What is The Sandbox?
The Sandbox caught my eye as something that has a lot of potential, assuming the uptake is good. The Sandbox is built around user-generated content and experiences, vaguely similar to something like Roblox. What makes it so interesting is the way users can purchase and sell plots of land to build their homes or experiences on, and the way user-generated content can be bought and traded outside of the game.
It has an expansive map, referred to as the Metaverse. Each of these squares can be purchased, with those adjacent to the big name creators expected to carry a larger price tag. Want to live next door to Snoop’s mansion? You can buy the land and either build yourself a home or experience and/or try to sell it on for profit.
Creating content for The Sandbox uses a WYSIWYG game maker, and it’s free to download and use. Assets can either be made yourself using VoxEdit, or you can download or purchase assets made by the community.
The created worlds bear a passing resemblance to Minecraft, and designing and building itself looks pretty straightforward. For advanced users, you can even add logic programming sequences, which should lead to some interesting creations (even if there’s bound to be thousands of “obbies”).
Check out this test game by user ‘Baby Chad’ for an idea of what can be made:
Shake your money maker
The Sandbox uses the Ethereum blockchain and NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) – this means that anything you buy or create in-game can be sold, rented, traded or purchased in and out of the game itself. The game uses bitcoin as a currency, so you’ll need to create a wallet, but they give a straightforward guide for how to do so.
For creators, the potential to make significant amounts of money is there. For anyone interested in making and developing games and assets, if you get in there early and make some bitcoin the potential reward could be huge. At the moment it’s unknown how popular The Sandbox could be – it could become the next Roblox, with tens of millions of active users. Were this to happen, early adopters could find this to be a highly prosperous venture.
Some big-name partners have already signed up to The Sandbox, with Snoop Dogg, Hell’s Kitchen, Atari, The Smurfs, Deadmau5, Avenged Sevenfold, Care Bears and more already creating in-game events and experiences. Much like how Fortnite hosts massive in-game concerts, the idea is those creators within The Sandbox can do the same, providing either paid or free events for users, or in the case of games companies like Atari, they can make games within the game (so meta).
Sadly, we didn’t get to see anything outside of what the developers themselves had put together, but there’s a lot of potential here, and if Minecraft and Roblox have taught us anything, it’s that social-driven user-generated content can be hugely popular. Throw in NFTs and this is certainly one to keep an eye on.
If you’d like to learn more about The Sandbox, I highly recommend you check out this in-depth FAQ
