And yet, the artificial scarcity coded into many metaverses has frustrated some blockchain purists who want the new digital world to create a truly fairer, more decentralized version of Earth. It can instead feel, at times, like an even more commodified and consumerist version of the reality humans naturally inhabit, in which a few power players are already dominant, and passion and hucksterism can look the same.“Domino's is selling pizzas in Decentraland that are delivered right to your door. It's simple, but it's revolutionary,” said Evan Buckman, the chief operating officer of Realm, which hopes to allow users to develop personalized worlds known as “microverses.” (As goes with many things in the metaverse, the truth is a bit less straightforward. Domino’s is not selling pizzas in Decentraland, a spokesperson told Motherboard, but a developer did create a digital kiosk to mimic the pizza’s old branding and interact with the company’s ordering systems, leading to the delivery of a pizza.)“Since October, everything is a metaverse,” said the chief operating officer of a metaverse-focused company.
Some metaverses are, including the 3D-focused Somnium Space. But while Somnium Space’s land parcels and digital assets are on the blockchain—“We love decentralized”—it sheepishly admits on its website that decisions are made by a centralized team because, according to the company, “a project of our size and vision needs to be curated and decisions have to be made quickly.”To some people in the industry, the level of boosterism emanating out of certain corners can feel like an overcompensation for a lack of a viable product. “It's all futuristic hype,” Chris Bell, a digital landlord within the virtual reality world of Somnium Space, said of another metaverse. “The underlying value for each parcel is not there.”“Many things which are not necessarily good or useful to people—or even working—are getting a lot of attention,” said one metaverse CEO.
The chief executive of the publicly-owned blockchain company Tokens.com, which owns a significant stake in the Metaverse Group and bills itself as “one of the only companies providing public market investors with exposure to the metaverse,” has compared purchasing metaverse land to “buying land in Manhattan 250 years ago as the city is being built.”But Michael Gord, the Metaverse Group’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said some digital land could prove even more valuable than a plot in modern Manhattan. “New York has 10 million people or 15 million people in the city at any time. And although New Yorkers like to say that New York doesn't sleep, actually New Yorkers do sleep sometimes,” he said. By comparison, Gord believes it’s “reasonably likely” that as many as 100 million-plus people could be inside Decentraland at all hours of the day and night, which “would make it the most populated city on Earth, and also perhaps the most desirable real estate on Earth.” He estimates the “growth opportunity” is “in the hundreds or thousands of X of ROI” and expects Decentraland to be not only “the next Facebook” but also “the biggest social network in the world,” which is why he believes his company’s investments to be financially sound.For all the talk of decentralization, a number of companies are betting big on a few platforms in hopes of reaping billions in profits. “There is only one Facebook,” one speculator said.
“Having been in it for four months longer than everybody else, we actually had a huge head start,” she told me. Republic Realm isn’t a “corporate tycoon who just buys and holds,” she said. It’s building the infrastructure that it believes will help turn the metaverse concept into a reality. The company’s most successful product is a collection of 100 residential villas in The Sandbox called the Fantasy Islands collection, for which the company purposefully charged the “very high-end price point” of $15,000—“It connotes some exclusivity”—and which were going for $300,000 in the secondary market when we spoke, she said. The plots are modeled after vacation homes in the south of France, sci-fi video games, and Central American ecolodges (“for surfing on the beach”), and come with customizable add-ons, like a hot tub. She compared purchasing a home in the metaverse to creating the modern version of a Myspace page. “It's like having your own website,” she said.“Everybody's talking about the metaverse, but you go there, and there's nothing to do, there’s nothing to see,” said the CEO of a metaverse real estate company that develops land.
To Lotlikar there’s truly no limit to what the combination of NFTs, augmented reality, and virtual reality can accomplish. For example, SuperWorld claims to have partnered with a DAO to bring together two indigenous Amazonian tribes to create digital art after 500 years of war. (Motherboard did not independently verify this claim.) Lotlikar also believes the popular blockchain concept of play-to-earn, in which people can earn money for playing games online, doesn’t go far enough in utilizing the blockchain.“What about live-to-earn?” Lotlikar said. How do I get you paid to go on a run by Nike? How does National Geographic pay you to go on a trip?”Sunny Aggarwal, the co-founder of the decentralized blockchain exchange Osmosis, believes in the virtual world just as much as Lotlika, enough that he currently has a bet that society will spend 50 percent of its time in virtual reality within 15 years—and all of its time soon enough. (When I asked him if this would be a good thing, he insisted that it would.)“Property prices in the physical world are unattainable for most people in Gen Z,” said one metaverse CEO, who suggested buying digital real estate as an alternative investment.
Somnium Space addresses such concerns on its website, saying that while “there can be an unlimited amount of virtual land in theory… someone has to build a platform, devote thousands of hours creating, running servers, etc.” Plus, the company believes scarce land has benefits, creating an incentive to cultivate it into something worth spending time on.“A lot of speculators aren't using the land that they're buying,” one digital landlord said.