Remember the heyday of web3 metaverses? When Snoop Dogg was building a mansion in virtual world The Sandbox, followed by Warner Music Group? Or when Bing Crosby’s ‘Winter Wonderland’ opened in Decentraland?
These were the days when brands and celebrities were happily paying hundreds of thousands of dollars – or even millions – for land plots in these virtual worlds, igniting economies where fans could buy their own plots adjacent to them.
And now? Well, about that. CryptoSlate recently published a no-nonsense summary of what’s happened since the 2021-22 boom times, and it makes for bleak reading (if you bought virtual land, that is).
“In December 2021, a 3×3 Snoopverse estate next to Snoop Dogg’s property in The Sandbox sold for about $450,000, or about 71,000 SAND,” wrote journalist Liam Wright.
“That nine-parcel estate now screens at about $1,025 on a floor-equivalent basis. That is a drawdown of about 99.8% from the reported sale price.”
Similar comparisons are offered for other famous virtual-land deals from that time. An estate in Decentraland’s Fashion District bought for $2.4m in November is now “not worth materially more than $8,929 on a floor-equivalent basis, down about 99.6%” explained Wright.
These figures come as we hit peak ‘trough of disillusionment’ (no, troughs don’t peak, but you know what we mean) with the metaverse.
Meta is reportedly cutting its metaverse budgets by 30%, having burned $60bn on those initiatives since 2020. Just this week Rec Room, a virtual world once valued at $3.5bn that raised $294m of funding, announced that it’s shutting down because it can’t see a “path to profitability”.
Even Fortnite, which was never dragged in to the web3 or virtual-reality bubbles, has seen a “downturn in engagement” serious enough to spark 1,000 layoffs at its publisher Epic Games.
