We've Built Over 200 Metaverse Experiences: Here’s What We’ve Learned

Building out engaging experiences in the Open Metaverse is what LandVault is the best in the world at. Starting from our first build in 2021, the process of planning, building, and activating a metaverse experience is something the company has continued to excel at and improve upon.

So far, LandVault has successfully completed 200 metaverse experiences spread across 100 million sqft in multiple virtual world platforms, like The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Somnium Space, to name a few. This was accomplished with a talented team of 120+ in-house professional builders.

However, being the world’s largest metaverse real estate development company has also allowed us to realize how monstrous of a task manually building and coordinating the work for deploying experiences can be - and how to vastly improve upon the process in order to scale the Open Metaverse to millions and then billions of future users.

This article will show metaverse stakeholders how we at LandVault build experiences in the Open Metaverse and what we have learned so far, giving insight into where processes can be improved to significantly scale development in the future.

How Experiences are Built

Completing a metaverse experience build is no simple task. It is a multi-step process that requires extensive coordination between all parties involved. The process kicks off with a discovery call which pinpoints what the client has in mind for the build and establishes the scope for the project. 

This can be tricky as the scope of the project can change as the build progresses. Additionally, builds must also be approved by the metaverse platform itself (i.e. The Sandbox), so there are multiple parties that must all agree on how the build is constructed.

What LandVault does well is how it is able to integrate the necessary skill sets in different ways with which to follow through on the project management and successfully deliver metaverse experiences to clients.

Working with institutional clients comes with substantial responsibilities as there are legal requirements, branding requirements, and regulatory guidelines that major companies employ which the LandVault team must accommodate. This makes the process overall slower and more expensive as the overhead is a lot higher.

What We’ve Learned

1. Time Management

The most important aspect of building and activating metaverse experiences is related to time management. For most builds, about 25% of the total time allotted to a given project is spent on physically building the experience. The majority of the time (75%) is spent on back end activities, such as negotiating with clients, gaining legal approval, and setting the expectations for a build.

Additionally, most builds average a start to finish timeline of approximately four weeks. This can vary depending on the expectations of the client and whether there are any changes during the build process. Manually choosing team members per project is a time consuming part of the process, so utilizing technology to automate this will vastly improve build speeds (and potentially build quality) over time.

Another key part of improving time management is having experts handle the back end work of projects. For LandVault, this is handled by in-house project managers who work with the client in continuous updates to relay feedback from the client to the builders and vice versa. This helps to increase efficiency.

2. Leveraging the Blockchain

One of the biggest challenges of completing builds is the possibility of mid-project changes and shifts in expectations. This, combined with coordination difficulties, results in longer timelines to complete projects. 

Leveraging technology to place project coordination on-chain takes a large leap forward in helping to establish immutable expectations for a project with set parties and parameters. This also makes it easier to bundle all the inputs of a project (ideas, land, labor, capital).

As mentioned above, there is less time spent on choosing the right skill sets for a particular project. Plus, capital, land, and ideas can be more easily found and communicated to the chosen builders. This was a major influence in certain tools associated with the LandVault platform. The more data and analytics on virtual land that project participants have access to, the more that can be developed successfully.

3. Increasing Participation

The only way that the Open Metaverse can properly be scaled to millions of users is with vastly more developer participation. LandVault alone cannot build the entire Open Metaverse. So, there have to be ways to streamline production and scale down costs when building metaverse experiences.

For LandVault, we have managed to manually streamline production processes by having most of what is needed to build an experience in-house. This includes the 120+ builders under our umbrella and the in-house sales team and project managers that also provide assistance. The problem is that there are insurmountable economies of scale for small builders with this method. While we as the largest metaverse builders can eat a ~$15,000 administrative cost associated with a build, independent or smaller build teams cannot.

Having technology on-chain allows more participants to be included in the development process. The more development that is allowed to occur, the greater amount of metaverse experiences that can be created. All of this leads to greater global adoption of the Open Metaverse.

Summary

With the knowledge that we have gained through our builds over the past year, it has become far easier for us to see the most efficient ways in which we can build, accelerate, and scale the Open Metaverse from the less than 2,000 experiences that exist today to potentially tens of millions in the future.

In a similar fashion, website publishing in the early days of the internet faced similar challenges. However, once the appropriate technologies were introduced, scalability of the internet skyrocketed into the estimated 1.5 billion websites that exist today.

By introducing sophisticated technologies (i.e. our own metaverse technology stack), development within the Open Metaverse can be vastly improved on all fronts, including cost, time, and efficiency. Technology will allow us to streamline production of metaverse experiences by automating coordination between stakeholders. 

Additionally, this process being on-chain provides transparency and permissionless building that will allow participants beyond just LandVault to also develop the Open Metaverse - a key component of truly accelerating the development and growth of the entire ecosystem.