Is The Metaverse Working?
A look at The Sandbox and its strategy of advancing collaborations between brands and creators
Before artificial intelligence exploded and captivated the minds and news cycles of both web3 and traditional news outlets, the metaverse was a hot topic buzzing around crypto circles.
But the heat appeared to dissipate in late 2023, until reporting on the metaverse almost seemed archaic.
Despite the downturn in coverage, many digital immersive worlds – or metaverses – have endured, such as The Sandbox. The decentralized virtual world allows anyone to become a creator and build games on virtual land, providing a path to earning real world cash through a digital medium. There are now over 6 million users of The Sandbox and it has partnerships with more than 400 major brand and intellectual property holders, suggesting the metaverse might be here to stay—or at least for longer than detractors had speculated.
“We’ve added one million users in the last year despite the bear market where the media isn’t talking about the metaverse anymore,” Sebastien Borget, chief operating officer and co-founder of The Sandbox, said to me in a recent interview.
But is the system of co-creation and fan engagement with brands actually working?
“The success of a metaverse platform is not just in the number of users, but in the depth of engagement—where time spent translates into meaningful experiences and value creation,” David Kroger, senior vice president of financial services firm StoneX said to me over email. “The Sandbox’s 119,886 assets and $8.88K in daily trading volume show activity, but the concentration of wealth—where a few wallets hold significant LAND—raises concerns about decentralization and true community participation.”
But Borget cited Season 4 of The Sandbox, which he said epitomizes what the company does. For 10 weeks, The Sandbox launched hundreds of experiences—40 of which came from major brands in entertainment—like Attack on Titan, Terminator, Hell’s Kitchen, Love Island and The Voice—where players collect and earn points that unlock rewards.
A recent map of Sandbox LAND ownership
The company used $2.5 million worth of SAND tokens to incentivize the people engaging with Season 4, and Borget said the numbers show it was a success. This round, there were 380,000 unique verified players, he said, more after only four weeks in Season 4 than The Sandbox has ever had. That compared with the 350,000 unique players the platform had during the bull run in Season 3, Borget said.
“It’s also onboarding fans of specific brands to web3 for the first time, giving them rewards in the form of SAND token or NFTs,” Borget said. “By reaching new records, we’re showcasing what the metaverse can offer to the brands and what the metaverse can be.”
If the metaverse continues to expand, the metric of “engagement” rather than “views” might become the new barometer for a platform’s content, said Joseph Cooper, founder of web3 game aggregator and discovery platform Earn Alliance. So far for Season 4, the average Sandbox user has spent 81 minutes of gameplay and 20 to 30 minutes per day in the metaverse participating in experiences, Borget said.
“How often are users coming back, how long do they engage for, and what activities are they doing that showcase deep usage of the features,” Cooper said to me over email. “The effectiveness of metaverse platforms and gaming in general needs to be measured by genuine retention.”
For Cooper, showcasing stats like all-time registered users, engagement that required users to only check in daily, or activities that are incentivized during a short period of time only obfuscates the effectiveness of platforms.
Borget agreed. “Views and those kinds of metrics are important, but they are no longer sufficient for creating long-term engagement for brands,” he said. “Whereas, an experience in the metaverse, virtual world or gaming terminal—through gamifying the education of the brands—is a much better fit.”
The Sandbox activation related to King Kong of Skull Island
There are two main models of Sandbox collaboration for brands, depending on the brand’s preference. They can either develop and operate their LAND by themselves alongside a builder agency or trusted partner within the Sandbox ecosystem, or, they can operate as a partnership with The Sandbox in a revenue share. In that case, The Sandbox develops and runs the LAND for the brand with regular activations.
“The launch by itself—just like in mobile gaming or in the real world—is not as important as what you’re going to do to continue sustaining your traffic with some form of strategy,” Borget said.
“We try to educate the brands that they need to have some form of re-engagement, something to bring the audience back even if a user came once before,” Borget said.
Cooper echoed Borget’s sentiments on the need for content that drives people back to the platform. “To improve engagement it sounds simple but it isn’t,” he said. “We need great content that inspires folks to participate in the metaverse. Expert game designers and economists need to combine forces to curate an experience that excites people.”
Borget said The Sandbox will continue to build on its model of brand and creator driven partnerships, activations, LAND sales and play-to-earn rewards.
“It’s exciting because it inspires the ecosystem to create a mixture of UGC and their own brand partnerships,” Borget said. “I really see a future where the brand partnerships can become much more dynamic.”
The fact that well-known brands are creating presences in the metaverse is good for the entire web3 community, Cooper said.
“It’s helping push the web3 game narrative to traditional studios to learn more about the use cases possible in this space,” he said. “Awareness and experimenting truly helps this industry in the long run, and once the industry lands genuine engagement, these activations will lead to insane revenue drivers similar to what we see in Fortnite today.”
lead image: Sebastien Borget