You might have seen recent claims that Decentraland, the metaverse platform which raised USD $25 million in Ethereum sales of virtual land to fund its development, only has active users in the dozens. That’s not quite true, game industry analyst and designer Lars Doucet tells me, citing his recent report for research firm Naavik -- as of yesterday, for instance, Decentraland has about 7000 daily active users.
Which is still not very much! (And tracks with my own data from last Summer.)
“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” Lars tells me. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects -- like people turn the [project’s] Discord into a meetup place for poker games. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”
You can see that in this Decentraland metrics tracker, with “ICE Poker” as the most visited location by far. It’s quite a fall from boom times (by which I mean last year) when huge firms like J.P. Morgan were touting their official “headquarters” in Decentraland.
And there’s some tragedy, too -- I’ve been following the platform since 2017, when the founders raised $25 million in Ethereum to fund it, and tried to keep true to its original, democratic-seeming vision.
“Decentraland is one of the few crypto metaverse/virtual real estate games to take its commitment to decentralization seriously,” as Lars tells me. “Like they seem to actually drink their own kool aid rather than using it as a cynical layer of paper thin marketing material like the other ones. To wit; their infrastructure is actually pretty decentralized!”
Then again, that’s also been one of Decentraland’s challenges.
Here’s why, according to a recent conversation I had with Lars, compressed for length -- with his own advice on how Decentraland might revive itself:
The decentral aspect itself, he notes, might actually be “one of the reasons the game is somewhat slow and janky, the architecture strains to provide a smooth experience with extremely short draw distances, very long load times.”
But the platform owners, i.e. the virtual land stakeholders, are serious about the decentral ideal:
“[They] have decentralized governance doing things, as in they regularly take votes based on voting points which are based on how many assets you hold... A big thing the votes are for is issuing grants for making stuff in Decentraland.
“But on the other hand, the game is very janky, there's not much to do, user figures aren't that great, a lot of stuff seems empty and broken and abandoned... So I give them major props for sticking to their commitments, but it doesn't seem to have really attracted a huge amount of people who want to stick around and build stuff.
Another problem is that the value of DCL’s virtual real estate has been diluted by the ability of users to teleport from one location to another.
“Because you don't get the locational benefits of games with weak teleportation (or that promise there will be weak/no teleportation on launch), the land has less leverage as an economic asset.” (He means “weak” as in there being a cost to make that teleport.)
With crypto experiencing a downtown in general, Decentraland has suffered too, making other problems more prominent:
“[The platform] seems to have some real architectural problems. It's slow, it's resource-intensive relative to its graphic fidelity (which is also quite low), draw distance is low… There's just not much to do.” (That’s also been my own experience any time I’ve tried it.)
More notes from Lars:
“I think coin governance is a deeply flawed governance model. [Ethereum founder] Vitalik Buterin has written extensively on that:
“I think the ‘virtual mall’ metaphor of Decentraland is a dead end; the push towards web-based catalog views, paired with instant teleportation… roaming around Decentraland aimlessly just isn't a compelling experience…
“[V]irtual land ownership holds ‘metaverse’ games back. You don't need to own land to create experiences in ROBLOX. You want to make creating content as easy as possible and land ownership as a prerequisite hinders that. My whole spiel is just given in my digital land value tax policy paper.
“Crypto doesn't seem to add much besides friction for user signups and it doesn't seem to have really incentivized significant creative energy. And I've already spoken my peace about virtual malls and virtual land.” (In fact ,Lars wrote a whole book about land, endorsed by Vitalik himself.)
None of this is to say the platform is fated for the digital aether:
“Overall I see Decentraland as an interesting experiment,” as Lars Doucet puts it. “Something actually really good could come out of this, if you just keep the interesting bits and remove the deadweight.
“In short they should try to make something more like an open source peer-to-peer version of dot big bang rather than a more decentralized version of the Sandbox.”
Dot Big Bang, by the way, was created by Linden Lab veterans. Then again, remember J.P. Morgan’s Decentraland partnership? The financial giant is now partnered… with Linden Lab spin-off Tilia.
I wonder whether in-app advertisement of UGC worlds is a "land-like asset" in some metaverse apps where land itself is free or very cheap, e.g., Rec Room, ROBLOX, etc.
"Squatting"-like behaviour might include paying for advertisements of a world with rent from that world, republishing a world to keep it in a "new worlds" list, or gaining subscribers with empty promises to stay in a "most popular creators" list, etc.
It would be interesting to "tax" the use of in-app advertisement such that occasional use is cheap for "peasants", but relying on it in the long run is too expensive even for "aristocrats" (who would have to find other ways of advertising their worlds).
In any case, I think it's interesting that problems with land-like assets might occur even in metaverse apps where land is free.
Posted by: Martin K. | Friday, October 21, 2022 at 11:18 AM
Now we have to own land in link metaverse as well? Wow...
Posted by: Matt | Tuesday, October 25, 2022 at 02:26 AM