Casinos in Macau were allowed to reopen at midnight on Saturday, despite ongoing restrictions on entering and exiting the city, as well as laws requiring them to operate with only half of their normal staff.
Simultaneously, a new version of the former Portuguese enclave could be established. This new Macau would be free of colonial history, unregulated violence, and the requirement to wear masks or maintain a social distance.
NFTs are active, and a new version of the metaverse with some features has been in the works for some time. Despite the fact thatEven though there has been no public discussion of incorporating a gambling component, NFTs are involved.
Beginning with otherworldly renditions of meeting spaces at the start of the 2020 world health emergency, visionaries, and businesspeople have been developing the means to serve more than gambling and the other wholesome and less than acceptable practices that always occur where people and money, lots of money, gather. Prostitution, drug dealing, prostitution, and prostitution with children are examples of these practices.
Meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions are all abbreviated as MICE. These four kinds of events are referred to as “MICE.” For several years, the Chinese government has put pressure on Macau’s businesses to increase the proportion of the economy devoted to MICE and other family-friendly and culturally acceptable offerings.
Going back to the first quarter of 2019, long before anyone had heard of a new pandemic, the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) recorded about 377 MICE events with 333,000 participants over the first three months of the year. This represents a 19.9% increase over the same period the previous year.
According to the Macao Trade and Investment Promotion Institute, such events were attended by nearly a thousand different individual exhibitors (IPIM).
Even though the MICE events provided through VR channels during the pandemic may have provided some measure of comfort to some presenters and attendees, there is a business case to be made for focusing more on integrating real-world Macau data into an experience that can be provided to almost anyone, almost anywhere in the world.
Expect some pomp and circumstance to accompany you there
Virtual tourists of the future will almost certainly expect the same stringent clothing standards and other filters as they would in the real world, as well as the same classism and assumed prejudices that they might encounter today when visiting a property in Macau in the metaverse.
There are no hard and fast rules in exclusive establishments for those who are entitled
For the time being, something completely different is happening. Some people may find that playing highly pixelated NFTs at Mini Macau’s APE Nightclub levels the playing field.
Mini Macau has come to life, and the experience is more akin to playing an 8-bit video game on a 10-kilo cathode ray tube television than to the magnificent virtual reality adventure provided by games like Red Matter 2.
If and when the blockchain finally makes the leapleaps to handle the needs of the real-world actors who are currently wasting hundreds of millions of dollars while people stay away, you might be able to don a haptic glove that lets you feel the chips as you lay them down. This will be possible when blockchain finally takes the step to meet the needs of real-world actors. You may hear the shuffler and have the same internal reactions to winning and losing each hand. However, neither of these things will happen in Mini Macau.
That concept can only become a reality if it is made more accessible to the general public and if people commit to accepting nothing less than absolute brilliance and perfection.
Despite losing billions of dollars, Macau is still standing
Macau businesses are surviving the economic brutalization that began with a government crackdown, then a re-imagining of a rough-and-tumble pirate town with multi-billion-dollar casinos into a sort of family-friendly Disneyland, and finally the devastation of COVID and a tightrope walk with the region’s first relicensing regime. All of these events contributed to Macau’s transformation from a rough-and-tumble pirate town to a thriving tourist destination. Nobody knows how it will fit into the metaverse once it arrives. For the time being, gamblers can return to the casinos.
Casinos are currently accepting gamblers
The doors and tables of Macau casinos, which had been closed for two weeks due to the rapid loss of value amounting to millions of dollars per day, have reopened in the former Portuguese exclave of Macau.
After closing all non-essential businesses in the 600,000-person city for two weeks to snuff out a potential COVID surge, 35 gaming venues reopened with limited services on Friday night. This followed the Chinese government’s closure of all non-essential businesses in the city.
Macau, as a Chinese special administrative region (SAR), is subject to the “Covid-Zero” policy, which is implemented throughout the country.
There have been approximately 2,000 positive tests in the last two weeks, but no new community transmissions were recorded on Saturday or during the weekend.
On a daily basisDaily, Macau, the neighboring Chinese city of Zhuhai, and Hong Kong, the other Special Administrative Region, all see a significant amount of foot traffic. Human traffic includes not only tourists but also workers.
Even though casinos and other non-essential businesses are now allowed to operate, travel to and from the gambling center—China’s only one with a population of more than 1.4 billion people—remains severely restricted.
At this time, casinos may have a staffing level of up to 50%, and players must maintain a personal space of at least 2 square meters (or around 20 square feet).
According to GGRAsia, broker Daiwa Capital Markets Hong Kong Ltd., they do not expect the testing and travel restrictions to return to “normal” until the end of September.