Last week, Linden Lab began promoting Sansar's Greenwall VR, a social VR hangout space for OpTic Gaming™ , a massive eSports gaming brand with 3 million+ followers on Twitter and 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube; the OpTic team has been helping too, tweeting about the site and even shooting videos in it (below).
So far, however, all this promotion hasn't translated into growing traffic into Sansar. According to data that Linden Lab provides through a back-end API (chart above), visits to Sansar's public spaces have not improved since the Greenwall launch, with daily average concurrency remaining at well under 20 uniques, total.
This is pretty surprising -- and to me, even more noteworthy than Sansar's Ready Player One experience from earlier this year:
Yesterday we revealed our brand new Virtual Reality fan space called Greenwall VR, and our man @Luke_TheNotable has a fantastic guide to some of the cool new features you can explore!
— OpTic Gaming™ (@OpTicGaming) August 15, 2018
Check it out for yourself: https://t.co/dF4LbBksc4 pic.twitter.com/Sj5pnhuPkN
Where most consumers interested in Spielberg's movie probably didn't have the high-end PC or VR equipment required to even visit the Ready Player One site in Sansar, most fans of OpTic Gaming™, being hardcore gamers, almost certainly do. I'd have at least expected an uptick of usage from several hundred gamers by now, but not even that is happening.
This failure to increase engagement not only concerns me about Sansar, but social VR in general. Thanks to promotion by Twitch and YouTube streamers, VRChat concurrency grew by many thousands -- but hasn't grown since then. Whatever the alchemy for growing this new generation of social virtual worlds, their appeal as hangouts for gamers seems limited at best.
If "concurrency" counts only those visiting public sites, that explains the low numbers. There are likely many many folks in private, friends only areas -- simply enjoy their spaces. There are lots of people working on their experience, a time consuming process if you are making it all yourself. It took me most of a month for Ranch Life, with much of the mesh already made. Add to that scripting and video and all those fancy EXTRA things and building in Sansar is a much longer process than building a sim from prims in the old days :D.
I haven't made many comments about Sansar in the past but after a month there getting my feet soggily wet, I have a few insights from a creator point of view. All my opinion of course. Not necessarily correct predictions.
Upside? Sansar is VERY techie and I can see many many possibilities in the future.
Downside? Sansar is VERY techie and difficult to master for the new folks.
The new default avatars (with even newer versions in the works) are quite good although I am not fond of the skins and hand size :D. Much of the default clothing is top notch -- I am talking VERY nicely made. While there are really no avatar poses or animations yet and no sits in furniture, one can sit on the ground by typing into chat (that brings up memories) AND the default animations are again, top notch. So I am impressed with the thought that has gone into the basics.
Things LOOK better in Sansar. They also look different. Most people are working in PBR which has many levels of possible shaders. I opted to do my own thing and use the same methods that I use in SL for Sansar. Some changes needed to be made now and then -- larger textures being one of them. Breaking away from the norm, even unconsciously, gives my experience a different look and feel. Some folks like it, some really want me over in the PBR shaders camp. But my site loads in less than 15 seconds for most folks reporting; others can take a VERY long time to become accessible. Low poly mesh, reasonable texture size, using baked textures and normal maps only -- it was a plan. I LIKE fast loading with good Frames Per Second.
For me, that quick loading is imperative. Imperative for me as a visitor (if a site doesn't load in five minutes I am gone) and imperative for Sansar if it is going to flourish in the future.
IMHO Sansar needs to become a cross-platform arena, bridging both VR and desktop user worlds. The folks in VR see things differently than desktop users. Desktop users don't care much about what the VR folks see. There is room for both in Sansar and I truly believe that the desktop folks will be the future. After all, there are LOTS more of us! It seems The Lab has at least an inkling of this -- likely more -- since there are now levels of graphics for low and medium as well as the original high. But download times need to be shorter if the masses are going to stick around once they come to visit.
I plan to keep making low poly mesh with baked textures for the desktop folks. Who knows, the VR crowd might get used to the "materials lacking" worlds that I make. One never knows. As a creator I am very happy with my first scene -- and honestly, that's pretty much the most important thing in my book.
Posted by: Chic Aeon | Thursday, August 23, 2018 at 09:52 PM
"July 31, 2017 - Sansar™, the world’s leading social VR platform, today opened its creator beta to the public. Sansar is a brand new platform built from the ground up to enable everyone to become a creator. Sansar democratizes social VR," said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab. "Until now, complexity and cost has limited who could create and publish in this medium, and Sansar dramatically changes that. It's been inspiring to see the thousands of virtual creations that have already published with Sansar during our limited preview, and I'm looking forward to the explosion of creativity we'll see now that we’ve opened the doors in beta.”
So a year later, that "explosion of creativity" has become a "hangout" where nobody wants to hang out. It's like WordPress for people who can't read or write.
The most ground-breaking creativity of the Sansar project has been the "spin". It's been breath-taking. This virtual hocus-pocus of turning actual resources into nothing has been masterful -- and honestly, it's looking like that's been the goal all along.
Posted by: Clara Seller | Friday, August 24, 2018 at 07:02 AM
"It's like WordPress for people who can't read or write."
I about fell out of my chair reading that, it had me laughing so hard LMFAO
Posted by: Instant Larry | Friday, August 24, 2018 at 11:59 AM
You can't even change your E-mail address with Sansar so what do you expect?
Posted by: Tina Rowe | Saturday, August 25, 2018 at 05:19 AM