Introduction
Blockchain-based virtual land projects garnered industry-wide attention in late 2021/early 2022. The average price per NFT plot of land hit $18k in January 2022 and total secondary trading volume reached $2B by Q3. Much of this speculative demand was unsubstantiated, with very few playable games available and even fewer players. We went into a lot more depth about the performance of land-based virtual worlds in our Guide to Web3 Games report as well as our deep dive into The Sandbox.
The majority of this hype was centered around “the metaverse” and the development of virtual experiences and social platforms, with a large focus on user-generated content (UGC). However, there are a number of projects taking a different approach to NFT land-based games. Instead of taking inspiration from Web2 incumbents such as Roblox, Minecraft, or popular MMOs, these projects are designing curated experiences with fixed gameplay loops that most
