CoinDesk did not hesitate to raise the question of the vacuity of metaverses with an article with a murderous title: “It’s Lonely in the Metaverse: Decentraland’s 38 Daily Active Users in a $1.3B Ecosystem.” For its competitor The Sandbox, with a similar valuation, the balance sheet would be barely better with 522 people over 24 hours. Both platforms reacted quickly to try to rehabilitate their audience.
The Sandbox, which concentrates its users over periods of a few weeks to maximize its audience (before closing everything between its different “seasons”), reports 39,000 unique visitors per day and 201,000 users per month. Decentraland, on the other hand, reports 56,697 monthly active users. To try to understand these figures, The Sandbox would attract as many people each month as a B2B media and Decentraland would struggle to do as well.
Two methods for the same result
These figures differ from those of CoinDesk because they report on the traffic observed in these virtual worlds, while the American media is based on the transactions made in these metaverses (measured by DappRadar). This methodology aims to reflect the appetite of users for what is central in these platforms based on the Blockchain: the number of purchases of NFT.
DappRadar has just revised its calculation method for Decentraland, believing that it was flawed. Over 24 hours, we now get 3,400 transactions. For The Sandbox (for which the method has not changed), it is 254 …
However, this method is incomplete. As The Sandbox CEO Arthur Madrid explained, “It’s like measuring mall traffic based on checkouts.” But that’s no longer the debate. Because in both cases, these numbers don’t live up to the promise and are indicative of bad products. After a year of hype, this is all for naught?
These Blockchain-based metaverses are linked to the cycles of the cryptocurrency market, which has been in the middle of a bear market for several months. So we need to take a step back. Concerning The Sandbox, the platform is still in alpha version, and thus in full development. These metaverses are mostly victims of a buzz mainly caused by Meta and brands that were afraid to miss something.
A too-poor experience for the end-user
There is also the problem of the experience. While Decentraland is a receptacle for brands wanting to create their showroom in the metaverse, The Sandbox is more concerned with balancing the forces between advertisers and licenses, such as the Smurfs, The Walking Dead, or Snoop Dogg. These worlds all offer a gameplay experience, but it’s always the same: collecting gems in the form of NFTs that entitle you to bonuses.
A sign of hope for the metaverse concept, however, is that online video games that have come to be referred to as such, such as Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite, continue to amass a loyal following.
All may not be lost for Decentraland or The Sandbox, but they will have to pass the crypto winter for that.
In Bitcoin We Trust Newsletter: Everything around Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the cryptocurrency market
