Metaverse Game Backer Yat Siu Says Low User Count Isn’t Best Measure
The Sandbox, a virtual world based on blockchain, is doing just fine despite a report that the platform only had around 500 daily active users, according to Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands Corp., the majority owner of the digital game.
Such a low user count would be shocking for The Sandbox, which has considered raising funds at a more than $4 billion valuation. The CoinDesk report used data that only looked at blockchain transactions, Siu said Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. He said these transactions, which can include sales of virtual land represented by nonfungible tokens, are not reflective of overall engagement with the platform, especially considering that more users are holding onto their NFTs in order to use them in the game, rather than selling them.
To look at this metric would be comparable to claiming that “how many people trade on Wall Street is the size of the American population,” he said.
The Sandbox has more than 200,000 monthly active users, he said. Other metrics, such as the number of jobs created on the platform and how much revenue is being generated from the game, are more accurate measures of user engagement on the platform, Siu said.
“Every landowner in Sandbox has a wallet that's between half a million and $2 million,” he said.
Siu also discussed another virtual game backed by Animoca: Axie Infinity. Created by gaming developer Sky Mavis, the blockchain-based platform, which allows players to breed and battle monsters represented by NFTs, faced a $620 million hack in March and has seen the price of the crypto tokens used in the game as well as its user numbers plummet during the market downturn for digital assets. The
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