Bored Ape Yacht Club returns – as a metaverse

It’s dusk and insects are chirping all around me. I wander through the middle of a large virtual swamp towards the sound of muffled bass in the distance. There’s not much else nearby: a few trees, a few other players. It’s mostly me and the sound emanating from a large wooden structure with lights further out in the swamp.

When I finally arrive, it rises above me: the official clubhouse of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. I walk towards the door to enter. Except I find I can’t access it; Even though the lights are on in the house, the doors won’t open. There is nothing to do.

These were my first steps into the virtual world themed around the famous cartoon monkeys that have become the symbol of everything related to the NFT craze. Even though the NFT hype has died down, Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC and a few other NFT collections, is poised to make a big digital push with another buzzword of the early 2020s, a metaverse called Otherside.

Otherside has been a long time coming: the company announced plans to build Otherside after raising $450 million in funding in 2022, with one of BAYC’s co-founders saying at the time that the company hoped to build an “interoperable,” “gamified,” and “decentralized” virtual world. Yuga Labs has remained mostly quiet on the project since then, eventually releasing an alpha version earlier this year. Today, at the company’s ApeFest event in Las Vegas, Yuga Labs announced that Otherside will officially launch on November 12.

“This is basically one of the most ambitious projects ever attempted in this space, and it’s finally starting to take shape,” said Michael Figge, chief product officer of Yuga Labs. The edge.

The short version of the pitch is that Otherside is something like Roblox or Fortnitebut with crypto: you can use NFTs as avatars to explore virtual worlds created by Yuga Labs and by other players. You can log in with a crypto wallet, but you don’t need an NFT to participate or just hang out; you can simply join from a browser using more traditional methods like your email.

“We think there should be a very low barrier to entry for someone to try Otherside, because once they try it, it’s a really good way to get exposure to what it really means to own digital assets,” says Figge.

There’s a bunch of crypto stuff everywhere you look. NFT avatars, NFT land plots, blockchain-based currency. Yuga hopes to be able to build a creator ecosystem around all of this, offering builders a more compelling deal than competing metaverses because these digital assets exist outside of its world and can be moved elsewhere in the future. You can also ignore all of that and just run around Otherside without diving too far into crypto, if you want.

In addition to the area I explored, The Swamp, there will be a large virtual world called Nexus. Some community-created experiences will also be available to play. These include a shooting game called Bathroom Blitz (“action so explosive you clench your cheeks the whole time,” according to a description on the Otherside site) and a zombie game called Epidemic on the other side. Within worlds, you can also create “Bubbles”, which are essentially an Otherside version of a social audio room, like a Clubhouse room or an X Space.

“We actually think there’s really great potential for people to want to have their own experiences on Otherside,” Figge says. “Tackling incumbent players in the user-generated experience space, like Roblox and Minecraftis a huge opportunity for us, because I think a lot of people might be disappointed with this current way of supporting creators and the business model behind it.

Otherside game avatars are 3D representations of the NFTs players own. “Any NFT collection can submit their avatar collection to be reviewed and used in Otherside,” says Figge. There will also be avatars built using a new system that Yuga Labs calls Voyager. There will initially be two avatar partnerships. One is a collection of 300 pieces by digital artist Daniel Arsham. Another is a “tokenized asset” co-branded in partnership with Amazon called Boximus that Figge describes as “basically made up of a bunch of Amazon boxes.” Figge says the Amazon avatar will be available directly on the Amazon website.

These avatars will cost money. “Think of these travelers as a ‘skin’ from the traditional gaming world,” says Figge. “We are not disclosing pricing details yet, but what we can say is that they are intended to be reasonable and affordable.” And since these are blockchain-based assets, you’ll be able to resell the ones you own, according to Figge, something you can’t do in other metaverse-style games.

I had to go through The Swamp before writing this article. This world appeared to be a giant 3D social chat room – there was no sort of game to play other than exploring space and chatting with other visitors by voice or text. And while I don’t want to judge a pre-launch virtual world too harshly before its public launch, it reminded me more of the hollow experiences I had wandering through Meta’s Horizon worlds or a metaverse fashion show than something immediately fun and engaging like Fortnite.

In The Swamp, there just wasn’t much to see or do other than wander around outside the clubhouse (which I couldn’t go into) or explore the swamp to see things like a latrine (closed) and a platform near a railroad track (with a sign saying “out of order”). To my surprise, as I was walking away from the platform, a train started passing, but my character ran too slowly to catch it. I found a portal that sent me flying towards the moving train, but I missed landing on it and splashed the water.

Even if we assume that these kinds of tricky problems are solved and The Swamp, Nexus or Otherside experiences are filled with players, 3D environments intended primarily for socializing are usually very niche or rather boring. Hits like VRChat are the exception, not the rule. And that’s part of what makes things like Fortnite and Roblox is so popular that it offers games while spending time with your friends. At launch, and with such a focus on crypto, I’m not sure Otherside will have the same appeal.

Maybe Otherside will become something more interesting; FortniteRoblox and Minecraft all snowballed into huge successes. But I’m skeptical of what I see right now, and you probably won’t see me on the other side.