The metaverse was supposed to be its own destination. You would put on a headset, enter a virtual world, and never need to think about the platform that brought you there. That was the pitch, anyway. Decentraland, one of the earliest and most persistent experiments in decentralised virtual worlds, appears to have reached a different conclusion. On Monday, the project launched on the Epic Games Store and released an Android app on Google Play, with an iOS version to follow. The message is clear: if people will not come to the metaverse, the metaverse will go to where people already are.

The Epic Games Store listing is the more strategically significant 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 rose 57 per cent year on year to more than $400 million. For Decentraland, which has long struggled with the perception, and at times the reality, that its virtual world is sparsely populated, placing itself alongside Fortnite and other mainstream titles on a storefront with that kind of traffic represents an attempt to solve a distribution problem that no amount of blockchain architecture could fix on its own.

Yemel Jardi, executive director of Decentraland, framed the launch in distribution terms rather than technological ones. Epic Games, he said, has become a primary discovery channel for desktop experiences, and being there strengthens how people find and access Decentraland. He described it as part of a broader strategy to meet people where they already are, with plans to expand to additional stores over time.

The mobile launch follows a similar logic. Decentraland’s Android app is now live on Google Play, with the iOS version expected shortly. The project cites figures from Mordor Intelligence showing that mobile devices command 71.55 per cent of the social gaming market, and DataReportal statistics indicating that the average internet user spends three hours and 46 minutes per day on their phone. The Consumer Technology Association puts cross-platform play engagement at 61 per cent of gamers. Gino Cingolani, executive director of DCL Regenesis Labs, said the mobile experience is about reducing the barrier to access, allowing people to drop in from a phone rather than planning a desktop session.

The timing is pointed. 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 it would shut down Horizon Worlds on VR headsets (a decision it partially walked back after user backlash, though the platform’s future remains uncertain). Meta cut 1,500 Reality Labs employees in January 2026, closed three internal game studios, and slashed its metaverse budget by 30 per cent. The company that did more than any other to popularise the word “metaverse” has effectively abandoned the concept in favour of AI infrastructure and wearables.

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Decentraland’s pitch is that this retreat creates an opening. Where Meta built a proprietary virtual world controlled by a single corporation, Decentraland operates as a community-governed platform supported by a non-profit foundation. Users own their virtual land parcels and avatars as tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The governance structure is decentralised, with decisions made through transparent community votes. There is no single company that can shut it down, which is precisely the vulnerability that Horizon Worlds users discovered when Meta decided the economics no longer worked.

The question is whether Decentraland’s own economics work. The project’s native MANA token trades at roughly $0.08, down dramatically from its peak above $5 during the 2021 crypto bull run. Measuring active users has been a persistently contentious exercise. A widely cited 2022 report from DappRadar suggested the platform had as few as 38 daily active wallet users, though Decentraland disputed the methodology, arguing that it captured only on-chain transactions rather than total visitors. The project’s own figures for late 2025 claim roughly 847,000 monthly unique visitors to its web client, with daily unique visitors up 23 per cent since mid-2025 following the release of a lighter, faster desktop client. In January 2026 alone, the platform says it hosted 312 community events with average attendance of 127 unique visitors each.

Those numbers are modest by the standards of mainstream gaming but significant for a platform that has survived the metaverse winter largely intact. Secondary market sales of Decentraland LAND parcels reached $4.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 31 per cent quarter on quarter. 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 outlasted or outpaced most of its contemporaries.

The Epic Games Store launch comes with a promotional incentive: anyone who downloads Decentraland through Epic receives an exclusive wearable item called the Epic Arrival Shield. It is a small gesture, but it reflects an understanding that building a user base in a crowded digital landscape requires meeting the expectations of platforms where people are already spending money. Epic’s store ecosystem, which gave away 662 million free game copies in 2025 alone, has trained its audience to expect value upfront.

Decentraland will mark the dual launch with an in-world party on 2 April at 7pm UTC, featuring performances by Dúo Dø and DirkNeuenfels, who will also stream on Twitch. The cross-platform nature of the event, accessible from desktop, mobile, and stream, encapsulates the project’s current strategy. The virtual world itself is the product, but the storefronts, app stores, and streaming platforms are the doors.

Whether those doors lead to a meaningful audience remains the open question. The metaverse narrative has been bruised by Meta’s retreat, an industry-wide reallocation of capital toward AI infrastructure, and the broader crypto market’s decline from its 2021 highs. But Decentraland’s bet is that the underlying idea, a persistent, user-owned virtual space where people gather for events, socialise, and build, does not require a trillion-dollar corporate sponsor to survive. It just requires a good enough reason to show up, and a storefront that makes showing up easy. As of this week, it has 317 million potential new front doors.