Game Industry Expert Scott Jennings: Sansar Stuck in Its First Impression as a VR Platform

Sansar.com homepage

Scott Jennings has worked in the game industry for 15+ years, and is renowned for his commentary and analysis of MMOs, including Second Life, which he has played since its early days. So when he stopped by NWN's Facebook page recently to drop a truth bomb about Linden Lab's Sansar, it bears featuring here:

There's a phrase in game development - "you only ship once."

You only get one impression, and then you're done. No matter how well you iterate, how much you fix -- you can't beat that first impression. The first impression will be everything.

For the vast majority of people, Second Life's first impression was reading a Time writer speak quizzically about how someone gifted him a working penis.

This is actually why Sansar is a thing - it's Linden Lab's attempt to make "Second Life, but with KANGAROOS!" To get past the expectation of everyone that oh, this is that game with detachable penises.

The problem is that Sansar hit headlong into another completely unrelated problem - that VR is a very unproven technology that will sometimes make people throw up, ESPECIALLY women, who tend to for various reasons get motion-sick and reject first-person shooters, VR, and anything else trying to cram too much in not enough frame rate.

Note well: A majority of SL's user base is female, and thus a majority of THAT majority will nope out of any VR implementation because it's hard to have fun in a game when you immediately want to throw up.

To be exact, a majority of Second Life's very most active users are women, which basically boils down to the same thing.

I pointed out to Scott that Sansar does have a PC client and supposedly, a mobile version is coming soon. That didn't change his take:

"But if you go to Sansar.com right now, the first image is a woman wearing VR goggles. Again -- you only ship once."

What does he recommend Linden Lab do with Sansar now to improve engagement/installs?

"Not sure they can, other than backing away from VR which pretty much is its whole reason for being. VR was a horrible bet. The implementation was fine, but VR is nothing but bleeding-edge early adopters this generation."

This sounds roughly right, though I'm not as bearish as Scott: Sansar hasn't really reached much consumer awareness outside tech news sites, so Linden Lab could re-launch the Sansar website as a cross-platform virtual world for PCs, Macs, and mobile, as well as VR, then plow lots of advertising dollars to back that message up. But for the early adopters, as Scott suggests, Sansar's first impression seems pretty well set.

Comments

[David Cartier]

It's kind of discouraging sometimes, logging into an SL where I now suck at building stuff, and the big competition is now about whomever currently makes the most lifelike mesh pubic hair, but then I get an IM - even emails from High Fidelity, sometimes, advertising "DJ Music and Dancing in VR!" or the opening of a new gallery or museum show. We're still (not quite) the cavalcade of fetishism and perversion which most people seem to believe.

[Clara Seller]

It's good to have an expert opinion now. It's a crying shame that non-expert opinions weren't listened to years ago. It would have saved a ton of money.

So here we are, post-Ready Player One, and that bird still won't sing, chirp, or move. The Golden Calf bought Oculus and we got to watch him squirm before Congress. We're anxiously waiting to find out how dead dead has to be before it's officially dead.

[madeline blackbart]

Female VR user here (oculus rift and google cardboard specifically I have tried)! I find the motion sickness for me is down to specific types of movement (specifically very fast turns) which most games that I've play do not do. I've also been playing videogames a long time so maybe I'm more immune then most?

In my opinion BIGGEST issue is the lack of community. SL users have apparently spurned Sansar in general and (again in my opinion) the world of Sansar has very little interactivaty on it's own. With no community you can look as nice as you like but it's going to be boring. When I went there it felt like being in a museum. You can look but you can't touch and no talking.
I mean VRchat kind of got a leg up on this having been shown on a number of youtube channels. Log into VRchat and even though it's desktop mode is not as good as it's VR it seems to always have users on it. Maybe not quiet as many as SL but certainly FAR more then most other VR worlds/games I've been in. It's kind of the catch-22 of virtual worlds in general. You need a community to start a community.
Now that's not to say sansar has 0 community but that community is so small and rarely on sansar from what I've seen.

[Clara Seller]

Madeline Blackbart zeros in on the subject of community. Community is everything.

Someone at Linden Lab needs to do some soul searching on what community really is. Is community about "me" or "us"? Sansar has a community of "me". It was conceived and has been artificially supported for a collective of wannabes whose only goal has been to elevate careers and personal gain on a delusional assumption that their "greatness" is enough to attract herds of cash cattle to be milked and packaged for sale at the market. The active "community" of Sansar actually believes that the rest of us are so pathetic that we will find some meaningful "experience" in becoming their hamburger.

Linden Lab has worn the ruby slippers of "community" all along. They could have owned the future of VR if they would have bothered to look at "us".

Poor fools. Their day of reckoning is fast approaching. Owning the future of VR is no longer an option. They need to decide if they want to survive in it at all.

[sirhc desantis]

'For the vast majority of people, Second Life's first impression was reading a Time writer speak quizzically about how someone gifted him a working penis'

Make that a minority minus 1. Took me 3 months before I knew there was sound let alone a winkle.

(You know my views on community i.e. there isn't one)

Headline 'Sansar Stuck in Its First Impression as a VR Platform* err yeah and? Was the point?

Ser Jennings may have been in the games biz for 15 years (make up number) but I first tried it 40 years+ back. But I know I am an SL noob being only 11 actually involved. Plus his beard is better than mine.

And to clarify @ ser seller you are one reason I rail against some sort of blanket 'community' =^^=