Rising Metaverse Game Pairs Ethereum NFTs With Retro 16-Bit Look

When most people think of the metaverse, they imagine immersive 3D worlds—whether it’s Ethereum-based games like Decentraland or The Sandbox, or Facebook’s vision that taps into VR and AR headsets.

Worldwide Webb is decidedly different in approach, with a throwback 2D pixel aesthetic—and digital land sales are surging.

Designed like a massively multiplayer online version of a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis game environment, Worldwide Webb is an Ethereum-powered PC game built around NFTs. Players can purchase apartments of varying shapes and sizes in the world, for example, and will be able to customize the locales to share with friends and online communities.

But users can also bring in the NFTs that they already own. Since launching in November, Worldwide Webb has added support for a variety of NFT avatars, such as CryptoPunks, Cool Cats, and CrypToadz. That means that players can connect an Ethereum wallet and then explore the pixel world using their owned NFT profile picture.

With its retro look, Worldwide Webb stands apart from much of the competition. But amid rising overall metaverse hype and its growing integration for avatar projects, Worldwide Webb’s profile has similarly risen of late—and so have its NFT land prices.

Worldwide Webb has seen the floor price—or cheapest asset listed on a secondary marketplace—of its apartment (or land) NFTs surge 142% over the last seven days to 3.6 ETH, or about $9,530 as of this writing.

Zoomed out further, the entry-level price has risen 188% over the past 30 days, per data from NFT Price Floor. Blockchain analytics firm DappRadar tweeted today that the floor price for a “large apartment” NFT in the game has risen 3,183% since December 14, when the site profiled Worldwide Webb for the first time.

Amid rising overall prices for NFT land parcels in the game, Worldwide Webb also logged its highest-ever single NFT sale earlier this morning, with a penthouse selling for 70 ETH, or more than $190,000 at the time of purchase.

Two other penthouses have been sold over the last day, at prices of 60 ETH ($163,535) and 59.59 ETH ($162,376) apiece, per data from CryptoSlam. All told, land in Worldwide Webb has generated $9.2 million in trading volume over the last week, and nearly $57 million to date.

Digital land plots in metaverse games have seen significant demand in recent months, particularly since Facebook rebranded its parent company to Meta in October while laying out its own vision for the space.

The Sandbox, Decentraland, Portals, Somnium Space, and other metaverse game platforms have collectively generated hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of NFT land sales since then, including more than $100 million worth in a single week in late November.

An NFT acts like a deed of ownership to a unique digital item, whether it’s images, video files, or interactive elements in video game worlds.

Such blockchain-based games are seen as the first step toward the wider evolution of the metaverse, a future vision of a more immersive, avatar-driven internet. In such a future, users will socialize, play, and work in interconnected, interoperable online spaces, and use owned NFT assets for things like avatars, accessories and customizable home spaces.