New World Notes

Sansar's Steam Reviews Decidedly "Mixed" One Month After Publication

Since Sansar hit Steam almost exactly a month ago, we now have a better picture of how it's perceived by Steam's established userbase of core gamers. Based on most recent reviews, their reaction is distinctly Mixed. Here's a sample of reviews from people who are not evidently from Sansar's early beta, pre-Steam period, but discovering the platform for the first time:

It certainly has potential. The engine is absolutely gorgeous, and runs decently. Some of the worlds blew me away with how nice they looked. But I cannot enjoy them. Sansar has horrible controls in VR. It is very uncomfortable to use. The feeling of embodiment that I can get in other social VR platforms does not happen here...

Weird game with nothing to do. The executable itself acts suspicious and never shuts down.

Sansar could still use some work, but has a lot of potential. The game looks amazing, and the people I've met are friendly and helpful. I attended a live comedy event this past week and it was hilarious when one of the comics started wandering out into the crowd to interact with people.

I'll try it again once it's more optimized because it seems as if it has potential. I couldn't really read the descriptions of the "worlds" as the font is too small and burry in VR and they're a set distance away so you can't move forward to look closer which was a bad start. Also it annoyingly pushed me out of VR for passwords then T&C updates. I think the recommended spec of a 970 GTX doesn't cut it, it needs something way more powerful to run it properly.

Much more here. Overall, there's a stark difference between users who got into Sansar during its closed beta period (and by definition, are more dedicated to the ultimate vision for Sansar imparted by Linden Lab), and those coming across it now -- perhaps after trying other social VR experiences on Steam. By contrast, current social VR leader VRChat has very positive reviews on Steam, as does runner-up RecRoom.

Is there another social VR platform on Steam that is getting Mixed reviews more similar to Sansar? Yes:

Linden Lab Should Sell Off Second Life to Focus on Sansar, Return to Being More Like a Lab (Comment of the Week)

This is probably more of a thought experiment than something that can actually happen, but reader Irihapeti's intriguing prediction for 2019 is this -- Linden Lab sells off Second Life to laser focus on Sansar:

As Fortnite is showing, and Minecraft before it, something is eating Second Life for lunch. And it isn't Sansar. What's eating Second Life is that Linden Lab is getting eaten for lunch and dinner by other companies. Family-oriented, all-ages-targeting companies. Second Life for better or worse is now a product for adults. It can never be a family-oriented product. The family-oriented part was all over when the Teen Grid was abandoned. Linden Lab needs to split. Spin Second Life into a separate company. When they do this then Linden Lab can get back to being a lab -- like a research lab -- using Sansar to push the technological boundaries. Which is what the Lab has always been good at - innovating and pushing technology to its limits and beyond, and nevermind its users.

It's definitely the case that Linden was once an actual lab, even creating VR hardware way back in the day. The idea of selling Second Life is worth thinking about. With relatively reliable revenue of about $60-70 million a year (by my rough estimate), the company could probably find a buyer at, say, $250 million.

Irihapeti thinks this is a good idea because the current executives have lost sight of the Second Life userbase, and lost focus as a company:

Watch: Sansar As Experienced By a YouTube Gamer

Sansar's publication to Steam hasn't grown the userbase much so far, but it is starting to bring in some curious visitors outside the metaverse/core Second Life/VR market. Here's a "Let's Play" video from gaming YouTuber Yorkie, whose usual focus is more on games like Sims 4 and Red Dead Redemption, rather than open platform virtual worlds. But if Sansar does attract users, they'll likely come more from the consumer gamer side of the market that he and his followers are in. So it's notable that Yorkie seems most impressed by Sansar's dynamically adjustable clothing ("I've near seen this in a game before!"). His mid-sized fanbase of gamers also seem impressed:

Will Steam's Hardcore Gamers Try Playing Sansar Now That It's in the Store?

Steam is by far the largest game platform for hardcore gamers on PC, Mac, and VR -- which is why many competitors have launched would-be Steam Killers in recent months  -- and so it's notable that Linden Lab just published its social VR platform to Steam. The way the Lindens categorize Sansar ("Genre: Casual, Free to Play, Massively Multiplayer) and describe it to this gamer audience is interesting:

Welcome to Sansar - the best place to hang out with friends, play games, and stay connected with your favorite communities! Host and attend virtual events: concerts, watch parties, meet-and-greets, and more. Create and share virtual spaces with your friends, and explore the thousands of experiences our users have already created. Cheer for your favorite players and teams WHILE playing any number of fun virtual mini-games: cornhole, shuffleboard, pong, bowling, and more. Shop for new items and sell what you create on the Sansar Store.

No mention, for instance, of Sansar's branded experiences for education, NASA, Ready Player One, or even its hardcore gamer e-sports partnerships. Compare the description with its likeliest competitors on Steam. Here's how Rec Room describes itself:

How Many Second Life Communities Will Follow Pfaffenthal 1867 to Sansar?

Linden Lab has created Sansar partnerships with a Hollywood movie, e-sports groups, and YouTube/Twitch personalities (including the just-announced comedian Steve Hofstetter), but little has been reported about any outreach with the many communities and brands in Linden Lab's Second Life. One possible exception is Pfaffenthal 1867, a sub-community built around roleplay in a detailed recreation of a Luxembourg City district from the 19th century. But last week, Pfaffenthal 1867's leader, Hauptmann Weydert, announced the roleplay sims would be closed, so the project could move to Sansar:

The moment has finally arrived, for the 1867 project to move on to SANSAR, were land is free, where we can have better graphics,VR headsets and real physical interactivity. Note that Sansar works very well on a normal PC [Editor: Some would argue otherwise] for desktop mode you do NOT need a gamer PC. IMPORTANT! All the 1867 sims in second life will be shut down next Monday, on the 26th of November. Please pack all your stuff by then.

The sudden move is surprising, so I asked Hauptmann Weydert donations were running short to cover tier.

"No," he told me via SL IM, "it was arranged that the museum paid until that date and after this we were to move to Sansar."

The passive voice of his answer was a bit ambiguous, so I asked him if (as many have speculated) that Linden Lab was helping the community make this move. No answer at press time, but I'll update this post if I get a reply. Until then, and until Pfaffenthal emerges in Sansar, here's a lovely tribute by Pepe Cometa to what the community created in Second Life:

As We Wait Forever for Election Day Results to Arrive, Let's Watch a Sansar Experience Take Forever to Load on a High-End PC

If you're tired of refreshing Twitter or your favorite news site homepage, waiting impatiently for midterm election results, why not instead watch this Sansar experience attempt to load on a high-end computer with very decent broadband:

While some Sansar experiences are larger than entire AAA videogames, most experiences (a platform developer tells me), are about 5-8 gigs. However, watch what happens when Alexandria Brangwin attempts to load one that's relatively small:

Social VR Halloween: Explore a Creepy AF Hotel in Sansar

If you're looking for a scary social VR experience today, the aptly named Scary Game Squad Hub by Sergio Delacruz is open for visits in Sansar, evoking the creepy hotels of The Shining and other classics. Intrepid virtual world explorer Eve Kazan made a recent visit, somehow survived, and came back with some suitably creepy images featured here. (Also, unlike other Sansar experiences, it's a relatively small download -- Eve estimates 5 minutes or so.)

As to the experience itself -- possible spoilers and definite video from Eve below:

Sansar to Close Sandex, Move Platform to Steam in Search of VR Users

Well this is quite a virtual shoe to drop -- the end of Sansar's virtual currency to US$ exchange (called the Sandex), and a transition to  publishing the social VR platform on Steam:

The cornerstone of our growth effort will be to put Sansar on Steam. Steam is where more than half of the VR market goes to find software. It also is a huge pool of users who are interested in our space and are likely to have the hardware required to run Sansar. We anticipate being able to get onto Steam by the end of this year... n order to do this, we are obligated to make significant changes to how Sansar works, especially in how the Sansar Dollar and process credit system work. These changes, will also make the credit process for Creators far more consistent and predictable. The first change is that we will be discontinuing the Sandex as of December 4, 2018.

Sometimes I feel like Linden Lab's strategy is to do the direct opposite of what New World Notes just reported, because as I posted yesterday, Oculus and Vive usage appears to be flat or declining on Steam. And also, early this year: That only twelve of all the thousands of compatible games have attracted meaningful sales on Steam. And that when it comes to social VR on Steam, only VRChat has a (relatively) large user base, with the rest struggling with concurrencies in the two to three figures. But all that to one side, you can't blame Linden Lab for making what seems to be a hail Mary pass in the face of low user numbers.

Then again -- and this was years before Ebbe Altberg became CEO, and I'm not sure any executive from 2012 is still there, to tell him -- Linden Lab unsuccessfully attempted a similar strategy with Second Life: 

Sansar Creators & Linden Lab Still Working to Optimize the Platform's Heavy Experiences (Comment of the Week)

Pictures of Sansar's Harvest 114 from Linden Lab's official Flickr account

Lots of interesting conversation about the heavy download times required by Linden Lab's Sansar, most notably Harvest 114, a kind of suburban neighborhood experience which is often promoted by the company and is somehow 24 gigabytes (i.e. much larger than the entire world of Skyrim). "BlueBell", one of Harvest 114's developers, recently posted a defense of the experience, writing:

When we started in Sansar we had no clue to what was acceptable or what would work. That was not lack of knowledge on the side of the creators, there was just no documentation. It did not come with a full manual, we had to test what the limits were. We did not know how objects were decimate or optimized by the engine, we had no info on things like Level of Detail. Not even a recommended texture size. We all had to learn the hard way, trail and error.

I am on a notebook, 2 years old, 18GB ram. My specs do not even meet the requirements for a VR set. I do meet the specs that Linden Lab advises. I can get in [Harvest 114] fine, I can get into edit mode and work on very, very heavy scenes... Harvest is not the fastest loading scene, I am aware. But there are experiences that are on the same level.

May I remind you Harvest is made by creators that are Sansar residents. Not by some game design studio, like many other heavy experiences, but by people that may know Sansar better then any design studio ever could. Why? because they work closely as a group, closely with Linden Lab support, and they are working on it every single day. Working to make it faster, better and populated. If you ask me, that is succeeding. It is the most alive experience on the Atlas...

BlueBell claims Harvest 114 is the most popular experience on Sansar, and says they are working to optimize it:

Sons of Second Life Status: Sansar Attracting More Website Visits, High Fidelity Attracting More Monthly Social VR Users

Interesting dynamic going on with Linden Lab's Sansar in contrast with High Fidelity, founded by Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale: According to SimilarWeb, Sansar's website is drawing roughly twice as much traffic (285K monthly visits, versus High Fidelity's 148K).  This is notable, because High Fidelity seems to be seeing more actual usage, at least during its monthly stress tests, which attract hundreds of concurrent user over a period of several hours. However, Sansar has announced more high profile partnerships with major eSports brands, the Smithsonian, and so on, which will tend to drive interest via web traffic. However, due to large download requirements and other reasons, few people who hit the Sansar website actually log in: