Majority of SL Brand Owners Already Planning to Launch in High Fidelity or Project Sansar - NWN Survey

Here's the results of our survey last week, asking how many Second Life brand owners are already preparing to launch their brand in Project Sansar, High Fidelity, or another nex gen virtual world. Just under 47% say they've not done so, while 48% say they're preparing the transition in either High Fidelity or Project Sansar or both. Among this group, Linden Lab has the more popular platform thus far, with 19% solely focused on moving to Sansar, versus 8% concentrated only on High Fidelity. However, nearly 1 in 5 are keeping their options open, exploring how to transition to both platforms.

Why the pronounced preference for Sansar? Most likely because Linden Lab has stated they plan to allow some level of content transfer from Second Life to Sansar (without explicitly saying what that entails), allowing for a smoother transition. By contrast, some content creators have raised concerns about High Fidelity's digital rights protection system:

"You may know HiFi doesn't host the models or textures etc, on their own servers," writes "djehan" in the survey comment thread. "In order to visualize the models, the user loads them from an external URL and last time I checked it was still unclear how to 100% protect these as it could be easy just to get the URL and go pick content for free. You may look into the Hifi forum, a lot of people are suggesting possible security solutions. I would be very glad to hear some fresh news about that, but if there is no clear solution right now, I will wait. I personally believe the future of content protection is in the blockchain." (I'm checking with High Fidelity on that concern right now.) By contrast, I don't believe Linden Lab has publicly said anything specific or definitive about Sansar's digital rights management, so it's unclear how their solutions will vary.

For my own part, I'm not actually convinced most content creators are especially concerned by digital rights management, as long as they're able to reliably earn revenue from what they create -- which in the end, depends on which platform becomes more popular.

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Comments

[Philip Rosedale]

High Fidelity will protect content by issuing certificates that validate authentic content by providing a proof-of-purchase and link to get your own copy, etc. Server operators will have the ability to require all content on their servers to be authentic.

As you say, we agree that the most important thing for content creators is to be able to make money selling content if they choose to.

[Julie Tailor]

I have very vastly impressed with High Fidelity.
Less so with Sansar - still no news for the Beta for creators waiting nor dates "Summer" is fast coming to a close with no emails or news in months to those waiting.

Seems to be a familiar level of "comms" from Linden Research.

[zz bottom]

Sansar is a dead duck and Ebbe will be out of office before the end of the year.

[Timo Gufler]

As High Fidelity is open-source, it should be possible to create 3rd-party viewers. That's something not promised by Sansar. Allowing third parties to host domain servers should bring healthy competition to the land markets of HF.

[Chic Aeon]

@Julie

If you had been keeping up with the Project Sansar Creator Preview, you would know that the first creators are scheduled to be admitted in August. There are a few alpha testers now (at least that is the official word) but others will "begin" their journey sometime next month. I haven't seen a date and of course not everyone that applied will be invited in.

Some, according to Ebbe (recent video) had projects too complex for the platform at this time and some, I know, aren't really content creators at all and have nothing to show and tell; they simply were trying to get in and see.

Well THAT doesn't work LOL.

@ zz

While High Fidelity is certainly NOT Opensim there are many parallels, both positive and negative. The same issues that plague OS could easily been seen in HF -- domain hosting and viewers among them. Only time will tell.

[R]

Yawn...booooriiing.

VR next-gen games are where the real fun will start first in VR, not in some user-created, noob world with no game engine in place, where everyone stands around mindlessly looking at 3d objects.

[futurtastic]

The future of VR belongs to user created content. Have any other companies thrived on user created content? Maybe a few. Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.

The old model of high price creators making things for the masses to play with is a dead model. Professional creators are to pricey to be profitable.