Bloomberg recently estimated the market size for metaverses to reach $800B by 2024, with other analysts speculating that metaverse investment growing in the gaming world to become a $400B business by 2025.
In January 2022, social media ecommerce platform Display Social announced that it had successfully completed the acquisition of both L.A.-based Thunder Studios and Infinite Reality in a multi-billion-dollar transaction to create a metaverse entertainment company. The combined entity will equip the creator economy with an unprecedented suite of creative tools covering social, gaming, virtual and remote production, NFT minting, and metaverse creation. The company more recently announced the further acquisition of an NFT Exchange and Marketplace to add to its creator economy tool suite.
Display Social’s CEO John Acunto and Thunder Studios’ CEO (and now President of Display Social) Rodric David join LAVA Gaming to discuss the realities of metaverses… socially, politically, and economically… and what opportunities they create for brands and the gaming industry.
Event Details
JOHN ACUNTO is a globally respected creative visionary who builds and develops new and exciting business and social platforms. John has worked at the highest levels with the world's largest technology companies: IBM, Apple, Ebay, Amazon, Facebook, and many others. He is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Display Social, the world’s most innovative social commerce platform.
John was the Founder and CEO of Play Gig-it, the premier social platform game development company and the world's largest interactive social music/gaming experience. He founded Play Gig-it in 2008 to incorporate his passion for gaming and music into a refined entertainment experience meant to connect people through a single platform. Prior to Play Gig-it, John was CEO of The Outernet. The Outernet was a 50,000 square foot retail store that allowed customers to select individual songs, games, movies, and books from hundreds of available touch screen monitors.
John holds a PhD in mathematics from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in data science from Harvard University.
RODRIC DAVID is an Australian born serial entrepreneur and the Founder of Thunder Studios, a fully integrated entertainment services company operating in Los Angeles focused on youth culture, gaming, music, UGC (user-generated content), and the metaverse. Established in 2013, Thunder Studios provides integrated studio, production, and broadcasting services to the entertainment industry (feature films, TV shows, commercials, music videos, esports, and live events), as well as produces original content and programming in a variety of genres from its six-acre, 150,000 square foot production facility.
Thunder Gaming produces and broadcasts live esports tournaments and gaming programing for the world’s leading brands and game publishers from a variety of venues. Thunder Music promotes and produces live music festivals in the metaverse from its XR stage using virtualization technology. Thunder Broadcasting’s fleet of mobile broadcast trucks services customers throughout the USA and Mexico providing live broadcasting services for sports, gaming, esports, concerts, parades, award shows, and special events.
In early 2019 Thunder became the founding investor in Infinite Reality, an open Metaverse company that has produced several metaverse experiences including the Virtual Burning Man Metaverse experience in 2020 and 2021, Cyberworld (a NYE live music festival from the Metaverse) on NYE 2020 and Transformation Island, an ‘always on’ metaverse that operates today.
Rodric graduated from the University of Southern California in 1993 and is a sought-after guest speaker on trends in the metaverse, UGC, gaming, esports, and digital media.
