Metroverse Community Notice

Hello Metizens, after one and a half years of development and delivering on the roadmap, Metroverse will be shutting down and ending further development of the game. In concluding the development of the game, the community will continue to have the rights to build whatever they wish using the Metroverse NFTs. The Ethereum smart contract code and block data is open-sourced and will be shared in an organized Github repo for easy use. This week's Metro Battle will be the last one, and as planned, Metroverse Mayors will be airdropped to the winners within the coming days, marking the completion of the roadmap. After this, all ongoing operations will cease, and the community will be able to build any experiences they wish to using the Metroverse NFTs and the open sourced assets.

While it is sad that the game must come to an end, Metroverse is proud to have delivered all the items in the roadmap over the last year and half:

https://metroverse.com/roadmap

Every step of the journey brings back fond memories, including the excitement of the first reveal, and watching you all stay up all night exploring your blocks in the block explorer and trying to complete your neighborhood boosts. The first phase of the game last year was a massive success and the memory of watching you share your strategies for optimizing your neighborhoods will always be a cherished one, thanks to community members who built analytical tools to aid the optimization puzzle. The good times watching you all live-stream your Prime rolls, watching you play metro royale, and watching the fierce competition between cities in battle will always be warmly tinted memories too. The game was a lot of fun, and that fun will never be forgotten.

After working tirelessly to build and launch the full game, the memories of you all enjoying the many gameplay features that were built will always spark joy. Thank you for participating in the gameplay.

Why Metroverse is Shutting Down

As was shared in the last fireside in January, there has been a significant decline in user engagement over the past 8 months. Digging into analytics has revealed that site visits are down over ~96% compared to this time last year. Social channels show a similar decline. Even before Metro Battles were launched, the market downturn resulted in a huge drop in engagement as people lost interest in NFT games. Engagement has continued to drop since, however development continued and the second (final) phase of the game was released as planned: Metro Battles.

Battles did not see the level of engagement that was expected for reasons completely outside the control of Metroverse, including the wider market downturn and declining interest in NFT games. This has been tough news to communicate, but the game is not sustainable given the very low interest in it. With engagement at all time lows and game activity continuing to fall, unfortunately it is no longer viable to continue supporting the Metroverse game.

The Future

Despite the project's closure, the Metroverse NFT collections remain available to their owners. NFT owners will maintain the right to use their NFTs in any way that they choose.

Metroverse Mayors will be released in the coming days, ending support of the game. Then the community will remain able to build utility using the Metroverse digital assets at their discretion.

In addition to allowing open access to create with Metroverse NFTs, creator royalties on all collections will be set to 0%. There will also be a Github repo with documentation on the open source smart contract code for the collections along with all of the open source block information and metadata for the on-chain neighborhood optimization game. While it's not viable for the game to continue in its current form, the community has broad discretion to use the open sourced materials to build other games.

A Word of Thanks, and Next Steps

Finally, thank you to those who have and continue to support the project. There was an outpouring of support after the last AMA, and this acknowledgement of all that has been accomplished was appreciated.

Over the next week, the following steps will be taken to wind down the project. By March 10th, 2023 the following will be completed:

• Closure of the Metroverse discord server
• Airdropping Mayors to the top 1000 players, marking the successful completion of the roadmap.
• Sharing a repo with the open source Metroverse smart contract codebase (NFT contracts, along with all of the contracts related to scoring/hood optimizing).
• Setting royalties on all collections to 0%.

Once more, to the many of you who have been amazing, thank you! Onward.

UPDATE March 10th, 2023: The above items have been completed. View the repo containing Metroverse code and data here.