What was the Decentraland’s Biggest Mistake?
Decentraland is one of the earliest and most awesome blockchain-based game projects. Yet, they fall behind other newer projects like Axie Infinity and Star Atlas.
Why is that? Doesn’t Decentraland a good idea or a good game? Let’s dive into it!
What is Decentraland?
Decentraland is a 3D open-world game on a web browser. The idea is so great! It is a nearly fully empty world. Players buy land in the game and build whatever they want on it. Decentraland provides a builder tool for players to build certain things. You can always build more advanced structures with their SDK.
Decentraland is managed by DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) which means everyone can participate and shape the future of Decentraland. According to the latest report, they released there are about 30 active voters.
How Big is Decentraland?
The size of a parcel is 16x16 meters and there are 90,000 parcels which makes Decentraland a world of 23 million square meters world. Decentraland is 9 times bigger than Luxembourg, 2 times bigger than Cyprus and Lebanon!!
There are lots of places currently built such as casinos, go-cart facilities, game centers, karaoke bars, and art galleries. The Sky is the limit! You can build whatever you want and make it interactable. Set rules on how can see or enter the place!
History of Decentraland
The project started to develop in 2015 by Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordino and published its first beta version in 2017. They sold their first lands in December 2017 at a price of $20. As of September 2021, land prices start from $4,000. The prices really depend on the location. There are lands that are on sale with a price of $200,000.
Big Players
There are some real-world big players in Decentraland. In June 2021 London-based auction house Sotheby’s created a digital replica of its New Bond Street headquarters as a virtual gallery in Decentraland to show digital art. On June 18, 2021, New York-based digital real estate investment vehicle Republic Realm paid the equivalent of $913,228 for 259 parcels of Decentraland that it plans to turn into a virtual shopping district named Metajuku, styled after the Tokyo shopping district Harajuku.
What is The Problem(s)?
Everything looks awesome and perfect, right? It is awesome but not perfect. The idea is quite fascinating but the execution is problematic. Let’s see what is wrong and why just a few people playing Decentraland.
The Biggest Problem
Let me start with the biggest problem. Decentraland is bigger than 50 countries (only counted the ones known by the UN) with a population of more than 60 million population in total. Yet, less than 100 people actively playing or living in the Decentraland which results in a desert-like this:
The vast majority of the Decentraland is like this. Pure emptiness. If you think it is like a world not populated with people, it is okay to be like this BUT, but the thing is every time you want to go somewhere meaningful, you have to “jump” there and it takes more than 1 minute to load the scene for me. I have a +90Mbps internet connection which is quite fast and 6 GB RTX 3060 GPU and 11th Gen Intel i7–11800H CPU which is quite fast and strong again.
Nobody plays a game where you need to load the scene for 1 minute frequently. That is the biggest mistake they have made and I feel sorry about it because it is such a good game to play. A true metaverse.
Infrastructure Problem
There are 2 main problems with the infrastructure problem of Decentraland.
First, blockchain network: Decentraland is an old project and it is normal to build on the Ethereum network. But Ethereum network transaction fees go up to +$500. On “Normal” days fees be like $40–50. Which is quite high again. Nobody wants to buy any item with a $50 transaction fee while the item itself is worth $5.
The second infrastructure problem is that Decentraland is a browser game and this is why loading times take so long after loading it still provides quite low performance even with strong hardware. There are many games that are built for PC with game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine.
Lessons To Learn
Lessons are quite simple for this case.
- Sell lands gradually as they get fulled by people and don’t let them abandon lands for a long time.
- Build on an efficient blockchain or migrate when you have a chance.
- Build on a strong game engine and make it available for everyone without performance problems or migrate when you have a chance!
Conclusion
I love builder games like Decentraland. And the idea of a decentralized game world is AWESOME. But unfortunately, we can’t play Decentraland with these problems.
Decentraland should have the power to migrate onto a new blockchain solution like Polygon and Solana. And they can build the game on powerful game engines. Therefore at least performance problems would be solved. If jumping action takes less than 5 seconds then people will likely play the game.
Even with all these performance problems, if Decentraland wouldn’t sell all the lands so fast and just sold them gradually as they get fulled by people, people would want to play the game. I would want to spend my time there, I would want to live there. Try to buy some land to build my own place that I can’t build in the real world.
I hope this article was helpful for everyone. We have to have a collective conscious to build better metaverses in the future. We can’t rely on individuals or companies. Cheers!
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