Well, the much-hyped “Otherside” launches this evening. This is Bored Ape Yacht Club's 3D world.

Interestingly, it uses Improbable. Their “Spatial OS” is now called “Morpheus”. Here's a tech demo of a few thousand players in one area:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NEUPQzH0D0​​

“Otherside” is mostly about selling land for too much money, but it will be interesting to see what their MMO/metaverse looks like. They might have a business model that works with the high costs of a Spatial OS system.

The Improbable cost structure killed four reasonably good free to play indy games last year. So they pivoted to selling to the UK Ministry of Defense. We'll see how this works in the overpriced, overhyped NFT land space.

Well, Otherside was announced, and over US $500,000,000 was spent buying land in it. But it's not live.

Currently, their Discord won't accept signups, and their SDK signup crashes with "Minified React Error #31." You can go to “otherside.xyz” and try to sign up, if you want.

Their plans are very ambitious:

Otherside is where the impossible happens. With the power of Improbable’s M2 technology, 10,000+ players will be able to interact simultaneously in a single place, connect with natural voice chat (even in crowds of thousands), experience rich, immersive gameplay supported by AI and physics, and move between metaverses. Otherside players will break through barriers in scale, bandwidth, and rendering as they create new types of gameplay and social possibilities.

Just like processing power in your PC can limit the quality of a game’s graphics, metaverses are limited in their scale by how many communication operations or ‘ops’ per second they can process. Typical online game worlds can handle around 10,000 operations per second. Otherside will be able to handle more than half a billion operations per second, which will power new gameplay and interactions never before possible at an unprecedented scale.

It’ll also solve problems in bandwidth and rendering, using machine learning to allow huge crowds to all look different, allowing you and everybody else to bring your own external NFT character to Otherside.

SweetDaria97 said:

oh this is interesting

It is. At this point, we have no idea whether this is the beginning of 3D worlds with user content that really scales, or total bullshit. The people who bought deeds to expensive “land” in Otherside are starting to ask that question.

It's not clear who's actually building the game. Yuga Labs, the issuer of the NFT, seems to be mostly a branding company. They're incorporated in Delaware, with at least one of the owners in Florida. Improbable, which is in the UK, is apparently just providing middleware. Improbable has an in-house game studio, Midwinter Entertainment in Seattle, which made Scavengers, a post-apoc shooter using Improbable's technology. But there's no indication they are involved.

The real company behind this seems to be Animoca Brands, of Hong Kong. They have a reasonable portfolio of games, some built in house, some bought. But nowhere on their web site does Otherside seem to be mentioned.

Nagle said:
we have no idea whether this is the beginning of 3D worlds with user content that really scales, or total bullshit

I think I have a pretty good idea, actually. I've made investment decisions accordingly.

There's a way Animoca can build Otherside from in-house off the shelf components. They have several block-placement games - Gunscape, Siegecraft Commander, and Base One. These are all games where you have a limited set of 3D models which the player can place. So they know how to do that.

Otherside is made up of randomly generated blocks, built by combining a small set of base models. That's what Otherdeed NFTs show. (Just like the 2D Bored Apes, which are composites of 2D images.). The user's client can be preloaded with all the 2D and 3D content. So they don't have the dynamic content loading problem of a general purpose metaverse. Or the huge bandwidth requirement. Which means it can work on mobile.

Improbable's back end, which is basically a message passing system plus a system for dividing the world into regions whose size changes with use, can manage such a world. It did OK with Worlds Adrift.

So I'm going to guess that when this comes out, it will be a block-placement game. They'll make it shiny and loud and hype it. Animoca should be able to ship something like that without too much trouble.

Doesn't matter whether people play it much. That's not the point. It just has to be real enough to avoid the SEC bringing the hammer down on Yuga (a Delaware corporation run by US persons) for selling an unregistered security. The way US law works is that if you sell an NFT for something that already exists, it's a collectable, and that's fine. So, BAYC is safe. If it doesn't exist yet, though, it's a speculative investment and has to go through the SEC registration process, where you have to disclose stuff like where the money goes. The SEC brings the hammer down on about two crypto schemes each month, and they're doubling their crypto enforcement staff so they can catch up on the backlog. So Yuga needs something running fast. You raise half a billion dollars and don't ship, people notice.

It's not looking good. Otherside's Discord has gone offline. Their SDK signup form leads to a dead Mailchimp link. Animoca Brands doesn't mention Otherside on their site, despite recent press releases on their other games.

The Wall Street Journal says that NFT sales are flatlining.

It looked for a while like this was actually happening. Now it's starting to look like somebody took the $500 million and ran.

Nagle said:
Now it's starting to look like somebody took the $500 million and ran.

There goes my hero.

First all unique ape jpgs robbed, now the belief in game snake oil vanishes too.
I feel so sorry for all those Musk and Dorsey wannabees, sniff.

Printing money requires to burn it on some Otherside :D