What Went Wrong With Sansar: Victim of VR Hype & Failure to Learn from Second Life's Mistakes

Pictured: Sansar featured in 2016 at a Wall Street Journal event on virtual reality

Linden Lab has probably spent about $50-60 million to develop and launch Sansar. We know this is likely because back in 2016, the company had likely already spent an estimated $20 million on Sansar over 2.5 years in payroll alone. Add four more years of payroll, not to mention marketing and operating expenses, and that range is a reasonably educated guess (if it's not even larger). I've been thinking about this ever since Linden Lab announced last week that Sansar would no be a company-sponsored project.

How was so much spent for so little return? There's a number of factors, but I believe it ultimately came down to two interlocking mistakes:

• A flawed assumption, fueled by Goldman Sachs and other respected entities, that virtual reality was on the fast track to becoming massive.
• A corporate culture that was unable or unwilling to learn from Second Life's early mistakes.

I do not think it's fair to lay the blame square on the company's CEO, Ebbe Altberg. Linden Lab insiders, even those who have left the company, fairly consistently praise Ebbe as an inspiring leader. Meeting in person him last year, I was impressed by his passion for virtual worlds. But even the best leaders must work with the limited options that are handed to them. In this particular case, it's likely that Sansar was already in development under the leadership of the advisory board and Ebbe's predecessor, Rod Humble. (Who was in turn working with limited options laid down by the board and previous CEOs.)

That said, to go into more detail:

My concerns for Sansar started early, when it was positioned as a VR-centric project. As I told Wired in 2016:

"Both Sansar and High Fidelity are operating under a very shaky premise," says Wagner James Au, author of The Making of Second Life. "They're gambling their whole companies' futures on the premise that there's going to be a large market consisting of tens of millions of VR owners.

My concern was heightened when Ebbe and other Linden Lab executives would cite Goldman Sachs' 2016 forecast that VR has a big and bright future. I'm not sure if they actually read it in detail, but I did, and it was rife with questionable assumptions. 

Making Sansar VR-centric sealed its fate: With that course set, it would have to be optimized for VR rigs and high-end PCs, but not for Macs and certainly not for iOS and Android. Linden Lab shifted course in 2018 to emphasize Sansar as a PC app, but that only created a new set of problems. 

Which takes me to my next point:

Another reason for early concern was when Ebbe announced in 2016 that Second Life "was the most successful virtual world ever made". This has never been the case, and the bold statement hinted at an internal corporate culture at Linden Lab that only saw Second Life's continued -- if relatively small -- profitability. But not its failure to capitalize on so much early potential.  How could something with so much media attention from about 2005-2010 attract 20 million-plus sign-ups, but still fail to grow its userbase? Everything about the launch of Sansar suggested little attempt to address that question.

So I will: Roughly summarized, Second Life missed its chance at mass market success by having heavy hardware requirements, a complicated user interface, and a confusing user experience that was not designed as a game even though the vast majority of its potential userbase wanted to play it as a game.

But Linden Lab is an old company by high tech standards, and by the time Ebbe took over, Second Life was widely regarded by new management as "a red-headed stepchild internally".

And so, when it came time to launch Sansar, it came with... heavy hardware requirements, a complicated user interface, and a confusing user experience that was not designed as a game even though the vast majority of its potential userbase wanted to play it as a game.

This isn't the end of Sansar, however; it's architected with some pretty cool features, and it may see a second life (see what I did there?) as a product on Stadia or another streaming service, or perhaps as a kind of neo-Playstation Home for next gen consoles. My only hope, now that Ebbe and Linden Lab are once again focusing on Second Life, is that the company finally learns from the mistakes that have already cost it a whole world of opportunity.

Comments

[Iggy 1.0]

Headline says it all.

Hype induces blindness. Funny how SL now runs fine for me on ordinary hardware and dodgy connections.

Maybe LL should just love that red-headed stepchild and adopt it fully. I'd be fine with incremental improvements and modest marketing to bring in a small cohort of new players who might stick around.

[Alicia]

First of all, people need to understand that Linden Lab, back then, didn't... and still, to this day... don't understand how to optimize anything. Why? Because Linden Lab was never a true, game developing company.

Why people lag on Second Life so much? Every ounce of cosmetic updates to an engine that was never designed to handle it all. Textures are one thing, but when you factor in every vertice, polygon, lighting, scripts, etc., you'll have problems as the servers, regardless of where or what type they are, will not save Second Life, especially as newer, more powerful-ready game engines make things much easier to handle, optimize, and the limitless potential they bring as they are regularly updated. There are reasons why the older games that were out before WoW never updated their graphics, and that was due to the engines not being able to handle it. Why do you think EverQuest never had its graphics updated? The people that developed it knew. Blizzard updated WoW's graphics and engine because they knew how to optimize things. Plus, they had been developing games since the early 90's. SquareEnix had heavy hardware requirements for FFXI, but when they re-released FFXIV-ARR, they listened and did everything right. Now, you have an entirely optimized game.

Yes, Second Life had things put in over the years to greatly help it cosmetically, but performance wise... it hindered it severely. Hence, the lag... the heavy hardware requirements... and the clear allowance of third party viewers that had more features than the official viewer. With Sansar, the same exact issues, but with a more modern engine, and its own severe problems. Even if Second Life were moved entirely onto the Cloud, it still would not fix the problems. All Linden Lab would be doing is placing a band-aid onto a problem that may not be able to be fixed by merely switching servers... and, that may lead to some very real problems financially. I think everyone knows which other problems I'm referring to. Unfortunately, don't count on Linden Lab learning from their mistakes.

[Mondy]

If you think WoW doesn't have lag then all the people on reddit and the WoW forums complaining about it and the videos on youtube must all be wrong.
Lag exists in all online games, perhaps for different reasons but always for bandwidth and latency issues at the very least.
Plus hardware performance issues regardless of how well any game engine is optimized.
Client side versus server side, there will always be lag, even on console games.
Can't really see Sansar being bought by one of the next gen console companies, they surely have their own VR projects and maybe it's a route for people to still get into VR without spending a fortune on separate kit as a console bundle. PS5 + Sony VR anyone?

[seph]

I know they're easy to forget since they were so brief, but Linden Lab also created Blocksworld, Creatorverse, Patterns and some other low hardware requirement, easy user experience actual games that were on large platforms ranging from iPad to Steam.

Linden Lab has tried everything EXCEPT repeat "mistakes" made with Second Life. Since Second Life is the only successful product they've ever had, why not try doubling down on those "mistakes"?

[TD Gunner]

I cannot remember who it was in SL that said this to me (I think it was a now banned member) but LL basically got lucky. Sure it took work; after all they did build it. However, anyone who has ever taken a basic business class knows you have to listen to the customer. In 6 Sigma it is the voice of the customer that is most important to offering a quality product.

Linden Labs has never seemed to be too concerned about their customers. In the Ebbie era, I would say that they don't give one damn about their customers. Why is that guy still there? Name another business that eats $60 million in sunk costs and the boss keeps his job!

[Lina Pussycat]

It wasn't a failure to learn from second life's mistakes but rather learning what makes second dlige work vs a lot of other social platforms like it that have come and gone. They put nothing in to attract people that would use second life and put to heavy an initial focus on vr instead of the overall experience. Sansar failed because it didn't take people and how we use these platforms into consideration.

[Ezra 2.0]

I think alot of resentment was his withdrawal from the community a few years back after being unable to accept criticism so he started just having other lindens be a middle man. its very obouse he used to be willing to have discussions with many about SL, then he started acting like the prior CEO by living in an ivory tower.

I think Ebbe needs to sit down with you for an interview so things can get sorted out for the record so residents can be informed.

refocus on SL again should be about rebuilding trust with residents including really listing to us and we need a real road map to see SL has future.

I know no one wants to be disgraced over a job so he should gracefully enlighten us residents instead of a video on another platform while allowing damaging rumors to run wild.

Why does linden lab need to talk & break news to select residents on another platform? it seems they are so out of touch with us (again)
why don't they have SecondlifeNews.com as a separate media site outside the forum to reach a broader internet audience while having direct links in viewers to for important updates for residents & subscribers.
(Maybe a collaboration with WIX,Vimeo & Flickr on a custom social site)

[Clem]

I'm sure lots of people are "inspired" to be driven off a cliff. Just look at the USA.

[Pulsar]

That's all true. There is a whole list of factors that contributed to the flop. Among the worst ones there was indeed not thinking out of the SL box, being anchored to that mindset, so not learning from its mistakes. Which has led to design and development flaws. Let's not forget the elephant in the room: while the VR hype has misled the new virtual worlds in the wrong direction, an "outsider" like VRChat was still able to gather a somewhat decent user-base; anything created by who was supposed to have experience from developing Second Life went nowhere at all, despite all the cash resources and marketing effort. There were good reasons to make a new VW for LL, but it was ill-fated, even if the coders were skilled and the CEO did his job as CEO.
I, too, I think that under a different company with a different mindset, perhaps Sansar could find a different use after being reworked.

[Lina Pussycat]

Pulsar I honestly think they needed to think in the SL box more than they did. The fact they didn't have almost anything that makes SL work presents all sorts of issues. The fundamental concept should of really been an SL 2.0 with better optimizations and a good VR mode and better sin setups. They went down a route that many tries to before even without the VR aspect and just continued down it.

The biggest problems honestly stem from an overall lackluster experience even versus second life. The freedom was largely just gone and it felt bland and largely boring because of how everything was. To put it bluntly it was too sterile to be good.

[NoGalileoDontHugMe]

Sansar was a Leftist SJW staff driven platform where the community manager galileo and other staff ruled Sansar with an iron fist.
Noone could breathe or say anything, because they were always watching and banning anyone who declared a countering opinion.
staff playing inworld stealing users from the community and in direct competition, while befriending certain individuals and using their LL powers to participate in drama and slandering others on the platform
staff taking over community meetings, campfires, putting portals down in their customers worlds and stealing them - all conflict of interest stuff.
Meanwhile Ebbe did nothing and stood on the sidelines
Ebbe may be appear to be nice but sansar failed because he couldnt keep his unprofessional staff in check

[Trilo Byte]

Your post makes some excellent points. VR always has been and continues to be a developer trap. It's a great success in a few niche markets (education and corporate training), but will never be a mass market success.

The future of computing, and social and casual gaming... is accessibility. People want to use Facebook and Instagram and play casual games on any device (gamer PC, laptop, Playstation, tablet, phone) anywhere they happen to be (computer desk, couch, coffee house, park bench, bus stop, etc). Focusing on VR was truly a bad decision, but the real critical failure was to ignore mobile (where the majority of social networking and the majority of casual gaming take place) and limit the accessibility to a single platform. People don't care whether their FB/Instagram friends use PC, Mac, tablets, or phones. A virtual world is a cross between social network and casual game, and any future generation world needs to be as accessible as possible if it hopes to be successful.

[sirhc desantis]

I expected better. And with respect to Medhue, we did this all in SL a decade back ... 13 years back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUxlKazwofc

Mobile is the drag of the opiated but hell i like it higher

ffs they do the macarena in that

[lancaster]

What is missing here is the soon-to-be-fact that nobody is going to ¨buy¨Sansar.

I mean, are there going to be any more idiots out that are not already on the LL Board and payroll?

[Cindy Bolero]

After 10 years doing many things with Secondlife, I got into Unity3D and never looked back. I totally bypassed Sansar and tried out various Unity MMO SDKs such as Jibe, VRchat, and others. I don't need no VR, but what I do need is a platform that cannot suffer the derailment of shutdown or obscolesence. That's Unity. I've easily ported my Unity-based scenes from one Unity-based virtual world to another. I settled in SineSpace in 2016, where I enjoy its features and possibilities, and I saved myself any grief I would have had with Sansar then or now.

[Stephanie Harrison]

Second Life as a whole is a social platform. I've been in second life for 12 years, and, still continue to come back. Even with small breaks, it keeps me coming back because I enjoy the social aspect of it. Rod Humble and the board (especially the board) failed (and continue to fail) to see second life as a social platform. Thus they don't advertise it as such. It's not just a place where users can create, but, it's a platform where users can be themselves and be sociable. I have seen second life have some bad days and I've seen it have good days. And, there's no real easy way to make the second life platform as a whole optimized to what users expect because everyone's experience is going to be different. However, people need to stop seeing second life as a game and understand that it's not a game, but more of an extension to your real life. It's a social platform and always has been. A place for creators and dreamers alike as well. For me second life helped me be myself. It helped me learn who I was, and, it helped me learn about others as well. And, still to this day helps me learn that. To me that is not something that is considered a game. There's nothing game like about second life. Now, when it comes to sansar I think Linden Lab had hoped it would be an extension to the idea of it being a social platform. I see this is as a trial and error type situation. And, we can't learn and be humans without trial and error. I applaud the team at linden lab for their continued hard work on doing what they can to make second life as enjoyable of an experience as they can. Linden Lab has gone through worse, and, they will bounce back from this as they have from other issues. I mean come on second life has been around a really long time. I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. And, I have faith that linden lab will try their best to make it more enjoyable for users. But, I will never expect perfection because nothing in this world is perfect. The world is not black and white as they say. But, we can as humans continue to try, try, and try again until something at least decent comes out of the situation. But, nothing will ever be perfect.

[Patty]

Stephanie Harrison is absolutely correct. People continue to log into to Second Life day after day and year after year because Second Life is a social platform. The Lindens have never understood that.

[Simple Lemon]

I keep posting the same thing over and over. Second Life has had forty-million people try it, and that registration data remains in Liden Research databases. SL is the money maker for Linden Research. After I have spent nearly 40 years in the upper executive branches of the software industry I cannot think of a single software company that would not rebuild, rewrite, re-engineer, their money maker and go after those forty-million ex-customers, all the while having some portal, some interface to their existing customers so they make the existing customers happy. It's just unheard of in successful tech companies. Can you imagine Zuckerberg launching a competitor to Facebook or any number of brand name tech companies not making their moneymaker product better but spending their capital creating a competitor? No matter what image you have of Linden Research the bottom line truth is the executives and the board of LR has proven themselves to be elitist snobs who think they know better, and in the end, they are proven to not be very good business people or decison makers.

[Ima Chump]

I took $50-60 million dollars and set it on fire, thus compromising the source of all that income. One of my greatest strengths is not encumbering myself with clearly defined goals. I'd say my management style is basically, jumping off a cliff and searching for rock bottom.

I think too many customers tend to hold a company back. I've found cheering squads to be more effective.

Yea, really. $50-60 million. It was like Australia. Total rush.

[Lagomorph7]

VR is limited to people who are comfortable with completely cutting themselves off from what is happening in the physical world around them. There aren't that many people willing, or able, to do this. This is why a person, like me, is comfortable with SL but not with a VR game. I can use SL while sitting on the couch while my spouse and child watch hockey on the television. Everyone is happy. Put me in VR goggles and nobody is.

[JoeJoe Suppenkraut]

Stephanie Harrison hit it right on. Those are my feelings exactly, too.

[JackVerrissimo]

The Sansar grift continues. The staff is made up of friends and allies rather than competent people, and the top positions go to those who can suck up the hardest to whoever is in charge. In this case, it's some schmuck named Chance, who is seemingly or purposely blind to the burning of money his staff is going through in the last 2 years and without any movement forward.
A recent partnership with LG got them some cash or a quick nod, but the Sansar Guest system they set up on trysansar.com functions more as a stalking and spying tool for staff and users alike to surveille conversations and monitor and record behavior. Whatever users left on the platform have taken to blocking these accounts just to protect themselves, and I don't blame them. Sansar doesn't want anyone talking ill of them, or being critical as they continue to grift corporations into giving them development money while the entire time they could not care less about the user or creator experience, and have vocally stated that they don't want any users because they cant afford to host them. Promises of features and usefulness get made month on month, but with a 1 to 2 year timeline of development but we all know they don't have access to the source code or the expertise to truly make Sansar run correctly or to even support their own goals - which change week to week.
Bad place to invest time as a creator you will lose all your work, users can't be themselves due to heavy moderation and monitoring and a culture of snitching and crying and moaning, and investors are fools to give these people any money when they self-report that they are just 'poking around' in the code.
Now they are further corrupted by accepting payments from users and featuring their friends on the front page of the store (but who's buying?), and again favoritism rears its ugly head. You stroke my back, I stroke yours.
What a super failed platform. I think the user base is like 5 now, who are just the only ones left that are friends of the 10 staff, all who fill up their own community meetings with staff and their alts