The metaverse was supposed to be its own destiny. You would put on a headset, enter a virtual world, and never have to think about the platform that got you there. That was the speech, anyway. Decentraland, one of the first and most persistent experiments in decentralized virtual worlds, appears to have come to a different conclusion. On Monday, the project launched on the Epic Games Store and launched an Android app on Google Play, followed by an iOS version. The message is clear: if people don’t come to the metaverse, the metaverse will go to where the people already are.
The Epic Games Store listing is the more strategic of the two moves. Epic’s platform reached 317 million registered PC users in 2025 and set a record of 78 million monthly active users in December of that year, according to the company’s annual review. Spending on third-party games in the store increased 57 percent year over year to more than $400 million. For Decentraland, which has long struggled with the perception, and sometimes reality, that its virtual world is sparsely populated, placing itself alongside Fortnite and other mainstream titles in a store with that kind of traffic represents an attempt to solve a distribution problem that no blockchain architecture could solve on its own.
Yemel Jardi, CEO of Decentraland, framed the launch in terms of distribution rather than technology. Epic Games, he said, has become a primary discovery channel for desktop experiences, and being there strengthens the way people find and access Decentraland. He described it as part of a broader strategy to reach people where they already are, with plans to expand to additional stores over time.
The launch of the mobile phone follows a similar logic. Decentraland’s Android app is now available on Google Play, with the iOS version expected shortly. The project cites figures from Mordor Intelligence showing that mobile devices dominate 71.55 percent of the social gaming market, and statistics from DataReportal that indicate the average internet user spends three hours and 46 minutes per day on their phone. The Consumer Technology Association puts cross-platform gaming participation at 61 percent of gamers. Gino Cingolani, CEO of DCL Regenesis Labs, said the mobile experience is about lowering the barrier to entry, allowing people to access from a phone rather than planning a desktop session.
The moment is punctual. Meta, which staked its corporate identity on the metaverse in 2021 and spent roughly $70 billion on Reality Labs before reversing course, announced in March that close Horizon Worlds on VR headsets (a decision that was partially reversed after user reaction, although the future of the platform remains uncertain). Meta cut 1,500 Reality Labs employees in January 2026, closed three internal game studios, and reduced its metaverse budget by 30 percent. The company that did more than any other to popularize the word “metaverse” has effectively abandoned the concept in favor of artificial intelligence infrastructure and wearable devices.
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Decentraland’s argument is that this withdrawal creates an opening. While Meta built a proprietary virtual world controlled by a single corporation, Decentraland operates as a community-governed platform supported by a nonprofit foundation. Users own their virtual plots of land and avatars as tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The governance structure is decentralized and decisions are made through transparent community voting. There isn’t a single company that can shut it down, which is precisely the vulnerability Horizon Worlds users discovered when Meta decided the economy was no longer working.
The question is whether Decentraland’s own economics work. The project’s native MANA token is trading at around $0.08, a dramatic drop from its high above $5 during the 2021 cryptocurrency bull run. Measuring active users has been a persistently controversial exercise. A widely cited 2022 report from DappRadar suggested that the platform had as few as 38 daily active wallet users, although Decentraland disputed the methodology, arguing that it only captured on-chain transactions rather than total visitors. The project’s own figures for the end of 2025 claim approximately 847,000 monthly unique visitors to its web client, with daily unique visitors increasing by 23 percent from mid-2025 following the launch of a lighter and faster desktop client. In January 2026 alone, the platform says it hosted 312 community events with an average attendance of 127 unique visitors each.
Those numbers are modest by mainstream gaming standards, but significant for a platform that has survived the metaverse winter largely intact. Secondary market sales of Decentraland LAND plots reached $4.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, a quarter-on-quarter increase of 31 percent. The project, founded in 2015 by Argentine developers Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, raised $26 million in its 2017 initial coin offering and launched publicly in February 2020. It has outlived or surpassed most of its contemporaries.
The launch of the Epic Games Store comes with a promotional incentive: anyone who downloads Decentraland through Epic receives an exclusive wearable item called the Epic Arrival Shield. It’s a small gesture, but it reflects an understanding that build a user base in a crowded digital landscape it requires meeting the expectations of the platforms where people are already spending money. Epic’s store ecosystem, which gave away 662 million copies of free games in 2025 alone, has trained its audience to expect value up front.
Decentraland will mark the dual launch with an in-world party on April 2 at 7 pm UTC, featuring performances by Dúo Dø and DirkNeuenfels, who will also stream on Twitch. The multi-platform nature of the event, accessible on desktop, mobile and streaming, sums up the project’s current strategy. The virtual world itself is the product, but the storefronts, app stores and streaming platforms are the doors.
The open question is whether those doors lead to a meaningful audience. The metaverse narrative has been affected by Meta’s withdrawal, an industry-wide capital reallocation towards AI infrastructureand the decline of the broader crypto market from its 2021 highs. But Decentraland’s bet is that the underlying idea – a persistent, user-owned virtual space where people gather for events, socialize and build – doesn’t require a trillion-dollar corporate sponsor to survive. All you need is a good enough reason to show up and a showcase that makes it easy to show up. Starting this week, you have 317 million potential new gateways.
