The Sandbox

An introduction to The Sandbox

The Sandbox is one of the best known virtual worlds, with its unique voxel design style and partnerships with some of the worlds largest banks, including HSBC and Standard Chartered.

Animoca Brand’s flag ship product hit the mainstream in 2021, riding the Metaverse hype created by Facebook’s rebrand to Meta, The Sandbox has been positioned as one of the premier Blockchain enabled virtual worlds, with a market cap peak of $6.8bn for their native currency $Sand at a price of $8.40 per unit. As of the 10th of October 2022, the price for $Sand is $0.73

The Sandbox is comprised of 166,464 individual plots, each plot is 98m² and has a height of 128 metres.

Each plot can be combined with any adjacent plot to expand the size, in the future teleporters will be enabled to allow users to travel through each neighbouring plot.

In July of 2021, a massive plot of 24x24 was sold to Opensea user DANNY for 3.6 million $Sand, a total cost of almost $900k

Design

Taking inspiration from Minecraft’s infamous “blocky” style, The Sandbox also uses a voxel design style. Players can create their world using the Game Maker tool created by Animoca. Using a simple drag & drop interface, non coders can also create their very own world, assuming they own a plot of land, sold as an ERC-721 NFT. Creators can choose from a wide range of blocks to add to their scene, allowing them to create an immersive experience in a barren wasteland, a lush forest or even build a city in the sky. Using the Minecraft import tool, existing worlds can be imported into Sandbox with minimal headache.

As well as designing the world, each playable character can be customised in the VoxEdit tool, allowing for all kinds of avatars to be created. In the Sandbox Shop, creators can sell their designs to other players and earn an income.

Unfortunately, these design choices do lead to some limitations, each non playable character (NPC) has to be approved before they are eligible to be used within the platform, meaning their is a limitation to what creators can ultimately include in their scene.

Who’s building?

Already many well known brands & artists have created their own presence, including iconic game maker Atari, Hong Kong based newspaper SCMP and even the premier NFT collection Bored Apes Yacht Club, who are due to release their own virtual world The Otherside.

The Sandbox is currently in Alpha v3 stage, with a limited number of games playable, it is not currently known when a full launch will come

Review

Design: 5/10

By using a Voxel design the potential for brands to enter The Sandbox are rather limited, although simple to build a scene, brands will find it difficult to build their own identity.

Number of users: 4/10

39,000 daily users is modest number for such a well known product, but it is still in alpha stage so we anticipate many more players in the future

Features: 7/10

Animoca have invested a lot into design and build tools allowing anyone without design or coding experience to express themselves in the Metaverse

Accessibility & ease of use: 5/10

As The Sandbox is still in Alpha stage, we cannot be too critical, but usability across platforms still leaves a lot to be desired, especially with Mac fans

Long term potential: 6/10

The partnerships Animoca has already shows a lot of interest from international brands who wish to build in the Metaverse. However, the voxel design and game based nature of The Sandbox could be off putting in the long run

Funding: 8/10

Animoca is not going away, having raised $110 million in their latest stage, it’s clear they’re here for the long haul

System requirements:

64-bit processor. OS: Windows 7, Processor: Dual Core 2GHz, Memory: 4 GB RAM, Graphics: 512MB, VRAM DirectX: Version 11, Storage: 2 GB available space

Overall ranking: 5.8

The Sandbox has a bright future ahead, but the voxel design choice may prove to be their downfall. Many brands we talk to want to retain their own unique identity, unfortunately Sandbox makes this very difficult to achieve. The inherent game like nature of the platform may also be off putting for brands who want to use the Metaverse as a neo-website rather than a platform for their customers to hack ‘n’ slash each other