How The Sandbox is expanding UGC for indie devs and creators

While The Sandbox celebrated a big milestone at the start of 2024, announcing at the end of March that it had hit 1,000 UGC experiences published on its map, the Animoca Brands subsidiary has continued to expand its UGC experiences.

Via regular programs like the Builders’ Challenge, it’s encouraging users to build experiences as well as empowering them to monetize their own work. Featuring a prize pool of 1,500,000 SAND tokens, the first Builders’ Challenge saw over 680 experiences made which were eligible for rewards. Of these, 300 were new experiences. 

Its 15 Game Jams have been another successful concept, leading to the creation of 340 new experiences. Inspired by partner projects such as Little Prince, Madballs, Mocaverse, Hell’s Kitchen, Dr. Bomkus, and more, The Sandbox claims over 4,500 creators have participated in the initiative, sharing a reward pool of 600,000 SAND. 

Continuing to build momentum as one of the leading web3 platforms for UGC, it recently unveiled a new program to bring indie game developers into its ecosystem. Called Voxel Games, the aim of the program is to support indie game developers using The Sandbox’s VoxEdit and Game Maker tools, contributing to the growth of new games within the ecosystem. 

Indeed, over 330,000 users, including 200 professional developers, have already used the tools to create NFTs, games and various experiences.

Launching with partner studios FRAG Games and The Devhouse Agency, the Voxel Games program expands opportunities for creators, allowing the use of Unity, Unreal, HTML5, or other game engines of their choice beyond The Sandbox’s no-code creation tools. Additionally, the games can be made available to other stores and platforms. 

The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget commented, “This is an exciting opportunity to realize our vision of the metaverse, where players can acquire, own, and use their digital assets across multiple games and platforms–beyond The Sandbox.” 

“Engaging with indie developers and veteran game studios brings fresh ideas or proven gameplays to the table and helps us grow the widespread adoption of web3 through voxel-style games.”

Looking ahead, the team is preparing for the next iteration of Game Maker, version 0.11. This will add team scoring, enhanced NPC systems, and new templates supporting Survival and Idle games, among other features.