Yuga Labs Opens Otherside for the First Voyagers

Otherside, a metaverse gaming platform from the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, opened for 4300+ users for its first demo and a tour of the online platform with ape avatars. And the experience was fascinating.

While the metaverse is still in a deep beta, the participants of the digital excursion say that the first gameplay was exciting and unique. All the players found themselves in a “Biogenic Swamp”, the center of Otherside metaverse, they could travel from realm to realm, and even had one boss fight.

All the participants of the first Voyage were owners of “Otherdeeds,” deeds to plots of digital land within the platform. In the Otherside litepaper developers announced that only Otherdeed owners and “selected third-party developers” will be allowed to participate in the game in its first phase. In the current Phase 1 Otherdeed owners will be able to contribute to the platform’s construction and shape its core capabilities as co-developers, via the Otherside Development Kit, the platform’s creation tool suite.

“We believe in the extraordinary power of community and have seen first hand how it can be a significant force for good in this industry. We aim to incentivize, empower, and recognize the expression, creativity, and ingenuity of Otherside’s community of contributors”.

Yuga Labs clearly wants Otherside to become a strong competitor for the metaverses powered by large corporations, like Meta, Epic Games or Roblox. They are committed to ensure Otherside’s interoperability — the ability for digital assets to freely traverse the many digital neighbourhoods, or gaming platforms, that potentially one day could constitute the avatar-navigated metaverse. On the other hand, Meta, for instance, is very much interested in keeping their metaverse offerings bordered to control users’ data and analytics.

Gordon Goner, one of Yuga Labs’ co-founders, tweeted that Otherside is in direct competition with Web2 “giants,” but he is still positive that the future is about interoperable and open metaverses.

The cheapest Otherdeeds on the market are currently selling for 2.4 ETH, or roughly $3,600, as of this writing, but there are more expensive offerings. When Otherdeeds launched in April they generated $561 million in sales and clogged the Etherium network. Then the price of one Otherdeed was about $5,800.

For now, Otherside looks like a real gated community, with exclusivity and high financial investments to enter. Although this has proven to be BAYC NFT collections’ recipe for success, it slightly contradicts Yuga Lab’s publicly announced desire to fight for an open and interoperable metaverse.

Compared to Decentraland, Otherside seems more advanced in terms of graphics and gameplay, at least in its current phase. It is also quite different from Horizon Worlds by Meta, which comes with a VR headset and serves mostly as a social platform for people to hang out. Clearly, Otherside promises to become something else, so let’s observe for further developments and keep you posted!