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by waif
1106 days ago
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The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain. It's about buying into the metaverse, buy your plot of land, buy your sneakers, buy your new hairstyle, buy your emote laugh animation. Every possible interaction is monetized. It's baffling, like why would anyone want to spend time in a dystopian capitalism simulator. VRChat seems to embrace the pure spirit of the thing, from what I can tell as an outsider. People are free to express themselves and be creative, making their own avatars and worlds from scratch if they want. It seems like a wacky hangout space, the whole point is to not have constraints. Trying to turn it into anything beyond that seems like it would fail. But then again, I also don't understand why people drop thousands of dollars on Fortnite skins. I don't feel out of touch with tech, but this I simply do not get, at all. |
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Most of the hyped "blockchain" metaverses never went live. All hype and NFT sales, no 3D metaverse at all. Of the few that did go live, Decentraland has 111 users in world right now,[1], Somnium Space has about 1 (yes, one)[2]. Sandbox doesn't have a public counter, but one source says 616 users in Q4 2022.[3] There are people just selling parcels on maps, such as Upland.
Otherside, the world from Bored Ape Yacht Club, has run two live demos for a few hours each, but they're just demos of Improbable's technology with some of their game art. There was supposed to be a third demo in Q2 2023. We're coming up on the end of Q2 2023. They raised US$400 million selling land, and the SEC is investigating.
Reality: blockchain based metaverses did not happen.
[1] https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/
[2] https://steamcharts.com/search/?q=Somnium+space
[3] https://beincrypto.com/mana-has-379-active-users-sand-has-61...