Exclusive: Upland Real Estate Game Quietly Becoming an Immersive Metaverse Platform With Nearly 300K NFT Owners

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:

While pretty rudimentary to start (so that it can be played on the web), this Unity-based 3D world will slowly get more creation tools for developers and users, Lueth tells me -- and in a clever move, allow real estate owners to build pretty much whatever they want "behind closed doors" of their property. So while the Upland world is directly based on real world map data, property owners can turn their homesinto  sci-fi/fantasy dreamscapes. (“I don’t know what people are doing behind their doors,” as Lueth put it to me.)

In this context, the Upland model is pretty similar to how the Metaverse is originally described in Snow Crash, where a vastly long Street is the main visual and physics-consistent metaphor, while individual landowners can create whatever they want on their own property.

All that said, I do remain an NFT skeptic. Talking with Lueth, I came away unconvinced that the blockchain adds any meaningful value to the Upland experience, especially because NFT interoperability across platforms remains a fanciful if not impossible end goal. 

Then again, that might not matter for Upland, since it's mostly comprised of users who aren't interested in buying NFTs per se. Its mixed reality Monopoly gameplay aspect is broadly appealing to, well, anyone who already enjoys games like Monopoly, and Upland is architected for a mass user base, not core gamers. (“We go where the mass audiences is,” as Lueth put it.) 

So I'll be watching to see how much Upland evolves from its mixed reality map origins to a full-fledged metaverse platform. Ultimately it may only appeal to people who enjoy the cut throat competitiveness of Monopoly, but then again, that's not a small population: Nearly 300 million copies of the classic board game have been sold. So far, Lueth tells me, the Upland playerbase includes people in the Texas badlands to a high roller in Saudi Arabia.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

Upload is, unequivocally, not a metaverse.

[sirhc desantis]

I am very glad you cover this *stuff* else would never have heard of it. And its nice to see 300k branded as Huge compared to what was it - 10 million vomit inducing diving helms being minnow like.
Fab as always, keep up the good work :)

[Adeon Writer]

Alternatively, if the definition of Metaverse is extended to include what Upland is, the term is inherently meaningless.

[james]

love what you doing. This is amazing

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Adeon: it is meaningless.

It would be like calling all kinds of computer devices — from desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, to supercomputers — 'metatoys'. Like, you see, those things that people play with? Metatoys. You can throw anything into that classification, and it will stick. A Xbox? A metatoy. Your old 1980s Tamaguchi? Why, obviously a metatoy. Everything is a metatoy, even if you use it to actually work with, or communicate with, whatever.

Anyway, speaking of meaningless things, I always thought that 'non-fungible token' is the sort of thing that sounds 'fintechy' but is also pretty much meaningless as well. Obviously, it is supposed to relate to financial, non-fungible assets — something which a financier is likely to understand. But an NFT is technically not the token (whatever it might be) but rather the contract that comes with it. In other words, what gets transacted on a crypto-exchange is not really the item but rather the contract — the item, by itself, is theoretically irrelevant. Or, if put in another way: who cares if you have a billion perfectly identical copies of one silly bitmap, so long as you have a sequence of random characters (which are utterly devoid of meaning and lack any patterns) that proves you own one of them? That proof (and not the item) is what is valued and transacted...

Well, speculators are used to invest in virtual goods of many sorts. The venerable old futures are just a bet made about the future price of an item; who wins the bet gets to keep all the money in the pool. That's the kind of thing that economists, bankers, Wall Street yahoos, and academics tell us that are supposed to be 'worth' something.

Compared to that, at least one can read out the long sequence of random characters 'inside' a NFT and recite them, just for the fun of it. Or assign each letter/number to a musical note and play a tune. Well, it's not much fun, I guess...

[UplandMetanomy]

https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/upland-series-a--9688e502

Jun 13, 2019
Uplandme, a "Monopoly"-like property game built on the EOS blockchain, has raised $2 million in seed funding.
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/06/13/monopoly-style-blockchain-property-trading-game-raises-2-million/

May 21, 2020
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200521005364/en/Upland-Enters-Strategic-Agreement-With-Tilia
Upland Enters Strategic Agreement With Tilia
Upland Players Will Be Able To Sell Owned Virtual Properties for Real-World Currency

Blockchain game developer Uplandme, Inc. (“Upland”) and Tilia Inc. (“Tilia”) today announced that they have entered into an agreement to use Tilia Pay to monetize activities in the Upland virtual property trading game. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Linden Research, Inc. (“Linden Lab”), the creator of Second Life, Tilia is a registered money services business and licensed money transmitter
https://decrypt.co/29978/blockchain-game-upland-second-life
https://venturebeat.com/2020/11/10/upland-lets-players-trade-virtual-property-for-real-money-using-tilia-pay/
Upland blockchain game will use Linden Lab’s Tilia for virtual property transactions
https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/21/uplandme-blockchain-game-will-use-linden-labs-tilia-for-virtual-property-transactions/

December 30, 2020
Virtual Property of the famous New York Stock Exchange Sells for US$23,000 in Upland Metaverse Auction
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/virtual-property-famous-york-stock-231400179.html

September 3, 2021
Will the metaverse bring the second coming of Second Life?
https://venturebeat.com/2021/09/03/the-deanbeat-will-the-metaverse-bring-the-second-coming-of-second-life/

Nov 2, 2021 at
Animoca Brands Backs Upland’s Real Estate-Based Metaverse With $18M Raise
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/animoca-brands-backs-upland-real-130000417.html

December 10, 2021
One World Universe Purchases Over 100 Properties Within UPLAND Metaverse Real Estate Trading Game
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-world-universe-purchases-over-165200234.html

https://upx-spark.exchange/
https://upxland.me/
https://assets.website-files.com/5f32eb9ab7a49338ca6baf68/5f398073ecda613f6448f8f1_Upland_White_Llama_Paper_2019-10-29.pdf
https://bloks.io/account/upxtokenacct
https://bloks.io/account/playuplandme
https://bloks.io/account/communityupx