The Sandbox Founders Talk Breaking Into the Metaverse
Photography by Kenzia Bengel de Vaulx
The Sandbox is a pioneer in the digital space, a virtual world where players can play, build, own, and monetize their experiences in a piece of virtual real estate (called LANDs) that they own. The platform has partnered with brands such as Gucci and Ubisoft, and coming soon, L’OFFICIEL will present a collection of virtual clothing created by applying artificial intelligence to our century of archives.
Arthur Madrid and Sébastien Borget, co-founders of The Sandbox, talk to L’OFFICIEL about online communities, the power of their user base, and how fashion brands are betting on the Metaverse.
L’OFFICIEL: How would you describe The Sandbox?
ARTHUR MADRID: It is a space to have fun and create within a community. Our Metaverse offers gamers and creators an intuitive platform to create immersive 3-D worlds and gaming experiences, including content that can be user-generated in licensed partnership with IPs and brands. In The Sandbox, any creator is free to share, exchange, or sell their creations, while remaining the owner of them and the resulting income. The platform allows you to create both simple and very complex experiences. There are amusement parks, virtual concerts, fashion shows, and art installations, but also universes of role-playing games. We see it as a shared digital space, where universes and their heroes meet to create an eclectic world.
L’O: Where does the name come from?
SÉBASTIEN BORGET: We founded the company in 2011. Games called “sandbox games” correspond to games where users can create what they want with an editor. We launched it in 2012 on mobile, with 40 million downloads and 70 million creations, and then moved forward with the blockchain version at the end of 2017. The strength of user-generated content is that it allows for infinite creative capacities—that’s what contributed to the monetization.
"We built The Sandbox with the idea of putting the community at the center of value creation." -Arthur Madrid
L’O: When did you become interested in the Metaverse and how did you “build” The Sandbox?
SB: We have had great success with our “The Sandbox” experience on mobile. Our players have created tons of content, games, and experiences to share. But all this took place in a closed economic system where the creators who contributed to the success of the game didn’t get anything in return because of the restrictions of the platform. Then, in 2017, we saw the first NFTs with CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks. We immediately realized that blockchain would become a key technology to enable a true system of ownership of virtual goods. This allowed us to combine NFTs with user-generated content, allowing any creator to make their own NFTs, use them in games, and monetize them. This was the first spark that gave us the idea to adapt our user-generated content ecosystem with a concept of copyrights and ownership of blockchain-related assets.
L’O: Can you explain to us what your business model is based on?
AM: The Sandbox is a universe comprising of 166,464 LANDs, each owned by a user. The limited amount of real estate makes The Sandbox a kind of virtual Manhattan in terms of property value. We have sold approximately 70 percent of our total map, which still leaves the other 30 percent for sale. The Sandbox keeps 100 percent of the primary sales of the virtual LAND and earns 5 percent on sales between users on the secondary markets. What makes our model unique is the fact that 50 percent of The Sandbox’s revenue is immediately transferred to The Sandbox Foundation, which supports creators, players, and stakers to accelerate the growth of our ecosystem. The foundation manages our $1 billion Game Maker Fund, which provides grants to creators to encourage the production of high-quality games and other content in The Sandbox. Going forward, all SAND aggregated to the foundation will be governed by SAND holders through a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). These holders will then be able to allocate the reserves and resources as they see fit, which puts the community in charge of the Metaverse.
"The world is changing and big brands are aware of it." -Sébastien Borget
L’O: How do you gain legitimacy in an industry where there are few benchmarks?
SB: We have always been transparent about who we are and what we create. In this new digital era, we want to be authentic to our users, and this is reflected in our community. Our proposition is not, Hey, do you want to make a quick buck from NFT games? On the contrary, it’s, Let’s create added value in a metaverse that we are building together. We believe consistency has allowed us to create a strong brand as pioneers in this space.
L’O: What sets you apart from other Metaverse platforms?
AM: We built The Sandbox with the idea of putting the community at the center of value creation and the reward system. It drives everything we do. The Sandbox is a rich and open metaverse powered by fun interactive experiences, a user-generated ecosystem that rewards creators with 100 percent of their revenue, and a decentralized virtual economy. In The Sandbox, players and creators have full ownership of anything they create or buy, and the rights to anything they create. There are decentralized NFT worlds and game-focused metaverses, but we think The Sandbox most effectively combines these two elements on one platform.
L’O: What specific features did you have to develop to accommodate the world of luxury, fashion, pop culture, and entertainment?
AM: Our Metaverse concept is not just a game gallery. It is a space where players create avatars and digital identities that represent them. In the Metaverse, everyone can connect and enjoy games and social experiences together. Where people are social, even virtually, fashion is an important element. As such, we’ve always envisioned fashion as a key part of The Sandbox. In 2021, we enabled creators to launch their own collections of avatars that they can customize using our free VoxEdit voxel editing tool. They can then create a series of unique NFTs out of it. We work with designers and fashion houses to continue to evolve virtual fashion. Customizing your avatar to make it cool, to represent how you feel and how you want to be seen, is a fun experience with great business potential.
L’O: How do you explain the appeal of the Metaverse for brands with a history and clientele as varied as Adidas, Ubisoft, Warner Music Group, and Gucci?
SB: The world is changing and big brands are aware of it. Not only is Gen Z spending more time engaged in the digital space, but young people are also increasingly valuing their online reputation and appearance, rather than just their physical possessions. Reactions to our vision went from “But what exactly are you doing?” to “How can we get our brand involved?” Working with brands is also a win-win proposition. For us, we appeal to existing fans of the brand who may be hearing about The Sandbox for the first time. And for brands, they can access a new global platform to showcase their world to a diverse and growing community in a new digital realm, with the ability to sell virtual items.
