The Australian Tennis Championship 2023 is gaining momentum in the Roblox metaverse

It was recently revealed that the Australian Open has abandoned promotion of its previous metaverse project in favor of an upcoming sporting event this year that will be linked to the Roblox virtual platform.

Roblox can be called a rather unusual phenomenon, since it has all the ideas and fundamentals for a project to be called a metaverse, but it does not work on Web3 technologies and is not connected with the blockchain and digital assets industry.

Users have the opportunity to freely explore the open world called AO Adventure, which is the Australian Open. The world was modeled after a real tennis location in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Users who log into AO Adventure will also have the opportunity to meet Australian tennis star Nick Kyrgios in the form of his humanoid avatar Nick.

While many big brands and companies decide to use Web3 integration and comprehend the world of the metaverse, the creation of the Australian Open in the world of Roblox, and not, for example, Decentraland or The Sandbox, was an unusual event.

MyMetaverse CEO Simon Kertonegoro noted that such a move can and will improve the user experience in the field of immersion in the world of Australian tennis, but he is still unhappy with the policy of Roblox Interactive:

To be honest, the decision of the Australian Open to build in Roblox and not exclusively in Decentraland will most likely result in an improved user experience for their community.

It's just a shame that Roblox banned NFTs from their platform.

The last time the tournament was held on the Decentraland platform. Then it was possible to achieve exceeding the threshold of 5,000 unique visitors per day. It is noteworthy that at that time the organizers managed to create the ArtBalls NFT collection related to the tennis event.

They introduced 6,776 unique non-fungible tokens that somehow had a connection with certain moments spent during the event. Collectors were interested in such an offer and, as a result, the total amount of trades exceeded the mark of $3,900,000 in 2 weeks, which not every NFT collection manages to do.

Despite seemingly successful sales, the hype around the tokens quickly fell and, according to OpenSea statistics, the NFT collection is showing all-time lows. The cheapest ArtBalls item is priced at 0.09 ETH (~$127). A year ago, the minimum was 0.03, which was almost $1,000 at the time.

This year's event may raise interest in the ArtBalls collection for two reasons. Firstly, a current event often attracts the attention of collectors and encourages them to purchase tokens of an ongoing event, as was the case recently with the World Cup 2022. Secondly, the creators of the collection will issue another 2,454 NFT tokens, which can also revive interest.

If last year had not been so unfortunate for cryptocurrencies, then with a high probability the organizers of the tennis championship in Australia would have made their choice in favor of the Decentraland or The Sandbox metaverse. However, the current situation and the past year have forced them to change their minds in favor of a virtual world that goes beyond Web3 technologies.

Roblox now has over 43,000,000 daily players. This option attracted the organizers of AO Adventure and the vast base of gamers may end up interested in the product. It is noteworthy that at the time of writing, the virtual world of AO Adventure in Roblox exists for no more than a day, but more than 2,500 unique visitors have already got there.

According to Tennis Australia Senior Metaverse, NFT, Web3 and Cryptocurrency Manager Ridley Plummer, Roblox is the perfect fit for them. The reason for this was the target audience of the site. 80% of Roblox visitors are people who are under 26 years old, and according to the idea of Tennis Australia, these visitors should be interested in their project.