Metaverse Real Estate "Boom" Actually Has All the Makings of a Bubble

Here we go again (again) with yet another "metaverse real estate boom" story:

The virtual real estate boom is turning the metaverse into the Wild West...

It wouldn’t be until the modern crypto movement began accelerating in the last few years, with the popularization of NFTs [LOL it's not "popular"-- WJA] and more recently the hype around the metaverse, that the concept of investing in virtual land would go from inexplicable to the next big gaming gold rush. In that context, Somnium is just one of a growing number of metaverse platforms that have been making headlines of late because of the mind-boggling amounts of money pouring in. Others include SoftBank-funded The Sandbox, Decentraland and Cryptovoxels, forming what you could think of as a “Big Four” in the metaverse real estate market.

Whenever you read these breathless media reports of a "boom" or a "gold rush", my advice is to immediately check how many actual people these platforms are attracting in terms of monthly active and/or peak concurrent users. Because on those metrics, this "Big Four" is actually quite small:

• Somnium Space's peak user concurrency on Steam over the last year was... 16 people total.
• Decentraland, as its co-founder told me recently, has about 300,000 monthly active users... but a peak concurrency of 2,500. (I.E. most of its monthly user base does not log in very often.)
• The Sandbox recently reported a monthly active userbase of just 30,000 monthly active users.
• Crytovoxel's homepage reports that its most visited Popular Parcel attracted monthly total visits... below 25,000 for the entire month, with most other parcels attracting far less visits. Since total unique users are likely to be much less than that of total visits, Cryptovoxel probably has a monthly active user base in the low five figures at most.

Media reports of a "metaverse real estate boom" rarely mention the user numbers of these platforms, probably because their paltry usage rates pretty much demolish their thesis. It's not a boom if it only attracts greater and greater speculation, but no growing market of consumers to capitalize on that investment. And it's irresponsible for reporters to only report how much cryptocurrency is being invested into these platforms, and not the looming danger of low user activity.