ALT land for each user

Background

Decentraland today lives under the slogan “Create, explore and trade in the first-ever virtual world owned by its users”. If we compare that to reality, very few people are creating because of the knolewdge required for 3D modeling, and also because besides that, you have to spend $ 7000 for a single land.

What kind of game or social platform sets its entry at that level? Not only its hard to 3D model, and expensive to acquire a land, its also hard to get inside DCL.

User acquisition is not that hard but the problem is that once we acquire users, they don’t have nothing to do in DCL so the chances they will come back are very low. The only users you see on the map today are mostly on decentral games casinos and on wonderland leaving their avatars standing to get free tokens.

Proposal

Create the concept of ALT land, each user/wallet receives an ALT land, it’s a space made of 5x5 lands which are not connected to the world map. That is to say, you cannot walk into a user alt land, you have to teleport there, kind of /goto username_alt, a similar experience of what you can find today in the builder.

At the same time, a user can only go to another user alt land if they are both mutual friends

Rationale

Users entering DCL are surprised by the product and like it but we are not offering content/experiences to do. Our shops are empty, there is no economy.

If users had their own alt land, shops on the map could start offering a variety of products in the form of NFT’s such as furniture, architecture modelings, games, portable experiences, etc, so implement on their own space. Which is the main concept that make games such as minecraft, habbo hotel, roblox, and many more succeed.

We are giving the users a reason of why to spend time inside DCL and at the same time allowing them to be creative while spending.

This could make 3D designers all over the world start designing things and sell them at on-land stores.

This could also reinforce digital art nft. Whats the point of having a lot of art galleries if the final user do not purchase cause they don’t have were to display it?

At the same time, we add those two conditionals so that ALT lands are well differentiated from in-land lands:

  • You cannot access alt-lands just by walking by, you have to teleport there
  • Both users have to be mutual friends

This way we protect today land owners interest, which at first glance could see this proposal going against their interest, but if users start buying items, then in-lands lands start having real value.

A 60% of something is better than a 100% of nothing. And today, we have plenty of empty stores, without generating a real economy. We are incurring in a high risk of making a bubble out of the lands market. Instead, if people are able to walk around the world buying stuff, then lands start having instrinsic value.

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This is an interesting topic. As the current development ecosystem exists, you can achieve what you’re looking to accomplish today. Creators & developers have the ability to be creative and host private scenes outside the realms of the “dcl map.” These scenes can be hosted on private servers or such hosting platforms as Vercel. I’ve linked an example of a scene I created and launched on Vercel. This scene works just like the original scene inside Decentraland and cost $0 to deploy to Vercel. Again, this scene is NOT within the confines of the Decentraland map, but it highlights your idea and how creators can “get going” with content without current land ownership.

https://dclprivatetheater-2b5z8bcds-lastraumonline.vercel.app/

Hope that helps!

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To add to this discussion. You can also achieve the same result within DCL. Many land owners, including myself, would be happy to work on a deal where the land is rented out or utilized for a worthy project/goal/business. This overcomes the barrier to own land just like irl and still participate in the economy. It seems we need a real estate ecosystem where these contracts are easy to obtain and execute.

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love it! I actually worked on www.rentabyl.com which allows land owners to “rent” their land out to people for a determined amount of time and mana. This smart contract assigns the “operator rights” to the lessee and doesn’t transfer your land or escrow anything.

I understand the points, but i would like you to consider the following,
grab some of your friends and tell them about DCL,
Once they know the plattform, tell them that if they want to build something they have to pay a monthly rent for a virtual land for fun, or that the other option is learning about node js and deploying their own catalysts alone.
These are the reasons why when you enter DCL today, you see the entire map empty, cause we want to hold to the idea that lands as they are, are valuable, but if no one walks in there, then whats the value at all?

The vision behind this idea would be to reserve the lands at the map for commercial use, different kind of business inside decentraland which they would be more than happy to pay for a rent,
but asking for a rent to a user who just wants to enter DCL for fun?

At the same time consider the following,
If the alt idea is succesfull and starts generating user acquisition, then lands start having intrinsic value,
people thinking “Hey i dont want my creation to be on an alt land which only people who know me can access, i want to be in-land”
And there is when the renting business starts.

Have you heard about at least 1 single renting deal inside DCL?
For standing on a greed point of view on a phase were we should be getting user acquisition, we will continue to have very few active users and no real intrinsic value for the lands.
Cause at this point, there are many lands which receives the same amount of traffic than having them on a standalone server, that is to say, 0 visits.

Given this image, do you consider we are in position to demand for monthly rents? Have we lost our mind?
The only place that there are a lot of red dots is a place were they are giving stuff for free. Yes of course if we grab 1mm usd and tell the users, hey leave your avatar just standing here and you will earn $ 10, of course you will have active users, making nothing, and only for the time that campaign lasts.
Commercial places are valuable because they have people who lives on the surrond, so businesses have more sales.
And we are standing on not wanting to give the users their own place off-world, but those same users, are the ones who would bring value to owning an in-world land

These are our “active users”, they dont seem very active to me

@lastraum @NGMI

Yeah, I think the point isn’t the ability to get your awesome, turn-key business idea deployed without up-front cost. Obviously if you can build something like a fully functional retro arcade you’ll have tons of people willing to let you use their land rent free. The point is more allowing people to see and display the fruits of their creativity, even if its not revenue-generating, was made just for fun, or even is kinda janky and random. This is absolutely an area that could use improving. Its great that people can publish a scene in builder without having to deploy it somewhere, but this should be foregrounded even more. I’m not sure if OP’s proposal is the best possible angle of attack but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

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Well to counter, you can build in the “virtual” world for free. You don’t need to spin up a server; you don’t need to run your own catalyst node; you don’t need to pay for anything; you don’t need to learn server side code. If you want to create in DCL, yes, you need to learn either 3d modeling and/or programming. That’s not a DCL problem.

Users can enter the world for fun for free. Now, to develop and be a part of the content creation with the ecosystem, that comes with a cost. This a world owned and created by its owners; therefore, you need to either own land or have rights to develop.

Additionally, when you deploy a scene, you can either choose “dcl deploy” or “vercel” as I mentioned earlier. The latter deployment option costs $0 and is still (via my example) a 3d representation of your scene.

The rebuttal to your argument is each land parcel is an nft itself and those have all been accounted for. There isn’t any more land to divvy up and allocate to “sandbox mode” when there are other “sandbox” options available for free. Now, if a district or land owners like who have commented here want to offer free deployment to their land, that’s their choice and more power to them. That’s the beauty of land nft ownership; the ability to deploy your own content whenever you want of whatever you want, or, to give those deployment rights to others.

Also, I can build the exact same experiences locally with zero land ownership just as they would be perceived in the actual dcl world. In saying that, if I have a really dope idea or build, maybe there should be a “showcase” somewhere on the DCL site like with the builder. This way you can showcase your scenes to others who might say, “hey, I love that, I want that on my land” and then give you deploy rights for that.

I’m totally in agreement with you that we NEED more content creators and developers in DCL to make the world feel “full.” I know of a lot of partnerships where big time companies are coming in and buying land and building out amazing experiences. There’s a ton of land that I know of which is currently vacant but also in development. This is a deliberate choice by those companies. They could easily put up a 3d “under construction” tape if they’d like.

I have access to over 80 parcels and I almost daily update the content on them; sometimes I leave them blank while I work on the next scene. So emptiness in this sense doesn’t always mean inactivity.

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I understand,
But i still agree to disagree,
The evidence is clear and you can see it in front of your eyes,
you will not find content creators if they cannot profit from making that, and people could profit, if there was an audience to sell items to, and why would that audience buy things if they dont have were to display them?
Its a chicken and egg dilema,

But as the proposal mentions, lets keep doing things the way we are doing them, making it impossible for the user who just wants to have fun, lets tell him, hey, yeah, i can rent you a land for $ 100 per month, and lets expect to keep doing the same things but expect different results.
Lets keep having an empty world (of people) just because we are afraid that the land value will drop if we offer them their own space. Once people realice that the value of the land is partially equivalent to advertising, and thats why lands near plazas are expensier and so on, its when the land bubble will burst, cause user acquisition hasnt being growing at the same phase than lands prices.

I still make the call for your consideration,
Rest assure that if you provide a user, who only wants to have fun, not to settle a business, his own space to create, and express, maybe gather with their friends and show his creations,
In world land would be much more expensive, cause having a place in land will generate profits from items sale, advertising of people walking around and seeing banners, and so on.

I wanted to add,
How many pizzas has your booth sold already?
Imagine if there were thousand of users moving around decentraland, how much would be worth your pizza stand on a land in world?
And how much would that same stand be worth on an alt land? Probably nothing. If we set those two business rules, were users have to be mutual friends and that you cannot walk into this lands, you only can teleport there, there is a strong differential between both kind of lands.

I mean, this is not a crazy concept, is like any software, you have the personal use, or the commercial use

What is the risk you are afraid of? Land losing value?
Why would it? Cause there is final user demand for the lands? There isnt!
I notice that most of the demand for lands come from very few companies and speculators,
we are not seeing users going inside DCL with their friends to hang around, cause we are not giving them reasons to do so

There’s a lot to digest in your comments. Long and short response is the land in dcl has been allocated and paid for by people making investments either to make profits on their land or to just be creative themselves.

Just because someone wants to be creative doesn’t mean it should be a free process. Think real world here. You can’t expect free land in the real world because you want to hammer two boards together and make a shed for fun.

There won’t be more land in dcl. There are a ton of free tools available to anyone who wants to use those tools and be creative without any investment in land. You could even have a 90,000 scene hosted privately for free if you truly wanted to. Use vercel.

Additionally, There are also tons of land owners like myself where I am willing to showcase your designs for free so you can see if making the land investment is worth it to you. That’s my choice as a land owner / operator. That’s the value in land. That won’t change. At least for a long time.

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Just because someone wants to be creative doesn’t mean it should be a free process. Think real world here

Okay, then the user goes to fornite, second life, or whatever game were they are allowed to build and walk around a city.

I understand your position, its a shame that if we continue this way, another metaverse will succeed, and you will end up with a land nft on your hand wondering what went wrong, why does anyone want to buy your land, and you will remember this moment.

And regarding your scarcity concern, two things:

  1. Thats why those business rules strictly differentiate lands from alt lands
  2. If you still consider that alt lands are an increase in supply, also consider user acquisition as an increase on demand, but your land is still a premium.

And a final remark once again, has any land in DCL ever been rented yet?
Do you see a lot of user activity inside DCL?