The founders of NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) have interesting things coming up with their startup – Yuga‘s early beta vision of the Otherside metaverse, a gaming platform on the blockchain and another world that we construct in at District3.
Otherside will be a platform for game developers similar to experiences like Roblox or Meta’s upstart Horizon Worlds. The users will be able to build and monetise experiences in the virtual world on virtual land that can be bought and sold. Yuga has already banked a significant amount of user investment on the future promise of Otherside. The startup is currently ranked at roughly $317 million in an NFT land sale for the game, selling 55,000 virtual plots called “Otherdeeds”.
The Otherside presents itself as an experience reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto but in real time with real players, building a city where thousands of people interact.
The first launch of Otherside called “First Trip” had 4,500 Yuga community members logged on simultaneously to experience an hour-long tightly scripted demo. Each user had own multicoloured robot avatar, with only a single Bored Ape “Curtis” in sight, guiding the thousands of gamers through the experience and bringing users their first taste of the Otherside platform.
“We’re really seeing this as multiplatform. You know, it’s desktop and mobile … VR is going to be an important platform for us,” Muniz says.
“While there is likely going to be a local component to this where people are running a local version of the game and the world, you still want the link and you still want someone to be able to tweet something out and say ‘Hey, holy shit, I just slayed this dragon,’ and then anybody can join and all of a sudden be popped into exactly where you are at that exact moment and see it live.”
