Are there really people in the metaverse? This is the question that can be asked after the publication of a CoinDesk article that states that there would be only 38 daily active users in the Decentraland metaverse, against 522 in The Sandbox. Ridiculous figures when you know that the two platforms are supposed to be the pioneers in their sector, attracting brands of all kinds (Nike, Coca-Cola, Dolce & Gabanna, Sotheby’s, etc.) to their universe.
distorted figures
Decentraland quickly denied the US online media report. On Twitter, the virtual reality platform claimed that CoinDesk only tracked “specific smart contract transactions by flagging them as daily active users, which is inaccurate.” Decentraland then revealed its figures for the month of September. According to them, there would have been more than 55,000 users during the month.
The platform also invites you to visit a dedicated site, DCL Metrics, to find out the number of unique visitors to the platform each day. On October 10, 2022, for example, 7,093 people would have visited Decentraland.
The other platform CoinDesk is targeting, The Sandbox, also responded to low-traffic rumors last July. Its co-founder, Sebastien Borget, said on Twitter that The Sandbox had 350,000 monthly active users during Season 2 of the game.
Assistance difficult to quantify
On the side of the other platforms of the metaverse, the figures also remain diverse and varied, but above all highly disputed. Meta, the group to which Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp belong, collected 300,000 users in Horizon Worlds, its virtual reality platform, at the beginning of the year. However, Mark Zuckerberg’s new playground isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and he’s still struggling to find a loyal, won over audience. With Tech & Co, Facebook declined to give more recent or related figures for French users.
At Roblox, another giant of the global metaverse, we claim almost 55 million daily active users in the first quarter of 2022. A significant figure, far beyond the audiences shown a few months ago. In April 2021, Roblox peaked at 202 million monthly active users.
Online Games: Metaverse Despite Themselves
It also remains to be defined which platforms belong or not to the metaverse. Fortnite, the online battle royale game powered by Epic Games, now offers many events related to daily life or the cultural world, such as a recent Aya Nakamura concert. And the public always follows him. As of early 2022, Fortnite still has almost 25 million daily active users and around 270 million each month.
Same observation for Minecraft, which offers since 2009 to create your own virtual universe. And the craze never stopped: The online game still had 126 million active players per month in 2020, according to Microsoft.
The different figures revealed by the brands in terms of attendance are not, ultimately, very exhaustive at the moment. Companies offer data that is often difficult to understand, comparable, or more up-to-date, making it difficult to measure the number of people that populate the metaverse. However, an observation is taking shape: the only metaverses that have a real global audience are based mostly on simple video games.
Source: BFM TV
