Sansar Concurrency Less Than FIFTY Users, According to API Data -- No Growth of Social VR Platform From Ready Player One Tie-In Experiences

Sansar data concurrency via Sansar creator Gindipple -- click to embiggen

Sansar game developer Gindipple has been collecting data that Linden Lab provides through a back-end API, counting the number of users logged into the social VR platform's published experiences at any given moment. The concurrency levels, as you can see above, are surprisingly small, running between about 10-50 throughout the day.

"It's pretty obvious there isn't much growth right now," as Gindipple puts it to me. That's not to say he's discouraged by these numbers: "I wouldn't be here if I didn't think it was set to win the game. So it's got a ways to go yet. They've been a bit slow on development, but there is some recent indications that they are starting to focus some on what I feel is important, allowing us programmers to create rich interactive scenes."

These Sansar concurrency numbers, by the way, are not necessarily reflective of the platform's entire usage -- many Sansar experiences are still set to private/unpublished, and based on his network's activity, Gindipple estimates total concurrency may be as much as three times the stated amount. However, in terms of active users that average consumers can interact with at any given time, it's in the two figures.

To my knowledge, this is the first published estimate of Sansar usage, which puts it around the range of High Fidelity, but well behind Rec Room (with concurrency in the hundreds) and way behind VRChat (with concurrency in the many thousands).

What surprises me most is that Sansar has official tie-in experiences with Spielberg's hit Ready Player One, promoted when the movie came out in late March. Look at the stats there:

Sansar average daily concurrency via Sansar creator Gindipple -- click to embiggen

We see a small bump in average usage just before and during the debut of Ready Player One, but literally just a handful more users. As Gindipple says, these are early days and Sansar has a pretty good head start among VR-centric platforms, but overall, VRChat remains by far the dominant social VR player. 

Much thanks to talented metaverse blogger Ryan Schultz for connecting me to Mr. G!

UPDATE, APRIL 27: I've asked Linden Lab for a comment on this story and Sansar's low reported user numbers.

Comments

[Ryan Schultz]

Glad to be able to help you out :-)

[Medhue]

Gindipple collects the data with his long ears!

[Iggy 1.0]

Fifty. Five. Zero.

How much money did the Lab invest to get fifty people concurrently?

You'd be fired in any other field, unless you were building MacLaren supercars, for that sort of ROI.

[Clara Seller]

Probably about the same as the nail salon next to the market where I shop. I can only imagine what kind of numbers they would pull in if they hosted a media-bedazzled "experience" promoting a Spielberg blockbuster about nail polish.

The salon owner didn't know much about VR or Sansar, but she suggested Ebbe try a couple of runs in Valpak, Groupon, or maybe offer some "experiences" up at local school auctions. She seems to think those avenues could increase numbers 25 or 30 per cent. Gindipple is right. There's still opportunity for growth.

[Susan]

I checked out Aches Garage. And most of the other popular promoted "experiences" in Sansar. The quality of the models, the PBR materials, the advanced lighting - it all looks great - really, really great! But still, all you can do is look at it. You can't get in any of the vehicles, you can't drive anything, you can't BE Ach. It's visual but not really much of an experience.

Hover Derby is an experience, it's something you can actually get involved in an do. It's not for me, but it shows there is still hope for Sansar. Next time you create a tie-in - make it something you can do rather than just something to look at. And PLEASE make the avatars something people might actually want to BE already.

[Clara Seller]

After receiving flak for comparing apples to oranges, I need to apologize to local nail salon owners. I realize that after a year of operation, a local nail salon is going to be a much more successful and profitable operation than Sansar. With an average salary of about $21,000 per year, skilled nail technicians across the country are leaving the Sansar team in the dust. Great work guys!

[Kaili]

Sansar is a joke

[Sapphiroth]

Nail salon visit doesn’t require sophisticated gear in which not everyone want to invest at this point (price, current possibilities).

VRchat seems much less complicated comparing to Sansar.

I suppose Sansar can be on time as advanced platform in next few years when gear will be more affordable/more advanced than it’s now.

[Carlos Loff]

People do not jump into new stuff unless what hey like and need is all there - LL would better improve SL and make tiers cheer and regrow SL, where people is and likes to be - If they want Sansar to succeed on the shadow of SL, they need to launch it only when most stuff is already there and tested

[madeline blackbart]

I've used sansar as a VR headset user and I agree with gindipple. They need to allow programmers to add interactivity. Sansar now is like a empty museum. No one to talk to and you can look but can't touch.

[Galen in Sansar]

It's a shame that many of the most visible experiences in Sansar are beautiful but static. There are actually quite a few interactive experiences; especially ones made for the 2017 Halloween contest. Paranormal Investigations, Orphanage of Angels, and Miner Difficulties are examples of heavily interactive spaces and stories. HoverDerby, one of my own collaborations, is about as interactive as it gets, and it's really just a start. Sansar's creators are still getting used to what they can do in Sansar. Even if LL never made any further improvements to Sansar, there would still tons of room to grow within its space.

Don't be surprised if we're still a small beta community for now. And certainly don't write us off. We're just getting started. And the platform is gradually getting better.

[Lance Corrimal]

ok, so here's a comparison "chart", based on the article and my own monitoring

Sansar: max 50
High fidelity: somewhere around the same number
Rec Room: hundreds
VR Chat: thousands
Second Life: daily average of around 40000, see https://eregion.kicks-ass.net/munin/servers/akari.eregion.home/SL_Online_Now.html

[Ailysa Skizm]

Probably not many users because their graphics card is not compatible and who is going to fork out $400 for a new graphics card? Mine is gtx 750 and told that its really good, but SANSAR requires gtx 970. So as soon as I log in, it crashes, I cant even get to the first screen and what about those who choose to use older platforms like Linux with minimum requirements? The turnover will take a long time, once people are ready to purchase a new computer or upgrade theirs. Ive only had my new one 3-4 years, so don't plan to upgrade for a looooooooooooooooooooong time.

[Pulsar]

And this even if Hi-Fi had zero promotion and media coverage, compared to Sansar, not to mention a company with already hundred thousands active users.

VR gears have a limited user base, the desktop mode in Sansar has too high hardware requirements for many (and after the bitcoin craze, good graphic cards are even more expensive) and Sansar still lacks even of graphic settings, so you can't mitigate this; the graphics themselves are nice... compared to SL, but nothing special compared to today standards (not to mention the awesome Unity demo, that Adam posted few days ago). Then at the recommended 10 Mbps network speed, it takes many minutes before you can see an "experience" (good thing they added a loading bar at last, so people would no longer think the client froze). Avatar customization requires loading and waits too (at the same speed) and you can't do much anyway (last time I tried, you couldn't even change the color of the eyes). Then you look at the marketplace, to see if you could help with these badly animated lifeless mannequins, that doesn't look so much better than Second Life "mesh" starting avatars. And you see the marketplace isn't integrated and it's still almost a stub. Then there is little interaction with both the environment and avatars, and hardly anyone to meet.

A mistake with Sansar was to call it "beta" (and then "creators beta"): I know marketing messes even with versioning, but a beta is an almost finished product, that needs just some fine tuning and bug hunting. "Beta" creates some expectations. Then you try it and what you see is a tech demo or an early alpha at best.

[Pulsar]

BTW, if you look for a bit of interaction in Sansar, you could give a peek at "Metaverse Machines" too. There aren't true vehicles yet, but in that place there is a clever workaround: disc-like pseudo-vehicles, that you can control by moving your avatar on different parts of the disc, just that, but clever.

About interaction, High Fidelity has a good one, but given High Fidelity few users, it looks like that alone doesn't make a virtual world popular. It's good to have, but it won't necessarily make Sansar much more popular. It's just an ingredient in the cake, it's not the only issue Sansar has.

For many people, Sansar experience could be summed up as "loading" or "wait please" (it's the slowest downloading among the virtual worlds I tried out). For others it doesn't work at all or it has little new to offer. It doesn't work as a social virtual world as a true SL2 would be, and it isn't so practical to showcase e-commerce products / hotel rooms / buildings / museums either, like would be an embeddable one running on your web browser.

Actually I love virtual museums in SL, but let's say I'm calling friends to share the experience. If they download at 10 Mbps (the speed they recommended in Sanasar), in SL they would be there in mere seconds, while in Sansar I would do something else for the next 5 minutes up to an half hour (depending on the "experience"), before they are there (if they didn't give up). Yeah, something else outside Sansar, because all you can do there, even in Aech's basement, is to walk in a clumsy way, and grabbing objects doesn't work so well either.

Then people feel it a lonely and frustrating experience, log off and bye bye.
It's true that you sell only once and perhaps Sansar already did. They sold it at first without even that simple loading bar, that was asked for months before the public release, and as a some kind of "beta", rather than an "early tech demo preview", missing about everything and offering little. Now months after, it getting closer to a year, after some media coverage, joining events with big brands like Intel and even taking advantage of movies, Sansar has a concurrency of a whopping 50 users. Well, maybe one day... good luck.

[JohnC]

So I am this guy who creates the best chocolate in the world. And I make all the money I could need with my product. My consumers love what I make, but tell me it could be better, and they offer to help, to do anything in fact that they can to help. But instead of listening to them, or realizing the simple fact of the quality of the chocolate he produces. This guy listens to some cheap advert created by a jealous competitor, who believes that he can create a better tasting chocolate, even though he has never really tasted real chocolate at all. So he spends all the money donated by the true lovers of Chocolate in some competition with a guy who has no idea at all about real chocolate. Of course he will end up with fake chocolate all over his silly face. This has been an advert on behalf of true Chocolate lovers all over SL.

[David Cartier]

Being the shallow fellow I am, I can't help but believe it's the incredibly ugly starter avatars keeping the numbers down. That and the fact that about 5% of the population have computers which can even access it. They might as well pull the plug now on SANSAR, and use what they've learned to either improve Second Life or to create a real SL 2.0.

[DoneWithSL]

Yep, I was on Sansar for 2 days, and literally only four people were online at once. It was absolutely terrible, but very good graphics, too bad it's nothing like SL.

[Jackie]

SL is dying , Sansar died at birth.

[Quinella]

I hoped that sansar would be a phenomenal flop and while it may not be phenomenal it is not the money mine that linden labs want. linden labs have literally almost done their golden egg to death with their greedy abandonment of SL and sucking all the good from SL to waste on their pet project. Perhaps linden labs should start using their heads and go back and cure their golden egg before it is tarnished beyond repair.

[rabbi jim]

all staff should be fired. hi it's 2020 and the average is still well under 50, more like 2-30 average. theyve destroyed their platform with repeated bad decision, disrespecting creators and user and the staff are abusive in a sick malovelent way that would get any of us fired for treating customers like crap like they do
must be some special group or family all these incompetents belong to if they can do absolutely the worst work and lose sansar money and still keep their jobs it is amazing get rid of the banjo lady and angel guy they're killing all chance