New World Notes

Early Decentraland Users Reportedly in a Tulip Mania Over Virtual World Land

Decentraland, the ambitious, open standards-based social VR world project which sold virtual land plots worth USD $25 million In Ethereum last August, is reportedly amid the next inevitable market stage -- a tulip mania land grab in Decentraland among its users:

Much of the activity in the various channels on the Decentraland chat server revolves around the buying and selling of LAND, which is the name they actually use for the 10m-by-10m parcels of virtual real estate that were first auctioned off in December 2017 and January 2018. It’s not yet known when the next auction of LAND will take place, so currently the only way to obtain LAND is to buy it from an existing owner... The red circle to the left, near Vegas City (the proposed gambling district), is three parcels of LAND together in a reversed L shape. Asking price is 80,000 MANA, which, according to today’s value using this MANA-to-USD converter tool,  works out to about US$8,749. According to Decentraland believers, this land is considered more valuable because it is located next to what is anticipated to be the lucrative and busy gambling district. Now, mind you, you can’t even VISIT this land yet, and there is as yet NOTHING in Vegas City.

Much more from the blog of longtime virtual world developer Ryan Schultz, who smartly rebranded his site -- originally being just about Linden Lab's Sansar, to now being about metaverse worlds in general. 

Watch: Virtual Reality Replaces Books in the New Adaptation of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

With rising star Michael B. Jordan (currently being badass in Black Panther) as the hero, HBO's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic seems savvily updated to today, squarely implicating virtual reality (about 35 second in) as a key part of this dystopia that's waging war, as the villainous Beatty declares, against "News, facts, memoirs, Internet of old.. burn it!" Often misinterpreted as mainly being about government censorship, it's really Bradbury's response to the rise of non-literary mass media, and its suffocating power, written many decades before smartphones and bedding Taylor Swift in the Oculus Rift. As he put in an interview some 60 years ago:

Second Life Log-In Downtimes Due to DDoS Attack Reportedly Resolved -- But Recent SL Item Purchases May Have Been Impacted

After about two days of reported log-in problems due to a reported DDoS attack across the real world which impacted Linden Lab's servers, Second Life log-ins are reportedly restored, according to the company, which has this important addendum:

The issue has been resolved. Please contact Support if you have experienced any issues with purchases made during this incident.

In other words, if you bought a virtual item from the SL Marketplace on the web or in-world, check your inventory to make sure it's there. Which is all very vexing and maybe stressful to many, but at least it led to this excellent meme:

If You're Still Struggling to Log Into Second Life You Can Watch This Second Life Music Machinima ft. Drake & PartyNextDoor Instead

With You - Drake, PARTYNEXTDOOR (Second Life) from Tyus Deonn on Vimeo.

No update to today's DDoS attack on Second Life as yet, so why not watch this super-stylish machinima music video by Tyus Deonn. Bonus points for the gorgeous lighting effects, the clever meta shot (you'll see what I mean when you see it), and, of course, featuring Drake and PartyNextDoor at their vibey best.

I Wonder if Sansar is Part of The "OASIS Experience" Pop-Up at Hot Topic

Are you ready? #TheOASISExperience is coming to a city near you. Don’t miss your chance to enter the OASIS and shop exclusive @HotTopic RPO merch. #ReadyPlayerOne in theaters March 29. pic.twitter.com/YRYvwqpyTj

— Ready Player One (@readyplayerone) February 21, 2018

The producers of Spielberg's Ready Player One adaptation are doing a kind of quirky tie-in with the movie -- an "OASIS experience" pop-up coming soon to Hot Topic retail clothing stores in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix. Little details besides that as yet, but semi-informed speculation suggests Sansar may be involved:

• Sansar already hosts an official Ready Player One experience
• Sansar recently launched a clothing shop for avatars
• We're seeing rumors of more Ready Player One content coming soon to Sansar

So let's say it's a "definite maybe". Or then again, maybe the "OASIS Experience" will just be some bored movie marketers handing out RP1 t-shirts and such to kids at the mall.

VRChat Adds Anti-Troll Panic "Button" (That May Cause More Panic)

VRChat seems to have established a solid little community of regular users, but to sustain that use and grow from that foundation, it'll need to deal with a history of trolling users, and a (perhaps unfair) reputation for not doing enough to stop same. Enter The Panic Button:

Panic Button - In the event that unwanted audio or visual spam occurs or that frame rate tanks you can now engage a “Panic Mode”. This mode will visually mute any avatars and audio mute any users who are not your friends.

This from VRChat's most recent release notes. This is a smart and reassuring reassuring feature, but in actual implementation, but it's not a "button" than a complex cheat code. Imagine getting hardcore trolled and not panicking while you try to remember any of these options:

Second Life Plagued by Log-In Problems for Nearly 24 Hours (And Counting) - UPDATE: SL Hit With a DDoS Attack, Reports Linden Lab

As I write this, I am personally unable to log into Second Life from California, and to judge by reports and screencaps like the one above, many SLers around the world are also still having problems. The problems started yesterday and were acknowledged by Linden Lab at 1:30pm, and there's been about a dozen updates since then, an unscheduled maintenance here, a rolling restart there, and three hours ago, this message once again repeated, for the fifth time: "Investigating: We are aware that there may be intermittent issues with Second Life logins at this time." 

Normally I don't report SL outages as they're usually resolved rapidly, but this is starting to seem like a fairly major downtime. I'm checking with Linden Lab for an update, and meantime, follow the SL Grid Status feed for updates.

Update, 11:00am: April Linden, the company's operation lead, reports that it's a DDOS, and suggests it's part of a broader attack other companies are also experiencing in North America, Western Europe, and Asia:

Premium VR Game Sales: Indie Hit Superhot Sells 164,000+ Copies for PC & PSVR, Far Outpacing Bethesda's Fallout 4 VR & Skyrim VR

New industry numbers from SuperData paint a pretty stark picture for premium VR content -- and low demand for "alternate world" games:

This chart just lists games that are only available for VR, and not those which come with a VR option; in other words, it paints the clearest picture of demand for VR-only content.  Notably, just one of the top VR games, Raw Data, is multiplayer. More notable: The top-selling VR game hits for 2017 sold hardly any copies at all: Fallout 4 VR and Skyrim VR, both from AAA studio Bethesda, grossed $4.7 million and $2.2 million, respectively. Each game retailed for roughly $59.99, so do some basic math, and you can see how few copies were actually sold:

Roughly 78,500 and 37,000 copies, respectively. This is painfully low: Both games have sold over 20 million copies each on PC and console. Yet somehow, of the ~ 2.4 million PSVR owners out there, less than 5% bought Skyrim VR. Fallout 4 VR did relatively better: of the ~700,000 Vive owners out there, some 11% of the market bought Fallout 4 VR. That's not bad, but for such a well-known title among hardcore gamers who own a Vive, I'd have expected sales closer to 20%+ of the market. Both Bethesda's games are incredibly renown for depicting vivid, fully-realized virtual worlds a player can spend 100+ hours playing and exploring in -- just the thing, you'd think, most premium VR owners would want to do. But it's likely that Bethesda has not yet made a profit on either game.

The only unambiguous hit? It's not one from a big publisher, and it's not a big virtual world:

Sansar Won't Succeed With Gamers Looking for Derpy Sandbox Fun (Comment of the Week)

From Hancroft's Flickr

 Jaimy Hancroft, a gamer who also makes great SL content, posted some worthwhile thoughts on Sansar's coming competition with VRChat:  

I don't know what they are trying to do , when it comes to VR. VRChat is the place to be currently for gamers that own a VR set, it's also on Steam where all the gamers are, I spend alot of time gaming as an SL resident (I'm in game communities etc, i spend a lot of time with gamers ) and mostly they care about just derping around in some avatar in a room (think Garry's Mod), acting like complete idiots. Just like PUBG's lobby, they don't really care about looks and creation when it comes to 'games' like this.

The gamers that do care about artistic/looks/creations, and they want to have an 'experience', will go play games like Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, Life is Strange etc. The gamers that enjoy building within a game will go play builder games. They will never move into something like SL or Sansar. This "looking at art someone made' - platform is very niche and not a lot of gamer 'youth' is remotely interested. Which is most of the player base on this planet.

To be more exact, most gamers in the world are casual mobile gamers, while Minecraft and Roblox have huge userbases in the tens of millions each, even though those have a "looking at art someone made" aspect. But if she's referring to hardcore Steam gamers, her point is stronger. And she argues Sansar is facing a huge demographic challenge:

Top Seven New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• New App For Chatting Between High Fidelity & Second Life (And Back Again)
• Cat Life Launches: Feed, Brush, Pet, Play With A Virtual Cat In Second Life
• Virtual World Developer's Visit To Linden Lab Hints At Big Updates To Sansar And Second Life Coming Soon
• Cajsa's Choices: The Amazing Avatar Cosplay Portraits Of SL Photographer Flight Of Osiris
• VRChat Settles Into Sustainable Community Of 7000+ Daily Users
• Linden Lab Makes Workforce Reduction Layoffs Impacting 12, Says Source; UPDATE: Linden Lab Confirms "Minor Team Reorganizations"
• WATCH: The Simpsons' "Steamed Hams" Scene Amazingly Recreated "Live" In High Fidelity With Actors Using Vive Motion Trackers