The Ape Pivot Has Arrived

Time to dust off your apes everyone, because Otherside, the Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse from Yuga Labs, is finally about to be released!

This string of words probably didn’t find much purchase in your brain, because if you’re not part of the Web3 world, the last time you were cognizant of Bored Ape-related news was likely October of 2022. That was around the time Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs had seemingly become toxic assets, and the Biden Administration was targeting parent company Yuga Labs with a probe into whether or not the Apes were unregistered securities.

In any case, that’s the popularity timeline a search for “bored apes†on Google Trends suggests—a spike in early 2022, a jagged drop-off, and a seemingly asymptotic decline to almost zero. And that’s where things sit today.

 

Last year Mashable explored what was left of the Bored Ape empire, finding ape-themed burger joint closures, recent layoffs, and general bad vibes. The freshest indignity for the apes was just last week, when the Amazon Web Services crash reportedly disconnected all the Bored Ape Yacht Club images from marketplaces like OpenSea.

But that’s all in the past now.

Otherside is meant to be an NFT-based interactive world, and Yuga Labs originally teased it in 2022, before the NFT crash. Suddenly it has an actual launch date of November 12.

Figge reveals that the Koda Nexus will go live on November 12th pic.twitter.com/YkfbZfJIII

— Jack (@Jack55750) October 25, 2025

It all gets a bit “slurp juice†from here. Otherside is also known as the “Koda Nexus,†because, according to the decentralized app marketplace DappRadar, “Kodas†will be the term for NFT-based characters or “celestial beings†that inhabit this new online space, and “the narrative surrounding Kodas is directly connected to the Otherside lore and its first in-metaverse game: The Legends of the Mara.†Also, not all Kodas are Bored Apes. Got all that?

Jay Peters of The Verge was able to try Otherside, and gave his impression. According to Peters, it’s like Meta’s Horizon Worlds, a video game-type environment where you can wander around, hang out in, and talk to other users—and where not much else happens. At launch, it sounds like it is trying to be something more like Fortnite mixed with Roblox—a customizable, open-ended gaming space.

The most promising feature in Peters’ account of Otherside was the flexibility to at least let non-crypto people in the front door. You can apparently play it from a web browser after registering with just an email address.

In his announcement address Yuga Labs’ chief product officer Michael Figge called Otherside “a living world, with scale, story, and real utility.â€

After three years of hearing grandiose pronouncements like that, and having most of them turn out to be disappointing AI chatbots, doesn’t an open world video game sound like a nice change of pace?