Yuga Labs' Otherside - Flop or Win?
Updated: Aug 1, 2022
Otherside, the much-awaited Bored Apes metaverse gaming platform was opened for testing by the parent company Yuga Labs.
The company invited over 4,000 participants on Saturday, July 16th, to tour and test the new platform for a second time, with the first one happening on the 10th of July. Otherside has been in development since late March 2022, with Improbable.io in charge of building the game.
Here's all you need to know about the recent demo run and what's coming next.
#1 - What to know about the Otherside Saturday "Voyage"
#2 - WTF is Otherside and Otherdeed
#3 - Yuga Labs Big Plans for Otherside and what to Expect.
WTF is Otherside and Otherdeed?
If this is your first time hearing about Otherside, it's worth knowing what the platform is all about. Otherside is a substantial metaverse effort from the people behind BAYC, and it's Yuga Labs' biggest product launch to date, given the amount of hype and how it crashed the Ethereum blockchain.
Known as "Otherdeeds," Otherside NFTs represent the ownership rights to various virtual plots of land throughout the Otherside metaverse. Each Otherdeed NFT was valued at $7,000 by Yuga Labs and can only be purchased with ApeCoin, the company's official cryptocurrency.
With the public launch of the Otherside project back in April 2022, Yuga Labs successfully gathered over $561 million, although at astronomically high transaction fees of about $5,000. With so many people wanting to buy land on the Otherside when it first went on sale, there was a lot of traffic on Ethereum, which made transaction fees go up. In fact, in the first 24 hours after the debut, transaction fees added up to more than $176 million.
What to know about the Otherside Saturday "Voyage"
On the 16th of July, the Yuga Labs-created game, Otherside, invited 4,300 "Voyagers" to a first-look tech demonstration and tour of the visually stunning, ape avatar-navigated metaverse gaming platform. To be able to play Otherside, all participants will need to go on or watch one of these test demonstrations.
All 4,300 players who went on Saturday's digital trip to the "Biogenic Swamp" in the middle of Otherside were owners of "Otherdeeds," digital land titles within the platform. In a litepaper that came out soon after Saturday's First Trip, the creators of Otherside said that during the game's first phase, only owners of Otherdeed and "selected third-party developers" will be able to play.
The litepaper also added that in "Phase 1," owners of Otherdeed will be able to play Voyager's Journey, an 11-part story game "about a mysterious Obelisk that has appeared out of nowhere in the Otherside metaverse." As early adopters of the platform, Otherdeed owners will have the opportunity to work with the Otherside Development Kit, a set of design tools, to help create the platform's basic features.
Yuga Labs Big Plans for Otherside and what to Expect.
According to the released litepaper, Yuga Labs mentioned how having a strong community can greatly affect the success of a project. Therefore, they intend to “acknowledge, empower, and encourage the expression, creativity, and ingenuity of the people who contribute to Otherside."
They also reiterated Otherside's commitment to interoperability: allowing digital assets to easily travel between the many gaming platforms that might one day make up the MMORPG metaverse.
In order to ensure that the internet of the future is both democratic and open [Shoutout to Fluf world], proponents of an "open metaverse," such as Yuga Labs, believe interoperability is essential. These supporters have been outspoken about the threat presented by mega businesses such as Meta [previously Facebook], which may seek to restrict its metaverse products to maintain control over user data and analytics. Furthermore, Meta's decision to charge creators a high fee for using the platform surely doesn't fit into a technology geared towards a creator economy.
"The future will tilt toward open, interoperable metaverse," one of Yuga Labs' co-founders, Gordon Goner, stated in a tweet on Friday, July 15th.
One of the essential ingredients in Yuga's Bored Ape Yacht Club's success is its exclusivity, which is matched by the incredibly expensive cost of membership, i.e. Buying a BAYC NFT. Yuga's expressed goal to make Otherside crucial to the struggle for an "open metaverse" has been highlighted by the co-founder's statement.
For the time being, Otherside may be regarded as the most notable gated community in the metaverse.
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