Heaven Land is yet another blockchain-based virtual world project, which describes itself as follows:
Heaven Land is a place in the Earth’s Orbit where everyone can live – it’s open, social, persistent and provides users with tools to interact, experience, improve and monetize their property. The virtual economy backbone is Solana blockchain; a backbone for content storage is decentralized IPFS. Welcome to Heaven Land, [the] metaverse for everyone…
Heaven Land is a futuristic city, distributed platform, shared virtual world, building and monetization platform, a place to spend good time, meet your friends and much more. Possibilities are endless, [and] all of them meet in a single place – Heaven Land.
—Heaven Land white paper
It’s meant to be a futuristic, space-age version of an O’Neill cylinder, from what I can gather, with 38 individual clusters of parcels of virtual land. There will be a limited number of different races of avatars, including humans, Maritans, and zombies (?!). It all sounds very nice and lovely.
Now, for the rant…
I’m getting rather sick and tired of blockchain-based virtual worlds (and yes, the metaverse platforms incorporating blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs are the majority of the guilty culprits here), who are using images and videos relying on “artistic interpretation” to promote their projects! These media range from the fanciful to the misleading, giving investors the sizzle—without any evidence of actual steak.
And Heaven Land is, unfortunately, the perfect example of this. Here are two videos on their YouTube channel:
Keep in mind that this is a project which, at the moment, consists of nothing but a slick website and a white paper! (Oh, and they also have an “Ambassador” program, where I assume you can volunteer to promote the as-yet-nonexistent platform to your fellow crypto bros.) 🙄
There is no way in hell that the final product is going to look like this! These videos remind me of nothing so much as that popular and completely misleading promotional video for Decentraland, published during their ICO when they were trying to entice crypto investors, and well before there was any actual platform:
I mean, c’mon…the actual Decentraland looks nothing like this disjointed collection of “artistic interpretations” (not to mention that DCL doesn’t support users in virtual reality headsets, and likely won’t for quite some time). And in the case of Heaven Land, unlike Decentraland, they haven’t even launched their cryptocurrency yet!
Which proves my point: these kinds of promotional videos are misleading, and lead to inflated expectations by investors, which are eventually dashed when they come up against cruel, hard reality.
Here’s an idea for the fine people of Heaven Land: why not, you know, actually BUILD something, and then market it? I’m kinda fed up with these fairytales.
Even worse, in my books, is the fact that there is ZERO information about the company, its physical office location, or its executive team on the website. There is one small paragraph in its white paper, stating:
Our core team comprises 15 people and grows every week. We have blockchain specialists, artists, architects, game developers, programmers, IT infrastructure specialists, community managers, and marketing specialists. Next to individuals, we build colaborations [sic] with established projects in a part of the technology needed to make the Metaverse reality.
So you really have no idea who you are dealing with at present, who is building this wonderful space-age virtual world project. Would you invest with such limited information?
If, after my rant, you still want to explore (mentally!) Heaven Land, you can visit their website, join their Discord server, or follow them on Twitter (where they have been doing a lot of advertising; after seeing ads for Heaven Land an overwhelming number of times in my Twitter feed, I finally got so fed up that I blocked them—something I have never had to do before for any metaverse platform!).
I will duly add Heaven Land to my popular, comprehensive and ever-growing list of social VR and virtual worlds—but (as always) I warn: do your homework before investing a penny in any blockchain/crypto virtual world project, and don’t be swayed by artistic interpretations!
