Decentraland Founder on Moving Open Standards-Billed Virtual World to Unity 3D

Decentraland, the virtual world which raised USD $25 million in Ethereum sales of virtual land to fund its development and is showing some promising closed beta growth. was originally billed as aiming to run completely on open standards technology and protocols. Over the Summer, however, the startup quietly moved to Unity 3D, the world's largest 3D development platform which is decidedly closed and proprietary. Which to me seems like a major change in development philosophy.

 

Decentraland founder Ari Meilich argues otherwise:

 

"More important than the underlying stack is what it enables," as he puts it to me. "The open source JS engines we previously tried were not performant enough, so having a web-based client was at risk. The web is crucial for Decentraland because it overrides any platform limitations, like those you encounter in the app stores against crypto.

 

"So by adopting Unity (which allowed for a great performance boost by compiling to WASM we are able to give users a web-based client, with the web being the last bastion of freedom on the Internet."

 

It's an irony of the times: The best way to get on the most open Internet platform is through a closed platform.

 

Ari tells me this doesn't move Decentraland away from the open standards as a principle:

"It also plays into our multi-platform strategy," as he puts it. "While the web will have the most permissionless client, to get real distribution we need to go to mobile, and Unity allows you to export to different platforms quite easily. Those two things are independent... For instance, we’re not using Unity assets, but glTF. The platform is still open in the sense that alternative clients are welcome." (I.E. other viewer software to access the virtual world.)

 

How's the established user community responded to the shift?

 

"Really well, since things have improved vastly."

 

Which is maybe another irony: Closed and powerful tends to be preferred over open but sputtery, just about every time.

Comments

[Nodoka Hanamura]

I'm wondering why they didn't decide on an open source engine like Godot? It's obscure, yes, but of all the open source engines out there, Godot seems the most up to speed with the big boys of Unreal and Unity.

[sirhc desantis]

Lets see - launch project to attract crypto - produce interesting alpha - find way to actually cash out said crypto - tantilise with interesting closed beta - move goalposts to platform supported by W3C, Mozilla, MSoft, Google and Apple (WASM is not a bad idea btw) - be bought out/assimilated/claim lack of scaling - rinse and repeat.
Not a bad biz idea really.
Ser Nodoka Hanamura has a point. Not sure how far Godot (is that pronounced as two words or as in 'Waiting for..') can scale as I have not really played enough with it but the latest pull is sitting on my box right now. And it is not the only engine out there.

[Joey1058]

Platforms can be closed or open as far as I'm concerned. Let me design an avatar once, and use it cross-platform, and I'm good. Hasn't happened yet. I'm not holding my breath, either.

[Brook Martin]

X3D is an ISO ratified, royalty-free open standards file format and run-time architecture to represent and communicate 3D scenes and objects. Not my business but, would this not have been a better choice, allowing them to keep the open standards mantra?

[Theanine3D]

At some point they'll probably even abandon the blockchain crap when it becomes inconvenient too. They already abandoned VR and open source, two major reasons they were able to get funding in the first place. This is not a business that can be trusted.

"When you stand for nothing, you fall for everything."

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

Good choice. Opensource web VR engine that I've tried are all buggy and with not a good visual quality. They still need time

[MichS]

Open Standards doesn't mean open source. They are two completely different things. Too much confusion here.