Sansar's End as Linden Lab Project Angers Second Life Users Who Feel Short-Shrifted (Comments of the Week)

As this video tribute to Sansar by Daisy Winthorpe suggests -- published to YouTube a few days before Linden Lab announced the virtual world's end as a Linden Lab-sponsored project and since seen nearly 10,000 times -- it does have (had?) some passionate supporters. To judge by the overwhelming barrage of reader comments about the news, however, Sansar also has quite a few detractors from the Second Life user community who feel short-shrifted by Linden Lab. Just a small sampling of the more civil comments (relatively speaking):

Quick, SLers, look busy! The Lab is going to be interested in us again, as 50K users are better than what? 500?

As for Sansar, well, duh. Said it years ago: Peak of Inflated Expectations for Scuba-Mask Life plummets into Trough of Disillusionment and return to something that works (mostly) on the devices that (mostly) normal folk actually own and use.

-- Posted by: Iggy 1.0

Aww Sansar was supposed to be "like Second Life,but better!" If they expected SL types to move over-- even to try it out-- they missed how many people are at work when in-world, child/elder watching or just want nice hair and not to get dizzy.

-- Posted by: Bet

This infuriated me. Laughing, acting flip about residents questions, the gasping financial strain of Sansars death--while we all stayed loyal in Second Life, and Sansar sucked us dry... And now we must wait decades for improvements, pay more...

-- Posted by: Booboo

At last Linden Lab wakes up and understand it was not good to have two MUVE competing with each other in the same company and harming the users of the oldest enterprise. A resident who invested thousands of dollars in years of content production and in gaining a loyal audience does not go to a new world, without a network, with a difficult construction engine, to start everything from scratch. In my experiments with Rift glasses I found out that SL works very well in VR, so neither does Sansar take advantage of that

-- Posted by: Janjii Rugani

A Second Life 2 is desperately needed. Second Life can't ride on forever with its 2001 engine. That's what Sansar was supposed to be, but bad choices were made, particularly not supporting everyone's inventories.

-- Posted by: Adeon Writer

I don't think anyone I knew had any interest in Sansar at any point, we just ended up being the piggy bank. I haven't been on SL in a minute, but I hope everyone still there finds something good from all this mess.

-- Posted by: T.Bucklinder 

Perhaps the most frustrating thing, however, is this: Sansar didn't have to fail. Had several steps been taken (or avoided), it would likely be in a very different place right now. But more on that later (probably tomorrow).

Comments

[sirhc desantis]

The vid title itself was enough to tick me off. Did 'dare' to test it out several times over the past few years and gave up in frustration each time. Not simply nipping in, mind. No, I wasn't expecting it to be particularly easy to adjust but hell I did expect at least some clear documentation. Yeah yeah I am so spoiled with that in SL...

I agree, it should not have failed (interested to see why you think so).

Also think it is a mistake to give up on it but I'm not CEO/board so what do I know (oh yeah, was in place to watch a year long kid PC game project get canned just as the market went ballistic - and we were a toy company with actual franchise rights. Actual known ones as well).

[TD_Gunner]

Kill it. Kill it with Fire!!

[Heidi]

So now our CEO is going to Make Second Life Great Again?

Everyone hit the deck! Ebbe's commin' in hot!

[Joseph E Gabriel]

It was really having to start over and not being able to take anything with you. We have hundreds of dollars a year invested in tbe game and now your gonna break it with SL2. Tha is what everyone was talking about and why no one went over.. It was also the almost 1500 dollar outlay for a VR headset and pc to run it. That is how I remember it back in 2014 when we first started talking about it.

[Francisnavi]

2 years ago, I bought my Oculus Rift specially
For SL, to find out that SL was not in Vr anymore.
But.. there was Sansar!! I spend many hours in Sansar, to discover a super bad experiance. SL is better in evry detail. So please, LL (second life).. start again the option for VR in your application.
I can't wait to discover Sl VR.

[Peter]

I tried Sansar once and was far from impressed. Having been in SL for over 12 years, and formed very special in-world relationships, I always said I would remain loyal to the end (of me or SL!)as long as my system could handle the current requirements. This remains true. Looks like my loyalty may be about to pay off.

[Luther Weymann]

Linden Research will never answer the biggest question because its way too embarrassing to explain in front of those of us like me who spent the last 35 years in the software business. Why, with forty million registered users of SL still in your database did you not spend all those Sansar capital funds on a greatly enhanced new version of SL and go after all of those forty million who left? Even a recapture of 2.5% would have given you a million new bodies in SL. What if you had recaptured 10% looking for a new social world? Just consider the real financial loss this Sansar decision has been for you.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

A mistake was made. The mistake was costly. Hopefully going forward, Linden Lab can make decisions about Second Life's future that help to mitigate or even obviate the losses of Sansar entirely. Because consider the alternative is SL following Sansar into ignominy, rather than gracefully flapping its wings occasionally with new features in a controlled glide like a well-kept legacy platform with still much creativity and community running rampant in its fields.

[Medhue]

IMHO, the Lab is selling Sansar because of management's incompetence. These same people put Sansar on Steam with almost zero interactive features at the time. How the F does any virtual world developer think something is viable, or people will stay, when they literally had almost zero features and zero interactivity? It's mind boggling, seriously! Almost all of the interactive features were added in the last year, and over the last year, Sansar has seen growth. We just got the ability to usefully animate avatars and be able to trigger these animations on command in our games. Days before they announced the Sansar troubles. Think about that. The Lab has a world, that they thought would be big, but didn't add good animation featured until after they decided to let it go. I waited 3 fricken years in Sansar to finally do something with animation. The Lab, as least as far as the Sansar team, was clueless as to what consumers want.

[Medhue]

A great example of LL's incompetence was breaking the event system almost 1 and a half years ago. If you had an event, the traffic from that event would not count at all to the actual world you build. It used to count, but then the Lab changed it because of their Corporate partners. Since then, we have explained over, and over, and over, and over, how it should work, and all the flaws with it. And over and over and over again, the Lab told us they were working on it. It was updated numerous times, each time telling us we'd be happy. The last update on it was in December, I think, with no major change to how it works. So, despite the fact we were telling them that it was pointless to have events if they don't boost our worlds, they refused to actually change the events system to work the way it should. Total incompetence.

[Aquadragon01]

Personally I'd of loved to try sansar but Iam glad they're focusing back to SL mabye they'll update their engine and improve it even more. I think the big problem with Sansar is the cost of pc VR headsets these days most can't afford it for example the HTC Vive Pro is £1,119.00 on Amazon.

[Betty Ai Tureaud]

A world based on VR headsets is doomed to die

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

a niche concept aimed solely at a niche IO peripheral was never going to work out. We'll still need screens and keyboard/mice for a while longer.

[Pull My Finger]

o vision.

We live in a world with a Hubble telescope and creatures born with unlimited imaginations. That world is also, for various reasons, making us small.

VR could be wings to let people explore inside and outside themselves. LL has become a company obsessed with building containers to put people in. They are so lost. Just look at their stated goals. Houses and names. Yea, people want that, like at sign-up. Two decades later... couldn't you at least get us to an imaginary moon?

Just think of the money that all of the users have spent over the years for god-like expertise. Now we have a company that is struggling with how to how to figure out name changes.

I'm sorry, this isn't a company that's made "mistakes". It's a crime scene.

[Patty]

I started a Sansar account soon after that was possible, created an outpost for my SL Estate, bought (bought!) a plywood cube and a picnic table. As one of the few visitors to my Sansar outpost later told me, figuring out how to stand on the picnic table was the most interesting thing she could find worth doing.

Time progressed, but what was possible in Sansar remained the same: practically nothing changed. Meanwhile, SL got laggier, windlight tanked, servers faced increasing difficulty in rezzing body parts and other objects, and LL appeared wholly indifferent to the Rest of Us.

Sansar's gone, but LL is now spending its time "moving to the cloud." I don't expect things to get any better soon but I do hope within a year we start to see some improvements. Time will tell.

[Erebus Beck]

Sansar was pretty with or without VR. However there was no point other than pretty. At first I thought I did not understand why I couldn't interact with anything then I realized it was not me. Never went back.

[Cathartes Aura]

"Anger" and "Feelings" have nothing to do with why some of us are commenting. It's simply calling out the LL Board of Directors for "their" obvious bad decisions since 2006. Reminding folks of the very long string of disasters "they" are personally responsible for.

It's all about accountability. Something the corporate world, and corporate boards, haven't had to face in a very long time.

Hearing from folks who aren't fans of the LL Board, and "their" terrible decision making skills, is good for "them". Smart folks would listen and learn. But the LL Board? Never.

Now I find that funny. Failing to learn from your f$ck-ups. That's f$cking hilarious to me. The more "they" dig in "their" heels and resist coming to terms with "their" many many f$ck-ups the worse the situation gets for SL and it's remaining users. One. Bad. Decision. After. Another.

Classic Crony Capitalism. ;)

[Mondy]

I made comments on Sansar about some personal frustrations a long time ago and some things got picked up on in this blog and made bigger than they were, even to the point of being talked about in the Discord server as though I was "anti-Sansar"
Some things about Sansar are really beautiful. People forget it's NOT all about VR, but the focus initially was much to heavy on using it with VR and gradually the experience changed to be a lot more desktop friendly. Partly why many people tried it, gave up and never came back. I bet many people who have seen Daisy's video have never visited many of the places in it. How many visited Bryn Oh's experience featured on NWN? That was absolutely incredible and even without VR truly immersive and a wonderful story. There are things Sansar got wrong definitely. Changing to Avatar 2.0 so most of the inventory clothing no longer worked? clusterf***! I still didn't get back a look and style I like since then but hey ho. But what I really, really dislike, even for all Sansars faults is the people that are truly happy to see it go if a buyer can't be found.This could be SL in the same situation in a few years! Probably there'll be people cheering for that to fail too.
At this moment in time RL problems are forcing me to take a break from both Second life and Sansar. Who knows if Sansar will still be here when I'm able to log back in, but I hope so.

[Medhue]

Nice sentiment Mondy!

Let me just say too, that I'm not against Sansar. I think it is an incredible engine they have made. Maybe I was a bit harsh on the managers earlier. The Lab really never gave Sansar a chance. They wanted numbers before it was even possible, and now that it is possible with the features we have, the Lab has decided to let it go. Like I said, they never gave Sansar a chance.

To those that think Sansar development hurt Second Life, IMHO that is BS. More features have come out for SL in the past few years, than the 8 years before Sansar. They SL team got more done, as there weren't so many people stopping progress. Plus, Second Life will benefit massively from what LL learned from Sansar. At least, I hope.

[Nodoka Hanamura]

I wrote about this on my blog after the news hit, and honestly I feel for those who enjoyed Sansar - but sadly I don't think that Managerial competence or anything LL could have done would have saved it.

https://nodo.kahanamura.com/2020/02/requiescat-in-pace-death-of-sansar-and.html

[Truthy]

Eggbert must be good at BS, and the LL board good at accepting BS.

This happens when it's all white guys in control.

Sorry if the truth burns.

[Yoofaloof]

I loved being in Sansar especially when jumping off very high buildings. The rush was amazing.

[AvaJean Westland]

LL: I've met someone else.
SL: What? Who?
LL: Sansar
SL: Are you serious? We've been together over 10 years!
LL: I know. But they're younger, newer, prettier and more exciting.
SL: I'm all those things...okay I'm not young, but you haven't been paying any attention or working at our relationship.
LL: I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope we can remain friends.
...time passes
LL: I was wrong. I'm giving Sansar the heave ho. I want you back. I want us to work on our relationship. I promise to give you all my undivided attention.
SL: ...That's mighty white of you.

[Dahlia Elton]

Put the $ in SL... You will show the SL members how much you care. Do you care?

[Ezra 2.0]

Never make anyone a priority when they only see you as an option.

[Pulsar]

At last Linden Lab did the right thing now. It was pretty clear since ages ago that Sansar wasn't going to work like that. The Lab insisted, rather than selling earlier, but that's understandable: they invested a lot on it and you can't depend only on an old and declining virtual world forever.
Insisting sometimes may work but... Acknowledging that the model was faulty and going back to the drawing board first? Thinking out of the SL box? Having any vision? Finding out any attractive novel feature at least? I mean not just a geeky feature to pull your clothes like your hair in frustration... Nope, more marketing and insisting head down to the failure.

At first they took too much time in reinventing the wheel. Nice engine, but the rest? Then they came out with an alpha release, that was lacking of even the most basic features, and yet they presented that as a sort of beta (ah, the marketing!). Learning the lessons from SL and guide the creators toward optimized content? Neither that... who wasn't on fiber optics but still had the recommended download speed (10 Mbps) faced experiences that took ages to be downloaded. Then we knew already it wasn't going to be SL2, Ebbe told that many times before the release, but it was also told that it was considered the possibility of porting something of your stuff there; basically that never happened, unless it's re-uploading your mesh and textures. Not even L$, account names,... nothing. Then SLers felt even neglected as the focus went on Sansar (although the crew left on SL still continued to introduce new features). And it was told it was different, SLers weren't the target, instead million and millions of new users were going to flock there and populate it in the wet dreams of the LL marketing-department. Even Sansar economy was set up for that. Which also means they went a tad off-target in getting those tens of millions of users to make Sansar sustainable.

Instead of producing anything really appealing, Sansar has been promoted in every possible way and eventually even radically re-targeted. Results? Sansar remained Sans-people. No matter the marketing.
There is a bunch of indie developers with far better ideas and even NeosVR looks more promising than Sansar.
I'm feeling more frustrated than else, because I'm pretty sure that a different management with the same amount resources (with all the income from SL) would have made something more usable, interesting, innovative and appealing. By wow we could have been talking about a cool and enjoyable AAA virtual world, but instead we got this. All hat and Sans-cattle.

And no, it's not just because of the VR hype here and VR didn't take off there (yet or not yet): VRChat is even more VR-cetric than Sansar and, you know, in VRChat there are a few thousands of people online right now. VRChat didn't become huge, but it's alive. Instead Sansar concurrency heartbeat-line remained flat. It was a dead horse.
Yup. It's dead, Ebbe.

[Tammy Faye]

Many companies have turned their focus away from their main source of revenue for even longer than five years. It happens. Good customers know that they can't always be valued. I think some people are acting like shameful, spoiled children. How are you ever going to get new customers of you don't dump on the old ones? That's like Business 101. Sometimes it fails and you lose all your money. It's important to remember that some people had a lot of fun doing it.

What we really need to do now is put the past in a big capsule, cram as much resentment as we can into it, and swallow it. We should do a Flickr photo challenge with a Sansar Apologist theme to show solidarity. I think I'm going to cry in mine.

[Fionalein]

LL cannot rely on SL alone, it had to look for a way into the future. Ebbe had a vision and they went for it. So far I see nothing wrong with that. The problems LL had were:

- the vision was quite blurry
- they apparently* invested way too much capital into the gamble
- they took too long to admit defeat adn cut the livelines
- they completely forgot to do an analysis of consumer demands (... once again, seems to be part of the corporate policy *sigh*)

* educated guess based on their desperate runs for SL money in the last year - we will never know what really happened for sure though

[alex]

I don't want to blame LL for there decisions, good or bad, we always learn from them, but everyone knew this was going to happen. In MP there is a lot of old garbage that nobody wants, but there are also incredible new products and thousands of products that even over the years are still fantastic. The MP of SL has been developing for years, increasing day by day to meet everyone's needs. What time would take for Sansar to match the MP of SL? I am very happy that LL is focusing more on SL now, if something has worked, keep pushing to keep it going, the Wright brothers didn't abandon their project, they kept pushing it until they got their dream. So if this lesson has been learned by LL I am sure that very good things are coming for SL and that makes me happy.

[Set fire to the Rain]

when it comes to holding linden lab accountable many are a bunch of frightened chickens!

Did Ebbe say to the community?
'I as the leader of linden lab who has made some very costly business decisions in recent years want to apologize to the residents of secondlife for the last few years of neglect in modernizing the software & further developing the community, please rest assured for now on secondlife will be our ONLY priority'

No he makes a video without talking directly to the community.

Did an apology show up on everyone's viewer under grid status at login?

Is there an apology on the login screens?

Emailed to current & past residents a letter of reassurance?

No he just made sure the cheerleaders who can go in game and try to socially defend the lab he made them feel better so they can help keep 'common residents' inline.

Sansar will never be sold and will just become a test bed and template for a future product to replace secondlife..give it 4 to 5 years it will rear its ugly head again under a new name with real time in game editing while being mobile phone friendly.
It will go back in development lowkey the way it was before Ebbe became CEO until the day comes.

I think the real way to deal with linden lab is to vote with the wallet/purse while helping places like VRChat,Sinespace & Others who have spent years upgrading and doing everything they can to give residents everything they want ..those places should get some extra reconsideration!

So Ebbe admits to his subordinate things did not work out, we could not replace SL right now.

Some people do not mind being taken for granted or valued its easy to see that in the comment sections here and on the official.

[Pulsar]

Many company went bankrupt by following the wrong strategy. That's money loss and people losing their jobs, not a fun exercise, unlike what some people with a childish mentality want to believe. If a company has to dump something, usually you cut the branches that no longer gives enough fruits, not your best tree.
Only who has no clues would think it's good businesses practice to just dump your current paying costumers and solid revenue source, your best working product to blindly jump into a bet.
At most you do that when you quit a company to start a new one, but that's a different story.

Linden Lab dumped no working product (Second Life). What's is be "dumped" here - actually being sold - is the branch that gave no fruits. Many were noticing very little was coming out of it... sure, the marketing team always tries to sell it anyway, but that's the marketing, you don't have to go full delusional to brag to be their good costumer. Some stuff simply doesn't work.
Earlier you realize it, the better. Selling it is the right thing to do, in order to not lose further money and getting something back. It's even possible (but I won't bet it) that Sansar, under a different company with a clear plan and finally reworked, other than rebranded, could find a niche.

[Pulsar]

Also we have 2 different cases.

#1. Even when your businesses has especially to deal with product obsolescence, and you need to offer a new version of your software or a brand new new car, you look for costumer loyalty, not to dump them. Sure, you can't convince anyone and someone would stick to the old stuff - either for too much attachment, fear of the change or... it's your new product that's really unappealing - until the old one becomes unsustainable for you to maintain and support it.
However it isn't that you say "ok, now we are releasing version 2, let's dump our costumers!" (not even Ebbe did that). Also that's not this case. Maybe LL has failed at communicating as well, but this isn't SL2 going to replace SL1: Sansar wasn't marketed as SL2 (you can argue that someone at LL, deep down, hoped for that, but another story).

#2. The current case. When a company shift focus like this, there is a new target user in mind. You aren't just moving from v1.0 to v2.0, you are now offering the product A and the product B. The purposes are, for example:

A) to differentiate, so you don't have all your eggs in one basket, if a business collapses;
B) to expand your business;
C) to adapt to the new market trends, so you won't end up like a dinosaur.

You are always taking a risk. Ebbe Altberg himself was worried that Sansar could fail, bringing down Second Life with it, i.e. a consistent part of the costumers migrating to Sansar, destroying the SL economy, then Sansar doesn't work and the company ends up with nothing at all.

The point is: if your product B now turns out to be not meant at all for your costumers A - not even in the minor things hypothesized during the development - then what it is your target user now? What is B for, for whom?

The vision was indeed blurry, as Fionalein said. Sansar grasped at here and there, refocused multiple times, a ton of promotions, but target users never materialized. And before I read the excuse "but VR didn't become big", VRChat, in the same market segment found their target users.

[Colpo Wexler]

I simply do not think that SL Users have understood why Alberg is at all costs reassured by the use of more resources and more money on SL. This happens because they misunderstood what Altberg meant when he announced that linden lab would no longer financially take care of Sansar. Sansar is not going to die Sansar is going to go into much bigger hands than those of LL ...

[Tammy Faye]

I've been editing tears in Photoshop all night, so forgive me if I'm a little blurry. It looks really hot. I hope I get lots of likes.

I really sympathize with this argument that LL needed to reach out to new horizons. In some ways, Sansar was doing what me and Jim were doing when we air conditioned our dog's house. We were spreading the love around.

Did we forget about the people who invested everything into our Heritage Park?
Maybe, a little. Did we give our best to those people in wheel chairs that we endlessly used to promote our project? Did we give our best to those families who paid a fortune and a half to keep the amusement park running for the future? Did we leave them solidly in tomorrow or did we leave them floundering in the stone age when we decided to climate control Muffin's pooch condo? I'm not sure we should ask these questions.

Now, we should just focus on an austere future and use as much whitewash as we can afford to spruce up these rickety old roller coaster tracks. It's all in Gods hands now. We've learned. It was meant to be.

[Cathartes Aura]

@Tammy Faye. Great post! Praise The Flying Spaghetti Monster and Cthulhu! Save Us Spaghetti Monster! Save us Cthulhu! Save Us All from the LL Board of Directors!

A prayer aimed at the Flying Spaghetti Monster and/or Cthulhu... "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest the LL Board of Directors armpits". May "their" junk become limp and useless... Praise the Spaghetti Monster! Praise Cthulhu! In his/hers/NBs name. Amen! ;)

[madeline blackbart]

Everyone blames VR headsets but it's really not that. Sansar was released far before it was ready and up until maybe late last year was an aweful experience for both desktop AND vr. I personally love VR. Games like VRchat are a lot of fun. But sansar was like going to a museum for a long time. You can look but you can't touch. There was just nothing to do, no interactivity and not much of a community especially if your someone who goes on at odd hours (I work at night RL so odd hours). There are VR games that have made millions now so it's not like making a VR game is NEVER financially viable. It is genuinely that they released a game with little to no interactivity or exciting features for the first year or more of it's life span. SURPRISE no one wants to participate in something you can't do anything with.