Transcending Shelter
“Housing” in the Metaverse
Serafus sauntered down the leaf-littered forest path leading to the Lavender Beds neighborhood. He’d been considering getting a home over the last week or so, and he walked along with a bit of a bounce in his stride. Not much of a bounce, mind you. Serafus was a Lallafel, an adorable, gnome-like being only 3 feet 4 inches tall… when he wore his hair up. Unbeknownst to young Serafus, he was also naught but a player character in Final Fantasy 14 — a popular online role-playing game.
He arrived at the lone unclaimed plot of land in Lavender Beds and leaned on his small, oaken staff.
“You camping here?”
A much larger, silent man — a Roegadyn — was standing about a foot from the For Sale placard, staring at it intently while holding a battle axe. In another world, a young man at his computer had spent the last 14 hours clicking on the sign in the hopes that the randomized timer would run out, allowing him to finally claim the plot that he had been eyeing for months. He saw through the Roegadyn’s eyes, but his own were bloodshot and heavy from lack of sleep.
“Hello?”
No response from the Roegadyn. He continued looming over the placard from less than a step away, unmoving, silent.
“Whatever.”
Serafus knew not everyone liked to talk, so he jogged around the larger, lumbering marauder and faced the placard himself. The young man in control of Serafus clicked the sign and immediately claimed the land. Nice.
There was a beat, and the Roegadyn backed up, then took another step forward. He seemed to hesitate, and then rotated awkwardly to look at Serafus. “I’ve been here for 14 hours!”, he said suddenly. “Dude…”
Serafus must have examined the For Sale sign at precisely the right moment to claim the land.
“I’ve been clicking this thing since last night!”, whined the Roegadyn, his exasperation now pushing more treble into his voice.
“Well, that sucks. Sorry bro.” replied the Lallafell, the slang seemingly coming from another world — one which echoed with the laughter of a gamer realizing his absurd luck.
“…I’m gonna haunt you for this.”
“What?”
“I’m gonna haunt you,” the giant repeated. The two looked at each other wordlessly for a few seconds.
“Uh…Okay…” The Lallafell turned on his heels and walked off, twirling his oaken staff before him.
From that day forward, the Roegadyn did exactly that. He stood outside Serafus’s new house like the specter of bad luck, with the vacant, hollow eyes that the others describe mysteriously as “AFK”. For months he remained there, staring perpetually out into the middle distance, haunting the Lallafell, exacting the most passive-aggressive form of revenge imaginable.
This is just one, story (admittedly, slightly fictionalized) from the ridiculous housing system of Final Fantasy 14. Almost since the game’s launch, there have never been enough homes to go around. Square, the developers, have attempted all sorts of solutions without success. They even provided an unlimited supply of instanced “apartments” for players, and that didn’t fix it. To this day, securing a house in the MMO often means choosing between hours spent clicking and praying, or a trip to the darker corners of the Internet to buy one off the black market.
But why?! The house doesn’t really do anything for you as a player. You don’t perform better in battle or have any significant in-game advantages as a result of having one. It’s pretty much just something to decorate. Why are people willing to go to such ludicrous lengths to get their hands on a customizable, virtual cottage?
Turning to Fortnite
The answer, I believe, can be found in Fortnite — a game in which there is no housing at all. What they do have is “skins,” a covering for your character that serves to customize his or her appearance in the game. Like housing in FF14, these skins don’t actually do anything for you. They make your character look different, but that’s about it. As a consequence, they haven’t really sold any.
Just kidding. They’ve sold millions. We don’t actually know how much Epic Games has made off of these frivolous pieces of in-game flair. But, we do know that, on just one set with NFL team branding, they made over $50,000,000. And, in their reports of their most profitable IP partners, the NFL is only in third place. Star Wars is in second, and a bar graph put together by a reporter covering the Fortnite beat seems to indicate that that Marvel has nearly doubled the NFL’s numbers. We’re likely talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in… texture files? It boggles the mind.
So, what does this teach us about housing? These Fortnite skins and the homes within Final Fantasy 14 have something in common that the aforementioned, instanced “apartments” don’t: they are seen by other players as they move through the world. If you encounter another player in Fortnite, you’re going to see what they’re wearing. If you walk by someone’s plot in FF14, you will see the house they put up. You will not, however, see their apartment unless you’re invited in. It’s hidden away. Digital possessions don’t necessarily have to be useful, they don’t need to cost anything, and they don’t even need to be fully customizable. But, if they can act as a channel of self-expression that’s visible to other players, they will be in demand.
“Digital possessions don’t necessarily have to be useful, they don’t need to cost anything, and they don’t even need to be fully customizable. But, if they can act as a channel of self-expression that’s visible to other players, they will be in demand.”
This just seems to be built into the human species on an animal level. There’s something comprehensibly similar about a hunter-gatherer collecting a feather for his hair and a teenage basement-dweller choosing the sickest new skin on Fortnite. People simply want to display their inner selves in a public fashion, and I believe Metaverse “housing” is the latest avenue for that — an avenue that people will be willing to pay for.
Redefining “housing”
Within the human mind, the archetype of a home or a house is “shelter”. It’s a place in which we can satisfy our primary physical needs while we protect ourselves from the elements. In the Metaverse, however, there are no elements and no physical needs. We have yet to come to grips with that, though, and housing in the Metaverse is still highly skeuomorphic. It looks like the housing we already know. People have beds they’ll never sleep in, chairs there’s no need to sit in, tables they will never eat at, and roofs to shelter them from rain and sun that don’t exist. It’s a little odd, frankly.
Housing in the Metaverse is better understood as a sort of “personal expression space” — more of an art installation than a shelter. Decoration and aesthetics, in this case, are the point. And, to an extent, this shift in perspective has already started. People have emphasized displaying their NFTs, and I could see that trend expanding, with people finding new ways to showcase their social affiliations, communicate their favorite brands, and so on. As its true purpose is realized, even the structures themselves are likely to become less “house-like.” Indeed, the forms of Metaverse architecture are already becoming more exotic as builders come to understand that they, too, are unbound by physics, structural engineering, or even geometry.
“Housing in the Metaverse is better understood as a sort of ‘personal expression space’ — more of an art installation than a shelter.”
In their most appealing forms, virtual houses will likely be highly customizable, large, and visible to other users within the “overworld.” They may also have utility that we are not yet able to conceive of, but as we’ve seen in Final Fantasy 14 (and other online games), utility isn’t actually a requirement for high demand. Its visibility and capacity for self-expression are enough.
Its present and future
Despite this massive potential “housing” market, we don’t actually see much in the way of Metaverse housing yet. The dominant use of virtual real estate has so far been much more commercial than residential: people tend to purchase land in places like The Sandbox or Decentraland with the intention of monetizing it in some way. They plan to sell something, advertise, lease the land, or just flip it on the secondary market. That’s not to say they don’t express themselves through it at all, but I would be very surprised if that was many people’s primary motivation when purchasing.
This is probably compelled by the cost of acquiring virtual land at the moment. It’s expensive, and it’s much easier to convince someone to spend thousands on a parcel when there’s future money to be made from doing so. Buying one of NFT Worlds’ enormous plots (currently at least $27,000 each) just to put up a house and display your NFT collection would be a pretty absurd flex.
Metaverse property sold explicitly for housing purposes is still fairly rare. We see it in some of the smaller metaverses, and it tends to have a lower price point than properties with commercial potential. One example would be “Portals”, where a small apartment could be acquired for as low as about $230 at the moment. There’s also “Worldwide Webb,” in which a small apartment goes for about $4,700. It’s still expensive, certainly, but not on the level of several of the most popular platforms.
I think it remains an open question how much an average user will pay for a house in the Metaverse, but we shouldn’t underestimate people’s desire to peacock. It’s part of what we are. We see this expressed in goods as diverse as clothing, bumper stickers, tattoos, luxury bags, NFTs, and a million other things that tell people a bit about who we think we are. As people spend more time in virtual environments, it has become exceedingly clear they will pay for the opportunity to express themselves there as well. While “housing” may not ultimately be the best term for what’s described in this article, I think that once people see the money-making potential of selling visible space for self-expression in popular virtual worlds, we’re likely to see an explosion in this category. The question now is simply who will light the fuse that leads to the virtual housing boom.
