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.