Which companies are the pioneers creating the games, platforms and worlds of the metaverse that consumers and businesses are set to use?
There are a number of companies and platforms that can be considered to be part of the beginnings of the metaverse, or are creating to tools to make the metaverse happen. These players are not only attracting in users, but they are also where brands and retailers need to look to make their first tentative steps into using the metaverse.
Older than SnapChat and even Instagram, Roblox has been around since 2006. It started life as Dynablox in 2004, when co-founders David Baszucki and Erik Cassel created what they saw as a ‘social gaming platform’ to combine game play with social interaction. Changing its name to Roblox in 2006, the platform ticked along unremarkably until the late 2010s, when a new breed of gamer started to be attracted to more interactive and social online gameplay. The pandemic lockdowns then saw Roblox catapulted into mass-market adoption – particularly among kids – and it has become a central force in the putative metaverse, attracting some 47mn daily active users in 2021. It hit 52mn users in 2022.
What makes it stand out in the metaverse is that, for much of the platform’s life, it has sought to create virtual worlds in which gamers can play, socialise and where devs can create new games – all with existing gaming tech, rather than expensive AR and VR.
While it may not be ‘immersive’ in the 3D sense, Roblox is immersive as an experience and, with the average age of its user being just 13, it is creating the beginnings of a ‘metaverse expectation’ among Generation Alpha, the next wave of consumers who will be expecting their interactions with the internet to be more like Roblox and less like Amazon. That said, the company reports that its audience is starting to ‘age up’, with the 17-to-24-year-old segment being its fastest growing.
What marks it out is that it is both free to use and free to create games on, revenues coming from in-game purchases. Currently there are more than 40mn games on the platform, many with very few users, but those that are popular – Adopt Me! Brookhaven and Tower of Hell – attracting between 18mn and 29mn users.
The other element of Roblox that makes it stand out from other gaming platforms is the social element, with the site claiming that it sends 2.5bn chat messages a day. The social element also extends to up and down voting of games, the following of players and even voice chat.
For developers, Roblox Studio offers the ability to create games – using a relatively simple coding language called Lua – creating not only a massive raft of games, but also producing a whole generation of new game developers. This ability to create games on the platform is also a boon for brands. They too can create interactive games on the platform to engage this young audience.
This engagement can also be lucrative. Brands including Clarks, Spotify, Chipotle, NARS, Gucci, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Vans have built virtual experiences on Roblox, and the investment is proving worthwhile. Gucci’s Gucci Town has racked up nearly 33mn visits, while Chipotle’s Burrito Builder has more than. 17mn. Gucci also sold a virtual handbag on the platform for $4,000.
Decentraland is a 3D virtual world platform owned and operated by the non-profit Decentraland Foundation. It is often seen as the ideal of what the early metaverse stands for: a decentralised, non-money-making virtual world that anyone can access, build in and enjoy.
The platform is based around buying and selling NFTs using Decentraland’s own MANA cryptocurrency, which is backed by the Ethereum blockchain. It was created by Argentinians Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano in 2015 as a virtual ‘map’ parcelled up into digital plots of land, each for sale for $20 paid for using MANA tokens. The game’s first commercial map, Genesis City, was launched in 2017. It consisted of 90,601 parcels of land and raised $26mn. Thanks to a surge in interest in the platform during the pandemic, use soared and the platform attracted a number of major brands – including Samsung, Adidas, Atari and, perhaps less obviously, PricewaterhouseCoopers – to purchase properties on the site. Fashion Week 2021 saw major fashion brands including Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, Perry Ellis and Estee Lauder appear. Music artists Deadmau5 and Grimes have also performed on the site.
By October 2022, Decentraland was thought to be worth around $1.2bn and, by ‘area’, is the largest of the all the virtual blockchain worlds.
So how can brands actually leverage Decentraland? The first step is to create a username and avatar via the MetaMask app. Using this app – which is essentially a wallet – the user needs to transfer (or pay!) 100 MANA and a small Ethereum fee to make this avatar live.
Once this is done, the brand (or individual) rents or buys land in 16 x16 parcels using OpenSea (another app) or the Decentraland Marketplace. Like any real-world city, Decentraland cities are made up of different neighbourhoods, each with different property prices. Each transaction is kept on the Ethereum blockchain so it belongs to that user and that user alone.
This property can then be used to create experiences, games or whatever the user wants to do with it.
Another way to build a brand presence on Decentraland is to take out a billboard advert in neighbourhoods across the city or in other people’s properties and games. The more billboards you have, the more you will be seen.
The Sandbox bills itself as “an ecosystem of three integrated products and services that facilitate user generated content creation”. These three products are VoxEdit, which is used to create NFT game assets, a marketplace for buying and selling those assets, and Game Maker, which players use to build their own game experiences without coding.
What really makes The Sandbox tick, however, is how it uses blockchain. At its core, the Sandbox is a game in which players can buy digital plots of land, called LAND, and create experiences on top of them to share with other users. These purchases – along with the NFTs created using VoxEdit, are backed by the cryptocurrency Ethereum and its blockchain. Users can also use Ethereum wallets to hold SAND tokens, utility tokens that can be used for creating NFT assets, and for buying and selling on the marketplace. There are only 3bn SAND tokens, so they are in effect a cryptocurrency and ownership of SAND grants token owners voting rights on how the platform is developed and run.
How brands can leverage The Sandbox relies on a number of factors. Firstly, a brand will need to build a social hub on the LAND that it has bought. This is the equivalent of a website in Web 1.0, and is where any brand will seek to create an engaging experience. It is worth noting that this ‘engagement’ will almost certainly be some sort of gamified experience as that is currently the norm for metaverse interaction. Games such as finding coins, or solving puzzles are most common. Winners get a reward, usually an NFT from the business or brand.
Brands can also leverage their Sandbox presence through influencers. The brand can partner with an influencer and users can then hang out with those influencers, for tokens and brand exposure.
Owning LAND can also lead to creation and property games akin to things like Beast Quest or SIMS-like experiences, which brands can either run and operate or create a presence in. Brands can even buy billboard advertising in other people’s developments and within games.
There are many other ways brands can create gamified experiences in the Sandbox, limited only by their imagination, but to date most have followed the puzzle/collection/prize format or have aped existing games from the meatspace.
Epic Games is the games company behind Fortnite, a gaming and social space where iconic characters from popular franchises come together to take part in a range of virtual activities and games – all in virtual worlds. And this makes it a metaverse – despite the fact that the company itself never refers to itself as that.
In fact, Fortnite has existed before the term metaverse came into popular usage. The game play takes place across different worlds within the platform and mixes and matches popular culture characters – with one user describing it as a metaverse where you can play Kratos driving in a Ferrari with Ariana Grande and Thor.
This is the key to Fortnite’s success: it is really a multi-metaverse that allows characters from each to be dragged into others – and then made to interact with things from our real world universe. So, Dr Strange can be pulled from the Marvel metaverse, Naruto from his and they can all dance to music from our world. The thing is that it is all part of one ongoing story.
It was launched in 2017 and now has more than 350mn registered players, with upwards of 15mn playing at any one time. During lockdown, kids and Gen-Z-ers started to use the game in conjunction with video calling to meet up and play, watch concerts – Ariana Grande again – and interact with cross-over events with Marvel movies.
The unique appeal of Fortnite is that skill isn’t a prerequisite, with many people playing for fun and social interaction as much as to win. It is also free to use.
The game monetises itself through in-game purchases, generating $5.1n in revenue in 2020.
And the Fortnite metaverse is starting to attract brands. Clearly, Marvel – part of Disney – have leveraged it by installing characters in the game, but other brands are also starting to find Fortnite to be an interesting introduction to creating a metaverse presence.
Branded skins, adverts, brand tie-ups all contribute and, as more brands become part of the Fortnite story, the more users it attracts and so on. The creation of avatars for players has also opened it up to allowing clothing brands to sell NFT outfits for characters – all done using Vbucks, Fortnite’s cryptocurrency, which users buy using real money – and has given brands in the fashion and accessory space in particular access to its metaverses.
Meta – the company until recently known as Facebook – is one of the most high-profile players in the putative metaverse, mainly by dint of its owner, Mark Zuckerberg’s drive it bet the future of the whole company on it.
Meta’s lofty vision is to use AR – and VR to some extent – to bring the metaverse to life for everyone worldwide, using affordable AR glasses to provide a real-world-virtual-world composite view that allows people to interact with others both in the real world and virtually.
Or, as Zuckerberg said at the launch of Meta: “Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you’re instantly in your home space. There are parts of your physical home recreated virtually, it has things that are only possible virtually and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful.”
He went further, outlining how, within his view of the metaverse, users will be able to do anything they can imagine: join virtual rooms and worlds, get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create – and doing things we haven’t even thought of.
Users will also be able to bring real things from the real world into the metaverse, and to take things from the metaverse into the real world in the form of holograms and AR.
Meta is working on a VR headset, called Quest (née Oculus), and a platform called Horizon, which will be where the headset will deliver you. Within this, users – and brands – will be able to create Horizon Worlds, where games, parties, events, work and everything in between can be created.
That’s the vision. The reality, thus far, is that Meta hasn’t really created anything that anyone is using and, in the view of many, has failed to understand how people currently use what passes as the metaverse and is instead attempting to recreate Facebook in avatars – with a drive to keep people in one place long enough to see more adverts, if you are being cynical.
There is also criticism that Meta’s view of the metaverse, where the office is created to look just like an office in the real world is missing the point. The metaverse is about exploring not just virtual places, but new experiences and identities. People don’t want to go to the real office, why would they sit at home and go to a virtual one?
The company has, however, set aside billions of dollars to invest in creating its view of the metaverse and it is hard to see that it will ultimately fail. The question will be how it will attract users and brands to its vision of the metaverse, when the likes of Roblox and Fortnite are already way down the road of getting younger generations using the metaverse without realising.
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