Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation at Meta Connect didn’t carry many numbers and remained a bit vague about the current dimensions of the metaverse. It’s not that weird, and it’s not just Menlo Park’s problem. Take for example Decentraland and The Sandbox, which until a few months ago were on everyone’s lips. Their “metaverses” – immersive platforms based on NFT and cryptocurrencies (unlike Meta’s Horizon Worlds or Fornite) – hosted events of the caliber of Fashion Week, were contested by brands such as Samsung, Nike and Coca Cola and were haunted by various celebrities including Snoop Dogg and Grimes.
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In the meantime, however, yet another speculative bubble linked to cryptocurrencies (and in particular to NFT) has burst; while the enthusiasm towards the promised metaverse has partially cooled, also due to the few really relevant news following the now famous presentation by Zuckerberg last October (with which the transformation of Facebook into Meta was announced).
However, it might surprise you to discover how much enthusiasm has cooled down: according to data released by DappRadar (web service that analyzes the use of the most popular crypto-platforms), on 10 October Decentraland had 535 active users, while The Sandbox, on the same day, it hit 619. Over the past 30 days, these numbers stop at 6,160 and 10,190 respectively. Incredibly small numbers that require some clarification: for DappRadar, an active user is someone who not only enters one of the two platforms, but also makes some purchases with cryptocurrencies.
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A metric disputed by the executives of the two realities: “It is as if among the visitors of a shopping center only those who bought something were counted”, for example explained, speaking with CoinDesk, the CEO of The Sandbox Arthur Madrid. So what do the numbers that measure all the users who have entered these two immersive environments tell us? If you look at the data released by DCL-Metrics (an analysis tool built by the Decentraland users themselves), it turns out that daily users in the month of October were actually just over 7 thousand a day, while in the whole month of September we arrive at a total of 57 thousand active unique users.
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Better numbers, but which – in addition to having dropped significantly compared to a year ago (when Decentraland boasted 300,000 monthly users and 20,000 newspapers) – are still very low for a company valued at 1.3 billion dollars. The same goes for The Sandbox, a reality with a similar economic value but whose users are more difficult to count: according to the latest traceable estimates – dating back to last April – the platform founded in 2011 in San Francisco could count on 300 thousand monthly users; easy to imagine that in the meantime they too have gone down.
Comparing these numbers with those of reality whose success greatly anticipates the advent of the term “metaverse” (to which they were then compared) makes a certain impression: Fortnite can now count on 80 million active users monthly, while Roblox arrives even to 200 million. To really measure the diffusion of Decentraland and The Sandbox, it may be even more useful to compare their numbers with those of the platform that before any other anticipated the current vision of the metaverse: Second Life.
Even today – despite more than 15 years have passed since the peak of success and has now disappeared from the media radar – Second Life can count on about 200 thousand active users every day and 500 thousand active monthly. The platform founded in 2003 by Linden Lab (and which at the height of its glory was also used in Italy by politicians such as Antonio Di Pietro and by artists such as Irene Grandi) can therefore still count on a significantly higher user base than that of Decentraland. and The Sandbox put together.
While waiting to understand what form the Meta metaverse will take and how widespread it will be – that is to say Horizon Worlds – observing these numbers allows us to see clearly what the reality is that lies behind some impressive marketing campaigns.