Valid question from reader "Mitch", responding to my post last week pointing out the tiny weekly active users of blockchain-based metaverse platforms:
What qualifies an active weekly user in this chart? The Sandbox is still in Alpha. I joined to check it out, I thought it had potential, and then I uninstalled it and I'm waiting for the launch date... Do I count as a lost user, or are you making that assumption? I don't think low user count in this case necessarily correlates with low interest, but it does certainly correlate with the development stage and the lack of open market, at least for the Sandbox. In order to see the value that investors see in these platforms, you can't just look at the platforms themselves. These guys are banking on broader, long-term trends in the development of the web3 space.
To understand any species we need to consider its place in its environment, and the same principal can be applied here. Decentraland is being built in expectation of future demand, and I see it being a powerful tool for venture DAOs the future who need collective work and social spaces. If you don't know what web3 means or what a venture DAO is then you don't have enough context to make any claims about the future of these platforms. The web3 space is exploding with nascent possibility for large scale changes, and those take time. I wouldn't be concerning myself with these user numbers for at least another two or three years. This is a huge structural shift and onboarding people to that takes time as well; I think the "hype" was really just a prep course for society on the upcoming paradigm shift.
I do work with some colleagues in the web3 space, and they make a pretty good case that the technology is worth experimenting with. But it is still very unclear how much of the promises being made by web3 advocates can or will be fulfilled.
And as I can say from painful personal experience, this is a key reason why it's so important not to only follow the potential or possibility of a technology, but actual consumer adoption of it:
A similar debate happened during the Second Life hype phase of 2006-2008, as major companies bought real estate in SL. Critics pointed out that the virtual world's user numbers were still quite low in relationship to what was being invested. Apologists (including, ahem, myself, to a certain extent) insisted that the slow consumer adoption didn't matter, because Second Life had the potential to be transformative. But companies can only keep investing in untapped potential for so long before they start asking about ROI.
On the other side of things, here's a thing many web3 advocates may be missing: Historically, when an online game world/metaverse platform attracts real, sustained consumer enthusiasm, it tends to grow fast, because as more people play it, the more of their friends come along. Minecraft was in open beta for its first year, but still gained nearly a million users during that time. Fortnite: Battle Royale gained 10 million players in its first two weeks.
All that to one side, it may indeed be the case that web3's potential is just as grand as its most passionate (and personally invested?) evangelists say. But unless and until those promises can be matched with unique, active, growing users, it's important to keep our eye on the KPI/user metrics ball.
Well, for Decentraland, the trend is downward. Concurrent logins, measured from outside (the only honest number), peaked around 2600, and are now around 600. Current count is here: https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/
Posted by: Animats | Thursday, June 16, 2022 at 11:04 PM