AltspaceVR Gets Bought by Microsoft Despite Low Daily Usage

Last July I wrote that AltspaceVR's closing suggested a dark time for social VR, but fortunately, as it turns out, that's not going to be the case just yet for AltspaceVR staff:

AltspaceVR, the virtual reality social network that hosts events like stand-up comedy or presidential debate-watching parties, is now part of Microsoft. After a sudden shutdowndue to a drop in funding in July, the free VR community was in “deep discussions” with unknown parties to keep it online. It originally looked like Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey might step in and save the community, but Microsoft has now come to the rescue. The team at AltspaceVR are now joining Microsoft. “With the AltspaceVR team aboard we look forward to building the world’s preeminent mixed reality community,” says Alex Kipman, Microsoft’s inventor of HoloLens. 

It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft does with the platform, because while its underlying technology might work in other projects, actual AltspaceVR usage has been scant -- less than 50 concurrent users from Steam on any given day throughout this year. When it closed in July, the company reporting having 35,000 monthly users, but to judge by its tiny maximum daily concurrency on Steam, a lot of that was churn and "one try then bye bye" accounts.

Second Life's daily maximum concurrency, by contrast, is generally in the range of 45,000-53,000. And yes, yes, not everyone using AltspaceVR logs in via Steam, but even assuming total daily concurrency was 10x that Steam figure, we're still talking daily maximum concurrency in the hundreds of people.

Comments

[sirhc deSantis]

Thought it was the biz plan now for a small(ish) start up to be wooed by one of the big fish (ok fish perhaps a bit of an odd choice) but Was already a bit of a sweet story from:

https://altvr.com/good-bye/ (we has a sad)
to this:
https://altvr.com/altspacevr-is-back/ (awwwwwww)
and now:
https://altvr.com/joining-microsoft/

Still, looking at one of the links, mSoft might have played a bit clever here if, indeed, the xbox avs can be shoehorned in. Interesting one this, hope the tech doesn't just vanish (naming no names =^^= )

Oh yeah the steam numbers? Never was comfortable with that piece of intrusive bloatware and never had it installed for more than a day, so yes if I had tried anything it would never have showed up via that - channel.

[Ciaran Laval]

Microsoft want something to help the push for VR and AR. Altspace was available and makes a good fit as new hardware gets released and a new version of Windows 10 supports VR and AR.