Virtual Worlds, Real Politics: A Cross‐National Comparative Study of Metaverse Policy Approaches

While market sentiment toward the metaverse has cooled, states continue to promulgate metaverse policies with notable urgency—a paradox that signals the technology’s ascendance as a critical theater of geo-technological rivalry in the emergent Web 3.0 landscape. Drawing upon a systematic content analysis of 34 policy documents issued across major economies and regions between 2021 and 2024, this study interrogates the strategic orientations underpinning these initiatives and traces the structural determinants shaping divergent national trajectories. Our analysis reveals that while metaverse policies across jurisdictions converge on three core imperatives (advancing foundational technologies, catalyzing sectoral applications, and establishing regulatory guardrails), national priorities diverge markedly in emphasis and strategic intent. To fully capture these distinctions, we developed a four-fold typology: techno-economic vanguards, industrial innovators, transformative opportunists, and regulatory vigilants. This study reveals that metaverse policy architectures are fundamentally conditioned by strategic positioning, technological endowments, and industrial composition. While leading powers such as China and the United States primarily wield the metaverse to consolidate technological hegemony and economic preeminence, middle powers with vibrant cultural industries, particularly Japan, South Korea, and France, tend to seize upon the metaverse as an instrument for amplifying cultural influence and sustaining competitive advantage in the global attention economy. Resource-rich economies perceive it as a transformative engine for economic diversification, embracing expansive, forward-leaning strategies that anticipate structural shifts in global production. The European Union, by contrast, maintains its characteristic regulatory posture, extending its precautionary governance framework to this novel domain with deliberate circumspection. This inquiry contributes to the emerging scholarship on metaverse governance while enriching comparative analyses of techno-political regimes, demonstrating how political-economic structures and geopolitical imperatives fundamentally configure state responses to transformative technologies.