tl;dr
Nicola Sebastiani, Chief Content Officer of The Sandbox, discusses the thriving metaverse, with 5.8 million accounts and a focus on user-generated content. The company has 280,000 users actively creating games and experiences. They have 484 partnerships, including with "The Voice." Sebastiani predic...
Crypto Winter: The Rise and Thriving of the Metaverse
The Sandbox: Year of the Creators and the Future of the Metaverse
The Sandbox: Building Experiences and Navigating the Evolving Metaverse
The Sandbox: Partnerships, User-Generated Content, and the Metaverse's Future
Nicola Sebastiani, Chief Content Officer of The Sandbox, discusses the thriving metaverse, with 5.8 million accounts and a focus on user-generated content. The company has 280,000 users actively creating games and experiences. They have 484 partnerships, including with "The Voice." Sebastiani predicts a multi-platform metaverse with strong AR and VR elements, seamless interoperability, and a decentralized ownership model, impacting creators and virtual tourism. He looks forward to high-quality speakers at the Consensus festival in Austin.
Since at least 2021, you could trace the arc of crypto by following the word “metaverse.” It was once filled with buzz and hype and potential to be The Next Big Thing — even Facebook changed its name to Meta — and then lost its luster during Crypto Winter, as prices plunged and excitement cooled. But look closer. It’s now a cliche that many in the Web3 space “kept building” during the bear market, but it’s a cliche that has the ring of truth. And people kept building in the metaverse. “It’s thriving,” says Nicola Sebastiani, Chief Content Officer of The Sandbox.
He calls this the “Year of the Creators,” as 280,000 Sandbox users are actively creating games and experiences. Nicola Sebastiani is a speaker at this year’s Consensus festival, in Austin, Texas, May 29-31. A big focus of The Sandbox is user-generated content, and another is partnerships with blue chip IP. The Sandbox now has 484 partnerships that range from The Walking Dead to Care Bears to Snoop Dogg to a splashy new deal with “The Voice.” In the run-up to Consensus, Sebastiani shares what users can soon expect from The Sandbox, his predictions for the future of the metaverse, and why he shrugs off the ups and downs of the hype cycle, as “We're doing it, we believe in it. It's what we stand for.” Interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Bring us up to speed on what’s happening in The Sandbox. How many users do you have? What are people doing in the world?
Nicola Sebastiani: So, the current environment is great. The Sandbox has had about 5.8 million, almost 6 million accounts created. This year, for us, is the Year of the Creators. And that is really the focus for the company. About 280,000 users have experimented and used our Game Maker tool, which is the engine that creators use for experiences, and our VoxEdit tool, which is the engine that users use to create assets. Note: For a much deeper dive into these tools, you can check out my profile of The Sandbox from 2021.
What are some of your favorite experiences or games being built?
Nicola Sebastiani: Recently we ran this Game Jam themed around cooking, and “Hell's Kitchen.” It was amazing to see a cooking simulators game built with such ingenuity. And there are incredible UGC studios around the world, such as Vox Machina in Southeast Asia, that are really pushing the boundaries in terms of what can be made with no-coding. I like what our own proprietary studios are capable of making with some of our biggest franchises. Like Snoop Dogg experiences, and a lot that we do in music — We worked with Perry Seleton, Steve Aoki, and several other DJs. You can find literally something for every flavor. You can go in and explore a museum. And you don’t even really need to play; you can just explore and lose yourself in the metaverse.
You said that this is the Year of the Creators. What’s the next chapter for The Sandbox? What can people look forward to?
Nicola Sebastiani: Well, I think there's a lot coming up this year. It's not going to be just about creators. And, in fact, towards the second part of the year, we will have a couple of very meaningful moments dedicated to the player, the user. Although we're not ready to announce the details, I think people have been eagerly waiting for those. There's a continuous advancement in our Game Maker and the new features it can bring, and how it can make experiences stronger and stronger. And over the next, I'd say, a couple of months, we're going to keep announcing partnerships
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