The Sandbox Reports 300,000 Monthly Active Users Despite Partnerships With Top Brands -- Shades of Second Life's Hype Days?

My post yesterday questioning the logic behind The Sandbox's reported $4 billion valuation (by Bloomberg) led to an interesting conversation on LinkedIn. Staff members of The Sandbox took some umbrage in the thread, pointing out that the co-founder recently reported that The Sandbox client now has 300,000 monthly active users, which is pretty solid growth from its reported 30K MAU last November. (I updated my original post to reflect that.)

Then again, 300,000 is still very much on the low end for current metaverse platforms as compared to, say Rec Room (with 3 million MAU on VR headsets alone), not to mention ROBLOX and Fortnite Creative. And yet again, last generation platform Second Life still has some 600,000 monthly active users! 

In reply to that point, one Sandbox staffer told me it's still early days -- since after all, the product is currently designated as being in Alpha. Which is fair enough. But from my view, it only deepens the mystery:

Why aren't all The Sandbox's major brand partnerships leading to major user adoption?

Thx everyone who played @TheSandboxGame Alpha Season 2, we hope you had fun!

Some metrics
🔹350,000 MAUs
🔹1.12M hours played
🔹4.7M visits to the Experiences
🔹17M quests completed
🔹10M+ $SAND distributed (~ $30M usd)
🔹75M+ $SAND staked on Polygon

See you in #AlphaSeason3 👋 pic.twitter.com/aFsy3Wv57b

— Sebastien 🏞 (@borgetsebastien) April 11, 2022

Lots of wow... so-so MAU.

As you've probably seen across various news outlets, The Sandbox has announced in recent months brand integrations with Snoop Dogg, DeadMau5, The Walking Dead, among many others -- brands with tens of millions of fans. So why aren't those fans converting into users?

One likely factor, as I discussed yesterday: While The Sandbox has a fairly active website, the actual Sandbox client viewer requires a long and heavy download.

Which very much reminds me of Second Life's hype period:

Back in ancient times (by which I mean 2006-2008), when Second Life was bruited as The Metaverse, the platform also saw integrations with other mass market brands and personalities: Duran Duran, the CSI TV franchise, Armani, and on (and on). The entrance of brands was so incessant, I hired an analytics expert to monitor user traffic to their sites in Second Life.

And while these arrivals attracted much media coverage, there was one thing all those brand partnerships didn't attract:

Monthly. Active. User. Growth. 

Despite all that press coverage and excitement, fans of these brands, for the most part, simply didn't stay. Nearly all of them, in fact, quit during the account creation and client download process. (Besides core gamers, most PC/Mac users simply aren't comfortable or familiar with large client downloads, especially for "entertainment" software.) 

And yes, we are seeing other major brand integrations on other metaverse platforms, but in contrast to The Sandbox, the successful ones already had a large user base beforehand. And it's still unclear whether the brands themselves add anything lasting to that user base: In the year that Fortnite Creative added integrations with Star Wars/Marvel characters, publisher Epic's revenue actually went down.

And like I told The Atlantic:

[This new] metaverse hype wave is so similar to 2008. Everything’s being repeated now—the same news stories, the same assumptions, the same mistakes.... [T]here’s also the constant stories of, So-and-so company created a store in the metaverse! This happened a lot between 2006 and 2008—you had Intel, IBM, American Apparel, Nissan, and NBC who all created spaces in Second Life. Brands made mistakes then and they’re making them now. 

Or to put it simply: A virtual community creates value, not the other way around.

Maybe I'm wrong and The Sandbox can overcome these challenges. I promise to say Wow if I see more MAU. 

Image via Bitcoin News.

Comments

[Joey1058]

"most PC/Mac users simply aren't comfortable or familiar with large client downloads". This is attributable to phone app mindset. It has to happen in under a minute-thirty, or they lose interest. It's the "TL:DR" mentality.

The metaverse is an orobouros.

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

Amazing insight! And you are so true, we are re-living the same errors of the past...