The Sandbox game franchise is one of the world’s largest independent user-generated content and gaming platforms. Boasting over 40M downloads and over one million monthly active users.
The voxel-based blockchain version of The Sandbox adds many new creative and commercial possibilities. Named one of the top 10 most anticipated blockchain games globally.
After two highly successful land presale events concluding with +1300 ETH selling more than 10,000 lands. The Sandbox game will launch its third land presale on March 31st, 2020.
DappRadar currently tracks blockchain game The Sandbox on the Ethereum blockchain. DappRadar spoke to The Sandbox about future plans and their expectations for dapps in 2020.
Can you tell us about your project, what motivated you to create The Sandbox?
The Sandbox IP originates from a mobile game. Created almost 10 years ago, which encountered great success (+40M downloads). It is a user-generated platform where users can create pixel worlds, game adventures, and even musical works.
But in the mobile game creators had no way to profit from their creations. Using blockchain provides a solution by enabling true ownership. Giving users the ability to monetize their creations: this is how The (new) Sandbox came to life.
What protocol are you using? Can you tell us why and what benefits/disadvantages that brings?
We are using the Ethereum blockchain, because it brings many benefits, including:
- Ease of use: Ethereum has been built with flexibility in mind, which perfectly fits our use case with NFTs. Ethereum also has the largest number of developers, which allows for well-established standards, best practices, and support.
- Robustness: Ethereum is, as of today, among the most robust blockchain protocols. Its wide adoption makes the network validated by many and thus more secure.
- Interoperability: Ethereum is a protocol. A base layer on top of which all applications can build and interact with each other.
The main issue faced by Ethereum today is often said to be its scaling issue. Blockchains are based on 3 pillars: Security, Decentralization, and Scalability (throughput).
Historically, Ethereum always put security and decentralization first at the cost of scalability. As a result, some technological improvements need to be made at the base layer to support traffic at scale. On most public blockchains like Ethereum, this is one of the main current concerns. A lot of effort is being placed on progress to solve these scaling issues, without sacrificing the blockchain trilemma.
How are you planning to develop/support The Sandbox over the next 12 months?
In the next 12 months, several events will happen in The Sandbox. Here is a small preview:
- Ongoing LAND presale to allow anyone to stake a claim in our interactive gaming Metaverse (5 rounds in total)
- Release of new versions of our voxel editor, VoxEdit, to create voxel ASSETS that will be transformed into NFTs (ERC1155).
- Allow P2P sales on our marketplace for ASSETS (in-game items) and LANDS (parcels of virtual land). To be bought in SAND. Our ERC20 to be released this year.
- Enable the creation and management of player avatars.
- Release our GameMaker that will allow anyone to build amazing experiences in our metaverse.
We have other planned activities, but this is what we are publicly revealing at present.
How do you see the dapp ecosystem developing in 2020, is this the year of mass adoption?
The dapp ecosystem is growing at a fast pace. Especially in two verticals: DeFi and Gaming. I see this trend continuing to move upward and I am very bullish on their adoption. I would not say 2020 is the year of mass adoption. We still need some elementary bricks in order for the games to be easy to use, enjoyable and working at scale.
We are yet to see great playable games in the sphere. The main problem remains that blockchain is a barrier to entry in itself at the moment. We’re making progress on the usability and scalability side and we’ll probably see great use cases in 2020. More time is realistically needed before reaching the masses.
As a success story in the space. Do you have any advice for dapp developers and startups trying to break into the ecosystem?
We would be proud to call our story a success story, hopefully with our successful game release(s). My only advice would be to build games that are fun to enjoy immediately.
We think that games should be made as accessible as possible for anyone to enjoy. Both the (hyper) casual users to the most advanced, tech-savvy users. If we compare blockchain games to traditional games (console or mobile free-to-play). We often forget how easy it is to play these games and players are impatient.
To break into the blockchain game space we should focus on building games that are fun to play. Adding blockchain bricks if and only if it makes sense, without adding too much friction.
Try to put blockchain only on very specific use cases to start, expanding it along the way as needed.
