Valve's Destinations Sure Seems Like a Potential Sansar/High Fidelity Killer to Me

Destinations from Valve (on the Steam store here) was quietly released last year, but reading the latest update, it sure seems like it has the potential to be social VR's killer app:

Two new official Destinations have arrived: ponder the cosmos in the Clockwork Orrery, or enjoy a relaxing stay on the water at Illia’s Retreat. With the addition of tools, like the Airbrush and Drone Controller, players have new ways to interact with the world and other players. We’ve also added new avatar heads, avatar hands (complete with gestures of course), and a refreshed interface which makes it easier to meet up with friends in Destinations.

Compare and contrast with High Fidelity and Sansar, it may not be as powerful or full-featured than either, but has several advantages over either:

• As above, it allows for dynamic, multi-user content creation (Sansar will not).
• It's integrated with Steam, which has over 125 million active users.
• Steam users are by definition core gamers -- who are by definition VR's first and primary target market.
• Valve has every reason to promote content optimized for its HTC-Vive headset.
• It comes baked in with a fun game mechanic (scavenger hunt) while Sansar and High Fidelity still labor under the assumption that VR is already ready to become something other than a game platform.

Sansar and High Fidelity's only key advantage against all that? Valve often drops the ball on various content projects (Half-Life 3, anyone?) and may lose interest in expanding on Destinations. But Philip and Ebbe are best advised to closely watch whatever Gabe says about the metaverse.

Comments

[Cyberserenity]

Just love VR. Another thing to try out.

[Masami Kuramoto]

High Fidelity's key advantages:

- It's open source, i.e. it will never be shut down/turned off (unlike Blue Mars and eventually SL).
- It's multi-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac).
- Its potential scale is unlimited because people like you and me can host domain servers. In fact there's one included in the client download: the "sandbox". Just launch it, load some content, pass the URL on to your friends, have them come over.
- It fully supports VR gear but does not require any. High Fidelity is on Steam too ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/390540/ ), but unlike Valve's platform it is accessible to all of Steam's 125 million users right now.

Frankly, the race of VR metaverse platforms is basically over. Rosedale comes in first, again.