OTHERSIDE IS A PLATFROM : Yuga Labs CEO Garga Explains What Otherside Will Be And Introduces The Community To The Idea Of A “Mainline” & ODK Metaverse!
- Kyle
- Jul 23
- 3 min read
Otherside is a platform, not a game, that will feature experiences built by Yuga Labs and its partners, as well as user generated content created by the community. The world will also have an overarching story involving the mystical forces that shape the metaverse!
On Wednesday, Yuga Labs CEO Garga took to the Otherside Discord to answer community members questions and clarify what Otherside is and what it isn’t.
During the conversation with Voyagers, Garga reiterated that the goal of Otherside has always been to create a platform where Web3 creators can bring their ideas to life. At the same time, Yuga Labs and its partners will also build experiences, all tied together with a bit of lore featuring Kodas, and the forces of creation and destruction known as Soma and Chaos.
“The goal has always been to have aspects of MMORPG's. Don't get me wrong, it's NOT World of Warcraft. It's a metaverse with an onchain economy, wearables, crafting, and quests,” Garga said. “Plus, a flexible story like what I've talked about here regarding Soma and Chaos. There's also a Roblox-like aspect to this though. We can create our own experiences, but MANY of the most successful video games are things that come out of mods and stuff. So in the spirit of web3, we're giving holders the same assets and toolkit that we're using to build mainline Otherside to them.”
Garga went on to explain that Otherside experiences can be broken down into two categories, Mainline Otherside and Otherside Development Kit (ODK) Otherside.
“Mainline Otherside > This is Yuga-created Otherside, where you own your own deed, but the gameplay and rules are all things we decided,” Garga wrote. “ODK > This is all the tools and 3D assets that we used to create Otherside. Devs who don't know us can build and advertise those worlds. They can setup their own rules.”
This idea of Otherside as a platform, not a game was first emphasized by ImprobableIO Founder and CEO Herman Narula, who is working alongside Yuga Labs to bring the metaverse to life, back in September 2022.
“Otherside is not a game it’s a platform,” Narula tweeted at the time. “It is powered by M squared which is a network of platforms that all work together. If you own an otherdeed then as we add more worlds to M2 you get more potential people to come visit your content. It’s all stronger together.”
That “stronger together” mentality and the need for a robust UGC ecosystem have been talked about many times and many ways by Garga over the years.
Recently, he told NFT Now that he believes that equipping creators with powerful tools and rewarding them for success is key to Otherside’s future.
“My long-term vision for Otherside is to have it be the most thriving modding community essentially in crypto… where I want to bring it should be the most fun, easiest, coolest place for builders to come and create a 3D world or experience,” Garga said on March 10th 2025. I think that’s one of the most important things for me when I think about Otherside is it’s not enough to just do the exact same thing and slap crypto rails underneath it. I want to create kinds of experiences and enable my community to make those experiences as well… I want to create scenarios where our users, everyone can build and be rewarded by a protocol that enables people to do things that you can’t do anywhere else in the world.”
Tonight, we do not know exactly when the phased rollout of Otherside will begin, but Yuga Labs did announce that everyone is invited to make their way to the Otherside this Friday for a “Meet At The Clubhouse” Bubble, which is the metaverse’s native equivalent of a Twitter Space.
We also know that Garga said his goal is to have the first persistent Otherside experience, Bathroom Blitz, up and running before the end of the month.
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