MTV’s Video Music Awards are coming up very soon and it looks like they’ve gotten the attention of the video game community in the process. The company has announced that they are adding a brand new category for their annual awards show, Best Metaverse Performance. For those who don’t know, these performances take place in a virtual setting, and in recent years have taken off in certain video games. The nominees for this include some heavy hitters in the music industry such as Ariana Grande, BLACKPINK, BTS, Justin Bieber, Charli XCX, and Twenty One Pilots.
As we already mentioned, these performances were conducted in a virtual setting, with Arianna Grande’s Rift Tour taking place in Fortnite, BLACKPINK’s concert in PUBG Mobile, BTS’s appearance in Minecraft, Charli XCX’s concert in Roblox, Justin Beiber’s appearance on Wave, and Twenty One Pilots performance in Roblox. It’s important to note that the majority of these nominations’ performances do in fact take place in a video game. Fortnite, PUBG, and Roblox are featured here in a prominent setting, and it’s also notable that they’re live-service titles, making them one of the best possible titles to even hold such performances.
Whatever your opinion on this is, it’s definitely something that is drawing more eyes of both the video game community and the music community to the event as a whole. In addition, this is also a potential attempt to bring in a newer, and younger crowd to watch the show. Historically, the Video Music Awards have been one of the most anticipated shows of the year. While the same cannot be said in recent years, it does appear that MTV will continue to push it out as much as they can.
The MTV Video Music Awards will air live from New Jersey’s Prudential Center on August 28.