Introducing Metazone: Unleashing the Creative Potential of the Metaverse
Decentraland
Decentraland is the latest great attempt at creating a truly decentralized user owned and run Metaverse. It uses blockchain technology to claim and transfer land, keeping a permanent record of ownership. Toward the end of 2017 and early 2018, thousands of plots of virtual real estate were sold and distributed to digital land owners all around the world. The prospect of claiming a slice of the digital landscape was a captivating pitch which attracted plenty of investor interest, regardless of ownership only being represented by a 2D pixel grid.
Genesis City has a total of 90,000 Parcels of LAND available. 55% of the land has been allocated to private districts and plazas, while the remaining 45% is left for public ownership. This sounds like a good foundation to build from, but in reality this model has left several gaping problems in the community development due to the developer bandwidth (LAND) mostly resting in the wallets of speculative investors rather than developers themselves.
Decentraland publicly launched the 3D Virtual Web Explorer on February 20th 2020. The actualization of a decentralized peer to peer Metaverse attracted plenty of visitors on launch week, but soon after the dust settled, a reality sets in when exploring the world on foot. Much of the land is desolate greenness as far as the eye can see, indicating deployment of content isn’t a priority for a majority of land owners.
If you are to stumble onto a scene in Decentraland, most likely it is content put together using the builder creation tool developed by the team. In its current state, these scenes are mostly static experiences with minimal functionality present lacking the capability to produce captivating enough experiences for metaverse explorers to stick to. However, we believe this is still going to be a very useful tool once further developed to allow additional options for non technical land owners to build on their land.
Witnessing this empty land phenomena leads one to question, why nobody seems to want to do anything with their land. Much of these properties sold in the 4 figure range so you’d expect people who invest that kind of money to be more active with their metaverse endevours. Once we begun to build on our lands we quickly became aware of what the problem may be, we call it the Decentraland Trilemma.
Developer Dilemma: Access to developer bandwidth (LAND) is expensive in Decentraland which poses a high capital requirement in order to deploy and test their creations. Also, the Daily Active User (DAU) count is too low at the moment to take such a HIGH RISK investment.
Land Owner Dilemma: Mostly speculative investors who do not possess the technical abilities required to create content to potentially monetize the LAND they own, resulting in empty parcels throughout Decentraland.
Player Dilemma: Content is scarce in Decentraland so there aren’t many opportunities to explore and immerse oneself into the metaverse. Without a playerbase, Decentraland economy is weak.
Recognizing these problems is what lead us to build this community tool called MetaZone which bridges the creative potential from sitting on the sidelines to instead be unleashed onto a sustainable developer canvas ready for use.
What is MetaZone?
MetaZone is an open platform which allows for the distribution of community created content(METAs) designed for land owner deployment in Decentraland. Creators are able to upload their METAs and mint a specific total number of NFTs associating ownership to those who buy them off the marketplace. Land owners are then able to deploy these METAs to their land with a simple easy to use interface at the click of a few buttons.
Align Incentives to reduce risk for Development Cost
An active economy is essential to the sustainability of the metaverse. Because of this, MetaZone is designed with monetization as a key feature in mind. Its essential to align incentives for all parties involved in the creation and deployment of a META. This model encourages collaboration between the two parties to produce a highly marketable product and scalable brand for both parties.
MetaZone functions similarly to how a traditional app store would. Every sale of a META is split between the creator (70%) and the distribution platform (30%). Through the marketplace the land owner now has access to high valued content to host on their lands. Once a host takes ownership of the META the ID is assigned to their eth account, beginning a partnership between the creator and host either through a one time purchase of the META or a revenue share from any future activity the land owner brings in.
This is achieved through our payment split contracts and NFT integration. If a META is designed for payment capabilities, the creator determines the split agreement before it hits the market. An example of this is a game that requires 10 MANA per play session. For every transaction that occurs, the predetermined split built into the META will stream automatically to the Creator, the Host of the META, and the MetaZone platform itself. This payment infrastructure allows execution of payments to be dispersed to every involved party in a trust-less and automated manner. No middle man will be required to withdraw any accrued funds for both a creator or host. METAs are designed to be as easily transferable as any other NFT, so in the event of an ownership swap, the payment address must automatically switch to the rightful owner to avoid revenue going to the wrong party.
Land Owner Monetization
With METAs that offer either products or services that have a MANA cost to them, land owners can now benefit from hosting them on their property and begin to build streams of income from the digital real estate they possess. We’ve seen great examples of this ranging from hosting of games that have pot mechanics built in to reward top players, to hosting advertising METAs such as the Omniboard, and now some high profile games like Ethermon deploying METAs with essential game mechanics that require players to spend on crafting supplies. This is just the beginning, we expect many more creative monetization opportunities for land owners in the future!
META Customization with MetaZone Remote
We’ve added a critical feature that allows MetaZone users to fully customize their METAs by including an in-game remote control. This remote has multiple options ranging from scaling the METAs to a desired size to placement arrangement using the omni-directional functions. This allows for multiple METAs to be purchased and deployed to the same parcel, allowing for mixing and matching.
Deployed METAs = Content for Player Consumption
In summary, we believe by solving the Decentraland Trilemma, developers and 3D artists will feel much more comfortable contributing their talents to the metaverse, resulting in a content explosion. With more content means a stronger player base presence and economy overall. The days of wandering through the metaverse to see nothing but green grounds will dwindle down as the creator economy develops giving land owners more options to deploy and potentially monetize the property they own.
Introducing the METAs!
The MetaZone platform is open to anyone, many of our creators only recently begun spending time learning how to work with 3D design programs like Blender. After a few weeks of learning, they deployed METAs they were proud of and have found a way to monetize their new hobby. This is something we love to see and expect a lot more of, the more content variety the better.
Success Stories of Top Creators
Corv- The developer behind the Metazone platform and also the first to introduce METAs into the Decentraland ecosystem. Corv created a suite of retro arena style gaming experiences which include fully functional leaderboards and payment integration. Land Owners are purchasing these games and hosting them, sharing revenue with the payment split integration built into the Metazone platform. Within one month of MetaZone’s launch his games generated more than 500,000 MANA. A future game release called Corona Zombies is expected to be fully launched in the summer of 2020.
MetaZone.io Pac-Runner
Conquer the maze, collect all the orbs, avoid the badies, win MANA!
metazone.io
Planet VR- 3D modeling studio for Decentraland created a set of realistic housing METAs optimized for the limitations and constraints of the Decentraland rendering engine. Also, he was the first to create asset packs designed to decorate the interiors of these houses or any submitted to MetaZone (Furniture, TVs, Shelving's, etc.). House A sold out quickly and House B only has a few left to purchase. The Furniture Pack continues to sell well giving land owners the options to create and customize their own residential experiences within Decentraland using the remote capabilities provided by MetaZone to place these assets in any location within their parcel.
SugarClub- The popular owner and entertainment provider of the Sugar Club (-1,-35) used his branding power to create one of the hottest selling METAs in MetaZone history. The Sugar Gallery is designed to allow Land Owners to deploy fully customizable art displays for their unique collections of NFT artwork. Complete with donation button HUD and Soda Machine METAs to act as an additional donation interface, allowing land owners to monetize their galleries. 50,000 MANA was generated in sales in less than 2 weeks after launching this META.
Ethermon- The Ethermon Garden Bed is the latest sensational release on the MetaZone platform, outperforming everyone's expectations. This META is going to allow Land Owners to sell seeds to Ethermon owners as well as provide the farming grounds necessary to grow the crops needed to feed their beloved companions and help them grow. Also, owning this META allows for the mons to freely roam on your parcel and eventually will become the capturing grounds for new rarer mons. This META is the first of many anticipated releases by the Ethermon team which in total will complete a robust and immersive gaming experience for all Ethermon players and owners. So far this META has generated more than 600,000 MANA in sales less than a week after its release. 65 out of the 100 minted have sold leaving 35 available to claim.
Roadmap (Where we are)
The Link below will take you directly to our public roadmap, it will show you what we have done up to this point and our plans for the future.
Also, the MetaZone team has publicly logged its progress from literal inception of the idea to its current status of a fully operational platform. You can visit The Block Runner Youtube channel to go back in time and revisit those discussions on our podcast.
Come join the community that is working together to build the metaverse. Follow us on social media below. Sign up for a MetaZone account to receive the latest updates from our news blast keeping community members up to date on the latest progress.
Social Media Links
Website: https://www.theblockrunner.com/metazone
Platform: https://metazone.io/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwfsHLKyCp98lbZEHyrGA-g
Follow us here: https://twitter.com/MetaZoneio
