Upland Opens New City — as a Newcomer I Am Standing in a Lost Position

In Upland, it’s like real life — if you already have a lot, you get a lot more.

Hint: my Avatar is the one in the middle ;)

As a newcomer to the Upland Metaverse, I have invested a total of $50 since November 23. For that, I bought a few properties and traveled from town to town. As a result, my net worth quickly rose to over 10,000 UPX (The in-game currency, where 1000 UPX is roughly equivalent to one dollar). With over 10,000 UPX, you go from a visitor to an uplander.

As an uplander, you can no longer lose the properties you have purchased under any circumstances. This is because they are inseparably linked to my account in the blockchain.

Basically, you would have to invest a maximum of 10 dollars to stay in the game permanently. But of course, you also want to acquire properties because you speculate that the game will become more popular, and someone will later buy the properties from you for multiple.

So after investing UPX 50,000 worth, my net worth today is UPX 76,375. The increase is partly due to the 6,000 UPX I received for free when I signed up and partly due to the daily returns on my properties.

You would think that I am pretty well-positioned for a beginner. But then came the announcement that Upland will unlock a new city ( or better, a new district ). The opening of the Bronx was announced for December 08.

When a new city is unlocked in Upland, it happens in several steps. The last step before opening the entire city is the so-called stress test. In this phase, only a few initial neighborhoods are unlocked to ensure that the servers can handle the rush of players.

During this stress test, you can already travel around the city and buy properties in the unlocked neighborhood.

Out of sheer curiosity, I, of course, wanted to be there. So I set off from Cleaveland, where I had landed in the meantime, to New York and from there to the Bronx. Since I did not arrive there immediately after the opening but a few hours later, I did not expect to get one of the few plots available so far. But what I found there surprised me a lot.

As far as I could see, I was the only simple uplander far and wide. There were almost exclusively executives and chief executives on the road. You are promoted to these positions if you have a net worth of 10 million UPX (Executive) or 100 million UPX (Chief Executive).

Converted into dollars, this means that these players are invested in the game with sums between $10,000 and $100,000. This is extremely disturbing, in my opinion.

Of course, these bigwigs had long since bought up everything there was to buy up. When they offer the acquired properties for resale, they demand ridiculous prices for them. The cheapest of the plots for sale cost one million UPX. For comparison: I have spent between 4,500 and 7,000 UPX for my properties so far.

Of course, these players don’t expect anyone to be willing to pay these prices right now. They are speculating for the long term. At some point, there will be no more cheap plots for new players, but the opportunities to make money in the game will have become so tempting that it will be worth buying into the game with large sums of money.

Even if that point is ten years in the future, it would be a lucrative business for the big buyers of today. Of course, they could lose everything, but the sums they speculate with are probably peanuts to these people.

Then what about players like me? I’m able and willing to invest a total of a few hundred dollars over the next few months, but that’s hardly going to be enough to get my hands on the really lucrative assets. For example, it will be impossible for me to bid for the terminals of new airports or train stations. This can make a lot of money because every traveling player is a potential customer for the terminal owner.

At the moment, it looks to me like only the already rich can get richer in the game. But maybe I just haven’t understood the game well enough yet, so that even as a newbie without a fat bank account, I can slowly climb up the ladder and increase my virtual wealth.

I will therefore stay on the ball and continue to explore this strangely fascinating Metaverse.

I hope to get a few more plots once Upland completely opens the new city. If that worked out, you’ll read about it here again soon.

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