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As there are only a few dozen people alive every day, who are still playing Centre and?

Read this article in 19 Minutes

Players are discovering that LAND hype is no longer a good business.

"How can anyone play this game when the graphics are so rough?"

Talking to colleagues about the sandbox blockchain game as well as having a number of loyal fans in China, my partner expressed disbelief. Indeed, gamers who have been exposed to a lot of realistic, cool, immersive images are more likely to find the following abstract wind of oil painting unacceptable if they just look at the images.

The appeal of sandbox games is not limited to age, but adults are clearly not interested in games like Minecraft. Its largest group is actually younger players. If you go to B station and search for keywords like "Mini world" and "mini dog", you can see that most of the players are elementary school students.

Is also a sandbox game, the phenomenon of "elementary school students all go" seems to didn't swim in the chain, for this part of the players, "making money" is the first point, investors who play the Denver nuggets and the project, seems to be a major player, and with the development of Decentraland game seems to have not been too is the main melody of the chain to swim.

A sandbox game that raised $25 million before it went live

Sandbox is basically a game where the player is thrown into an empty space, with no clear rules or goals, and you have to use the built-in editor to start building items, homes, etc., and "create" everything you can imagine. The most famous sandbox game is Minecraft, and a few years ago, it was estimated that everyone could see some news in the media that "the great god has recreated a real building, just like the real world".

Because can be too creative, plus some games are pixel picture, rough sense is strong, so sandbox games attract mostly rich imagination of young players. Either way, sandbox games are not easy to play well and sell well. Because game development cycle is long, investment is big, dare to do sandbox game small team is not many.

In 2015, Jewish Argentinean developer Ari Meilich and his friends took inspiration from Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Avalanche about the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence in a virtual space.

Later, the idea was upgraded to create a virtual world based on the Ethereum blockchain, with Land with fixed coordinates replacing earlier pixels, where landowners could create content at will and monetize the content and applications they created as if they were in the real world.

2 Founders of Centre Aland: CTO Esteban Ordano and Ari Meilich, CEO

Sandbox games were not meant for indie game studios, but Ari Meilich's team caught up with IC0 financing at its peak. In August 2017, As soon as Center and launched token Sale, the project managed to raise money for THE ETH worth about $25 million in only 35 seconds. Subsequently, they successfully completed two land auctions, in which the most expensive land was nearly $120,000 according to the current price.

However, as far as player experience is concerned, Although rudimentary as they are, "Centre" and "Centre" are not yet fully fledged in the centre.

No. 1 Halloween Tours

As he was to be known, He naturally wanted to experience it for himself. Go to the website to register for free avatar, click https://play.decentraland.org/, connect MetaMask fox wallet authorization login, begin to enter the virtual world.

As Halloween is approaching, Centre and is holding a Halloween treasure hunt, there is no shortage of holiday excitement. Follow the tips to start at the Genesis Plaza and get a reward for completing the task.

A live Halloween video event

Wandering on the street, I found a blingbling star at the door, but I didn't expect that there would be an air-drop prop. This process requires paying a certain amount of Gas fee. In addition to knocking on doors, the entire event also includes games such as answering the phone, talking to ladies, and pumpkin playing, during which players are given a chance to get a POAP and Halloween props.

Halloween Activities quests

After quitting Halloween, I decided to explore other attractions. We probably counted before website display activities, there are telltale signs of nearly 40 (specific are available at https://events.decentraland.org/en/). Sugar Clubs (-1, -35) are certainly fancy enough, but the problem is that there are no friends in the same profession at first sight.

This is Sugar Clubs Level 1

As early as 2018, RMB an has reached a friendly cooperation with centre and is said to have bought land and built a building in Crypto Valley(70,21). According to the coordinates we found earlier (72,23), we entered the portal and soon arrived at our destination. The golden logo of an American currency was high above the entrance of the hall. There were several social media signs on the front desk, which looked quite formal.

Go to the second floor, also found a number of propaganda, according to the introduction of veteran players this September when the United States held the first anniversary of coin, as long as players have coin Ann T-shirt, can have a special booth in the party hall, sounds good.

In fact, Crypto Valley is not only a cryptogram enterprises, in addition to the U.S. headquarters of Crypto, we can also see Meme, SKALE, Matic, Maker and other teams 3D stadium. In March this year, Consensus Distributed, the world's largest virtual blockchain conference, was moved to Centre and was guided by Barry Silbert, CEO of Digital Currency Group (DCG).

"Red Bull", a small landowner with 50 land, is not well established in China. In 2017, when He was the first land auction as "Centre and", Chinese community lover contributed MANA into the Dragon City (106,88).

Previously, dragon Town planned to develop a unique virtual world integrating ancient Chinese culture. However, due to the power generated by love and the slow progress of official development, the construction of the whole content did not go smoothly. In the words of the old player, "the city owner changed more frequently than the Japanese prime minister".

In October this year, after taking office, the new master announced the establishment of Dragon DAO, hoping to manage the land use right of more than 6,000 pieces owned by him in a decentralized governance way. Moreover, under the governance mechanism of DAO, more cultural creativity could be discovered and applied to THE NFT field.

As yet, the overall building of the Dragon City as directed by the city master is newly in scale. Some Chinese elements are clearly seen in Centre and Here: Dragon Inns, pavilions, water trucks, etc. In the evening, we can still enjoy the beautiful moonlight of the Lotus pond.

Longmen Inn in the Dragon City

Unlike the other games, Centre and has limited land. Official has completed by the end of 2017, 2018, two land auctions, at that time, high heat, a piece of land near the city of the foundation of the prices as high as $200000, for ordinary players, now a minimum is three thousand yuan, to be the threshold of the small landlords are not low, players who have no land, basically can only go to other buildings around.

In fact, Not Being a Kryptonian game, As in this Halloween event, No gas fees are required to collect the medal as opposed to items, as Well as no free official decoration items. We took a look at the official events page, the current activities are basically free of charge, at this stage, attracting players to visit is still the most important goal.

However, if you're a player who CARES about clothes, you might want to buy some of these cool items.

Source: Network publicity map

As of now, both in picture and in playing, the whole centre and ecology are still in the relatively early stage, and cannot escape the traditional problem of sandbox games: no centre. In this situation, it is hard to keep players in Centre and incentivising them to pay.

Not much of a sandbox game

In addition to games like Dwarf Fortress, which are free to be updated by indie developers, sandbox games are best to maximize their user base by enhancing elements such as competition, but also by creating an atmosphere that allows developers to participate in building and commercializing games.

We can see this in games like Telaria and Knights of The Portal, which have strong linear designs or distinct levels, battles or adventure elements, and break out of the sandbox that only younger players, and adults, don't like to play.

Making money is actually a very good gimmick to break the circle of games. Early Decentraland land auction attracted high outside players, some very fire sandbox games abroad, such as Roblox new players attention is the "small player to become a millionaire by developing a game" news: 17 year old high school students and friends in Roblox development game, issued on the first day there will be 60000 people download, a few months to make hundreds of thousands of dollars; The 11-year-old made half a million dollars developing a pet simulation game on Roblox and went straight to his studio. Similar stories abound.

However, as of now, "Showing players around the building" is far from being fun, let alone profitable in terms of game ecology.

About a year and a half ago, we were approached by Shi Guang, an early player who envisioned the future ecology as being "Centre" and planning to turn off his real life centre to "open stores" "to help designers sell virtual game CARDS, people models and clothing."

Shi Guang was conceived as A year ago As Centre and ecology

From the actual situation, Shi Guang's assumption can be said to be null and void.

Currently, Many players are investors in MANA or Land, but as well as Being established players like Red Bull only enter the game when official updates or new events are launched. In June, Federico Molina, marketing director for the project, said 20,000 users had signed up so far, but the average number of daily births was only 500.

As of November 3, according to DclNodes. IO, as of Press time, there are currently 18 players active in The Center, as well as estimating the game's daily life in the tens if not in the center.

Decentraland business cooperation and, on the other hand, many, such as more and more encryption program began to build in Decentraland exhibition hall, all kinds of exhibition, product launches and meeting also started held here, in the face of a not very fun game, some old players have started thinking, Red Bull thought, "this game in the future can be encrypted developers default virtual gathering base", but in this case, instead more like a simulation game.

Sandbox games as a type of not easy to succeed, many ambitious sandbox games that end up not meeting expectations have consumed a lot of patience.

In June last year, Raw, a "multiplayer simulated sandbox role-playing" game that featured all the details and Settings as close to real life as possible, successfully raised nearly $200,000 in less than a month, but the platform ended its kickstarter campaign because of controversy.

The experience of "Raw" fizzle out really let a person think of Decentraland: two big game the same vision, the former main infinite close to the real simulation games, the latter is based on virtual reality world of block chain; The team is also independent studio with only two original developers, yet Raw, who claims to have been launched as early as 2015, is still in vogue.

The most central reason is the timing of its birth and the supporting institutions behind it.

Because of the IC0 craze, which coincided with the arrival of a virtual-reality movie called Ready Player One, the team was able to raise as much as $25 million from investors and the market. As of October, the team had 32 employees, according to Craft, and even at a cost of $3 million a year they are raising money to cover nearly 10 years of staff expenses.

It took three years to officially open the game as the team was still not in keeping with the grand futuristic picture in the video, but no one knows whether There will be another "Number One player" even given two years as a team. After all, when the project is transitioning into the DAO phase, the development team has a good reason to blame the community, even if it doesn't run out of money.