The Metaverse should have been its own destination. You’ll put on a headset, enter the virtual world, and never have to think about the platform that brought you there. That was the pitch anyway. Decentraland, one of the earliest and most enduring experiments in decentralized virtual worlds, seems to have come to a different conclusion. On Monday, the project launched on the Epic Games Store and released an Android app with an iOS version on Google Play. The message is clear: if people don’t come to the metaverse, the metaverse will go where people already are.
The Epic Games Store listing is the more strategically important 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. Third-party game spending on the store grew 57 percent year-over-year to more than $400 million. For Decentraland, which has long held the notion that its virtual world is sparsely populated and sometimes struggles with reality, putting Fortnite and other major titles in a showcase with this kind of traffic represents an attempt to solve a distribution problem that no single blockchain architecture can solve on its own.
Yemel Jardi, CEO of Decentraland, framed the presentation in terms of distribution rather than technology. Epic Games, he said, has become the primary discovery channel for desktop experiences, and being there is driving how people find and access Decentraland. It described it as part of a wider strategy to meet people where they already are, with plans to expand to additional stores over time.
The mobile release follows a similar logic. Decentraland’s Android app is now live on Google Play, with an iOS version expected soon. The project cites figures from Mordor Intelligence that show mobile devices have 71.55 percent of the social gaming market, and DataReportal statistics show that the average internet user spends three hours and 46 minutes on their phone per day. The Consumer Technology Association puts the cross-platform gaming icon at 61 percent of gamers. Gino Cingolani, CEO of DCL Regenesis Labs, said the mobile experience is all about lowering the barrier to entry, allowing people to log in from a phone rather than scheduling a desktop session.
Timing is noted. Meta, which built its corporate identity on the metaverse in 2021 and spent nearly $70 billion on Reality Labs before reversing course, announced in March that Close Horizon Worlds on VR headset (a decision partially reversed following user backlash, although the future of the platform is uncertain). In January 2026, Meta laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees, closed three internal game studios, and cut the metaverse budget by 30 percent. The company that did more than anyone else to popularize the word “Metaverse” has effectively abandoned the concept in favor of AI infrastructure and wearables.
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Decentraland’s position is that this withdrawal creates an opening. Where Meta builds a private virtual world controlled by a single corporation, Decentraland operates as a community-driven platform supported by a non-profit foundation. Users own virtual plots of land and avatars as tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The governance structure is decentralized, decisions are made through the transparent voices of the public. There isn’t a single company that can shut it down, this is the weakness that Horizon Worlds users discovered when they decided that the Meta economy wasn’t working anymore.
The question is, does Decentraland’s own economy work? The project’s native MANA token is trading at around $0.08, sharply down from a peak of over $5 during the 2021 cryptocurrency. Active users have been measured an ongoing controversial exercise. A widely cited 2022 report from DappRadar suggested the platform had up to 38 daily active wallet users, though Decentraland disputed the methodology, claiming it captured only on-chain transactions rather than total visitors. The project’s own numbers for the end of 2025 call for about 847,000 monthly unique visitors to its web client, with daily unique visitors up 23 percent since mid-2025 after the release of a lighter, faster desktop client. In January 2026 alone, the platform said it hosted 312 community events with an average of 127 unique visitors each.
Those numbers are modest by mainstream gaming standards, but significant for a platform that has come out of the metaverse winter largely unscathed. Secondary market sales of Decentraland LAND parcels increased 31 percent quarter-on-quarter to $4.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025. Founded in 2015 by Argentinian developers Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, the project raised $26 million in an initial coin offering in 2017 and went public in February 2020. He surpassed or surpassed most of his contemporaries.
The launch of the Epic Games Store comes with a promotional incentive: anyone who downloads Decentraland through Epic gets an exclusive wearable item called the Epic Arrival Shield. It’s a small gesture, but it conveys an understanding building a user base in a crowded digital landscape it requires meeting the expectations of the platforms people already spend money on. Giving away 662 million free game copies in 2025 alone, Epic’s store ecosystem has trained its audience to expect value in advance.
Decentraland will celebrate the duo’s launch with a worldwide celebration featuring performances by Dúo Dø and DirkNeuenfels, which will be streamed on Twitch on April 2nd at 19:00 UTC. The cross-platform nature of the event, available on desktop, mobile and streaming, encompasses the project’s current strategy. The virtual world itself is a product, but storefronts, app stores, and streaming platforms are gateways.
Whether these gates lead to a meaningful audience remains an open question. The narrative of the Metaverse was damaged by Meta’s withdrawal, an industry-wide reallocation of capital to AI infrastructureand the broader cryptocurrency market falling from its 2021 highs. But Decentraland’s argument is that the core idea of ​​a sustainable, user-owned virtual space where people gather, socialize and build events doesn’t need a trillion-dollar corporate sponsor to come to life. It just requires a good enough reason to display and a showcase that makes it easy to display. It is available from this week 317 million potential new front doors.
