
Yesterday I mentioned that "nearly all" metaverse platforms built around web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. I qualified it that way because I recently found out about a possible exception:
Upland, the mixed reality real estate acquisition game (and the first customer for Linden Lab's Tilia payment service), sells NFTs associated with individual plots of land. And so far, the game/metaverse platform has over 285,000 unique Upland NFT owners. (Screengrab above, as shared with me by the Upland team.)
285K might not seem like much, as compared to say Roblox or Fortnite, but it is massive when compared with the current NFT market. As I noted last January, there are roughly 360,000 NFT owners in the entire world across the main blockchains. But Upland's NFTs, as co-founder Dirk Lueth told me recently, aren't tracked by Cryptoslam and most other blockchain analytics firms.
In other words, Upland reportedly has nearly as many unique NFT owners on its own platform as there are NFT owners across all other main blockchains -- and far more NFT owners than Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and other wel-known blockchain-based games/metaverse platforms.
Notably, most Upland NFT owners aren't active NFT speculators on other platforms, as is usually the case. According to an internal survey, 65% of Upland NFTs owners don’t own NFTs outside Upland.
Hopefully regular readers are wondering if Upland is even a metaverse platform at all. What with its flat 2D experience for the web and mobile browsers, it's not a 3D immersive virtual world, which is key to the classic metaverse definition.
That is true. But here's the thing: Now that it has an active user base in the six figures, the company is gradually rolling out immersive virtual world features beneath the Monopoly-esque property game -- starting with a casual 3D racing game that's currently in Alpha. Watch:
Responding to our question on how many active users on the Quest VR headset there are, a reader points us to a recent market survey which suggests that use is quite tiny, especially among Gen Z:
Piper Sandler completes 43rd semi-annual Generation Z survey of 7,100 U.S. teens...
While 26% of teens own a VR device, just 5% use it daily. 48% of teens are either unsure or not interested in the Metaverse
This prompts reader "lieisacake" (LOL) to observe: