BoxSnax #7: Decentraland Beta, RecRoom & Crypto, Twitch Brings Back BTC, Etheremon Out of Funding, F1 Delta Unveils New Car
Decentraland World Explorer Beta, RecRoom Crypto Opportunity, Twitch Brings Back BTC, Etheremon Runs Out of Funding, F1 Delta Time Unveils New France Racer
Decentraland’s World Explorer Closed Beta Almost Here
Decentraland is set to debut the closed beta of their world explorer, allowing users to share, create, and experience a variety of user generated content. Throughout the month invitations to try the World Explorer will be sent out. To have a chance at early access a user must create an avatar (begins July 8th).
In the meantime anyone can try Decentraland’s Builder tool (which was released in March) a drag-and-drop editor that allows users to design 3D environments in their browser, without owning land or Mana. Within two weeks of the Builder going live, thousands of users entered over 10,000 scene submissions for their Creator Contest.
A Tough Road to Beta
Up to this point, the team at Decentraland has been working non-stop to build, fix issues, and make improvements. Notably, they’ve optimized performance by shifting to Unity and kept Decentraland decentralized by building on web (as opposed to app stores or consoles).
“Currently, app distribution for mobile, console, and VR, take place almost exclusively through gated app stores that have not yet caught up to the open economy enabled by blockchain tech. However, the design space of web applications remains uncompromised.”
Another hurdle the team faced was that most platforms pre-load the assets they render, but unique user content in Decentraland cannot be pre-loaded. It must be downloaded and rendered by players as they traverse the World. Secondly, each individual “scene” must be lightweight, since neighboring scenes run concurrently, sharing players’ computing power.
Looking Forward
Decentraland’s main goal moving forward is to empower content creators to monetize their creations. The key to this is large user base and market liquidity, so they are putting VR on backburner for now.
See full article and details here.
VR Game “RecRoom” Could Leverage Crypto
Another contender in the user generated content/experience arena is RecRoom. RecRoom is a VR social gaming experience on Oculus. Players can individually or collaboratively build rooms, experiences, and games (shooters, sports, adventure, etc).
Like The Sandbox and Decentraland, it would make sense to incentivize and reward creators on the platform. RecRoom is not using crypto technology yet, but it has a leg up on competitors with its VR functionality. The game’s developer “Against Gravity”, has already raised $24 Million over two rounds of funding.
It will be interesting to see who is able to attract the most users and creators moving forward, and what type of features and incentives they will offer.
See the full article from Brian Flynn here.
Twitch Brings Back Bitcoin Payments
The Amazon-owned game streaming platform is once again accepting bitcoin payments. Cointelegraph reported in March that, unannounced, Twitch removed Bitpay as a form of payment for subscriptions. Bitcoin is back trading at around ~ $11,000, up from the dip in March (March average ~ $6,900). Despite price fluctuations 60% of bitcoin hasn't moved in a year, and 21.5% hasn’t moved in 5 years, showing most BTC owners are in it for the long haul (see source).
Etheremon Out of Funding
This past Friday Etheremon announced they are out of funding and “will not directly develop any new features in the near future”. Their official stores (selling monsters and eggs) will also be closing. However, they are encouraging open source development of the game, and are willing to share rights to use artworks and EMONT, and grant smart contract interaction permissions. They will continue to maintain existing features and fix any current bugs.
Etheremon started over a year ago, as a Pokémon inspired blockchain game. It was actually the first ever dApp on the Ethereum network that had a real gaming feature. Interesting to see if the community or outside individuals will continue to develop the game. Or maybe the Etheremons will become out-dated digital artifacts drifting in the blockchain.
F1 Delta Time Unveils its France Edition 2019 F1 Racer
The France edition F1 Racer is the third NFT collectible from F1 Delta Time. It celebrates the Formula 1 Pirelli Grand Prix De France 2019, and is a one of a kind, “Apex” level car. Like its two predecessors, it boasts elite attributes (Speed: 988/1000, Acceleration: 906/1000, and Grip: 953/1000) and receives a special buff when racing on the French circuit.
Keep an eye out for the release of the auction schedule. Full article and details here.
Any comments or questions? Give us a shout on twitter @boxswapio .
Thanks for reading!