As SandStorm aims to establish the builder market across the entire open metaverse it’s vital we share important examples with the community of when builders and awesome brands like vEmpire find success on our platform. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen explosive growth from projects of all sizes submitting build proposals to our marketplace. Everything from Tupac tribute avatars to luxury VR headset wearables for immersedVR. The Sandbox launched Alpha Season 3 in August and we’ve seen all-time high demand for builders on the platform. However, one submitted build proposal 3 weeks ago by our partners vEmpire is extremely important to highlight and share.
What happens when your full metaverse experience needs to be updated with new features that just got released or the assets you have don’t pass a final quality control check by a virtual world?
This is a segment of the open metaverse SandStorm aims to support that we believe will become a multi-billion dollar market over the next 10 years. Providing brands with a trusted platform to go to for an experience tune-up or full-blown update instead of paying six figures to rebuild an entire land plot, will become a massive segment of the market. Brands and studios alike can now scale up and scale down using on-demand builders on the marketplace with ease to get the new features rolled out and stay ahead of the curve across multiple virtual worlds. As more of these metaverses open up to the public there will be constant updates and feature rollouts to keep users engaged and SandStorm is now the platform brands are turning to for their experiences to be updated and maintained.
The vEmpire Alpha Season 3 Scenario
vEmpire is a high-profile DDAO project that successfully announced its Seven Wonders of the Ancient World experience for Alpha Season 3 this week! Their team hired a 3rd party development studio to build out an amazing experience that they worked hard on to get featured in Alpha Season 3. However, when The Sandbox’s quality control team went through for a final check of the experience they brought up multiple issues with the Seven Wonders vEmpire experience. The studio they originally hired seemed to have moved onto other projects and with such a short time crunch for their experience to still be included in Alpha Season 3, the original studio wasn’t able to help fix the newly discovered quality issues.
This is the Zeus statue before SandStorm builders began fixing the experience per The Sandbox’s quality control team’s request:
As partners of SandStorm, the vEmpire team hopped on a call with us to see how our marketplace’s build proposals could help. Within 24 hours, we submitted a build proposal for them privately to hire 8 incredible verified builders from around the world to fix the identified quality issues.
Below are the eight awesome builders from the SandStorm platform that jumped onto the proposal and upgraded the vEmpire experience in record time:
For context on the scale of this issue Sandbox uncovered, initially, the team of 8 builders couldn’t enter the experience in question because it was built in an outdated version of the game maker.
Luckily vEmpire is a powerful team of operators and we worked closely with them to be able to dig in quickly to get their proposal live in front of the right team of builders. As partners, our team made sure to loop in the right builders for the job on the platform with their already well-defined specifications to help speed up the process.
Here are a few screenshots from the incredible updates the 8 builders successfully deployed in time for this week’s Alpha Season announcement:
vEmpire is a pioneer in the metaverse and wanted to help share this situation with everyone as a warning message. Be careful who you hire to build your metaverse experiences. Be sure to follow them on Twitter to support their efforts to move the needle forward in the metaverse with us!
How QA issues will become more common
When a brand hires a builder normally you come up with specifications for that build, agree on a rate, build a timeframe, and overall deliverables. However, often after the work is completed, there’s a disconnect. This same disconnect happened in the early days of the internet with the website development and hosting.
In many cases, brands in the late 1990s and early 2000s engaged development firms with six figures to build a website and after it was completed BOOM mobile responsive websites became a necessity. Luckily by then on-demand and freelance platforms had been started like Upwork where brands could hire for a fraction of the price to roll out updates making their website responsive. Every time a new technology is released hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by brands to keep their presence updated. Brands will approach the metaverse the exact same way.
The build pickle
Outside of ongoing feature releases by virtual worlds themselves and the need to update an experience, what happens when a hired builder releases low-quality assets to be submitted to a metaverse like Sandbox and moves on afterward? Virtual world platforms like The Sandbox are tasked with the hard choice of doing quality control on custom assets. If content gets released that doesn’t meet standards, users won’t be happy and this will cause a drop in retention. This puts brands and virtual worlds in a pickle. Issues found by the virtual world and brand need to be fixed at a lower cost and quickly.
Be sure to check out the vEmpire experience and how these awesome builders turned it into one of the most engaging experiences of Alpha Season 3:
Our team is really impressed by the 8 on-demand metaverse builders that successfully completed this build proposal. They turned a quality control pickle into a beautiful relish! SandStorm will help virtual worlds maintain quality content with new launches and seasons as well as keep costs low for brands in need of fixes.
To learn more about how to update or fix your metaverse experience in Sandbox or Decentraland with a build proposal send us a message on Twitter
Congrats on this historic launch everyone!
