physical limitations.