Metaverse worlds like The Sandbox saw mainstream popularity after the term ‘metaverse’ became part of the public discourse back in late 2021. As investors seek to take advantage of the growing metaverse gaming industry, a new token known as Metacade has been attracting some attention in crypto circles.
Today, we’re going to explain what the difference is between The Sandbox and Metacade, and which one you should consider investing in.
Player Ownership is the Foundation of The Sandbox (SAND)’s Economy
The Sandbox is one of the leading metaverse platforms on the market today. It’s a 3D virtual world powered by the Ethereum blockchain that allows its users to create immersive gaming experiences. To start creating games, players must first purchase The Sandbox’s digital real estate, represented by the LAND NFT, on the platform’s marketplace.
They can then build unique objects to fill their LAND using VoxEdit and store them on the blockchain with the ASSET NFT for true ownership. Similarly, entire games can be built inside of the Game Maker and stored as GAME NFTs. This has led to dozens of games and experiences being built inside of The Sandbox, with big names like Rabbids, The Walking Dead, Atari, and even Warner Music Group creating micro metaverse worlds for anyone to play.
Each NFT can be traded on The Sandbox’s marketplace, forming an entire economy built around user-generated content. LAND regularly sells for $2,000 a pop, and you’ll even find an entire section dedicated to in-game art, with some virtual sculptures going for as much as $16,000!
What is Metacade?
Metacade is an online community hub that’s planning to be a pivotal driving force of Web3, GameFi, and metaverse gaming. It’s set out to be a space where anyone can go to become immersed in a variety of metaverse worlds, earn more from play to earn, and link up with like-minded gaming and crypto enthusiasts with one goal in mind: making the most out of the rapidly-growing GameFi industry.
Metacade’s vision is to be a self-sufficient, community-run virtual arcade that creates and hosts some of the very best P2E games while rewarding players for their part in making Metacade the number one destination for GameFi on the web.
What Makes Metacade Different From Other Metaverse Worlds Like The Sandbox?
The key difference between The Sandbox and Metacade is that Metacade isn’t one of many metaverse worlds. It’s where you go to find these metaverse worlds. While Metacade has plans to eventually buy and develop land inside of games like The Sandbox, its goal is to be the all-in-one solution that helps anyone get ahead in the world of blockchain gaming.
To incentivise players to share their knowledge and expertise with the community, Metacade plans to reward users with the MCADE token every time they post a review, offer leading GameFi alpha, or even produce long-form write ups or videos. Metacade sees this as a benefit for everyone: players are rewarded for helping others learn about the games they already love to play, while anyone looking to advance their skills in these games can log on and quickly find an edge in GameFi.
But Metacade doesn’t want to just be a resource for existing play to earn titles: they want to help develop new ones as well. As part of Metacade’s roadmap for late 2023, they plan to award their first Metagrant, a way for the Metacade community to fund the games they want to see developed.
The community will cast their votes on dozens, potentially hundreds, of ideas and the winner will be allocated funding from Metacade’s treasury. Once in beta, developers can even use Metacade’s native testing environment to receive direct feedback from the community and host their game inside Metacade’s virtual arcade. Down the line, Metacade plans to fill their arcade with some of the very best community-endorsed P2E games the gaming world has ever seen.
As a key element of Metacade’s goal to be at the heart of GameFi and Web3, they’re also aiming to launch a job board in 2024 that will help the community find casual and long-term work testing, developing, and managing metaverse worlds like The Sandbox. It doesn’t matter whether you just want a gig testing a game for a few hours or are looking to start a lifelong career in GameFi, Metacade will be the platform to find these exclusive opportunities.
Is The Sandbox or Metacade a Better Investment?
Despite The Sandbox’s status as one of the leading metaverse games amongst crypto investors, the number of users actually playing with the game leaves a lot to be desired. According to DappRadar, the number of unique active wallets (UAW) interacting with The Sandbox’s smart contracts on a given day rarely creeps above 1,000 and peaked at 4,503 in early 2022.
You might point out that the metaverse is still a new industry and that players need time to adopt games like The Sandbox. But if we look at other games that arguably have their own metaverse worlds, like PUBG: Battlegrounds or Rust, both saw player counts of 17,000 and 9,000 in their first months, respectively, according to Steam Charts.
Clearly, something has gone wrong with The Sandbox. However, that’s not to say that Metacade won’t succeed. Crypto.com expects the GameFi market to grow at 10x the rate of traditional gaming over the next three years, and Metacade will grow alongside it while staying relatively unaffected by individual game failures.
In fact, Metacade’s vision to create a democratic process for funding and developing games will realign what players want with what developers build, growing the industry as a whole. Metaverse worlds like The Sandbox will come and go, but Metacade is here to stay.
You can buy The Sandbox at eToro here.
You can participate in the Metacade pre-sale here.
