New World Notes

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:

Sansar User Growth Slowed by Massive Experience Downloads Up to TWENTY-FOUR Gigabytes (Comment of the Week)

A virtual hangout as huge as Skyrim?

"I can give you another reason why Sansar interest is starting to tail off, from my own perspective," writes reader Mondy, commenting on the social VR world's slow user growth:

6 months ago I was pretty much enjoying being able to log in and enjoy pretty much the whole of Sansar in desktop mode, I don't have a VR setup. I could join in with the activities, engage with people on voice or via text. They even set it up so that people in VR could view text chat while using VR. At one time they couldn't even do that, so unless you used voice things were pretty much one sided. Several updates later, despite the minimum requirements not changing a lot of experiences can no longer be reached, places like Draxtor's 114 Harvest experience which so many activities seem to revolve around take up to 24 gigabytes to download.

To put that 24 gigs in context, the file size for the classic game Skyrim -- the entire virtual world and everything in it -- is less than 15 gigs. I confirmed this with a Sansar developer, who also noted that 24 gigs is on the high side, because most Sansar experiences are relatively smaller... 5-8 gigabytes. Which is also still quite massive: Even people with extremely high-end broadband would need 15-30 minutes to download 5-8 gigs, an aeon for a casual social VR experience.

Mondy says some in Sansar's user community have been pretty dismissive of these technical hurdles when they're raised:

Sansar & High Fidelity Not Growing Users Because They Miss the Point of Social Virtual Worlds, Says Expert -- But He May Miss the Point Too

Despite multiple partnerships with major eSports brands and an official tie-in experience for Spielberg's Ready Player One, Sansar's actual usage by actual users hasn't significantly grown. Will Burns, Vice-Chair for IEEE's Virtual Worlds Standard Group, believes the reason for that is obvious, and spells out why in a rather passionate rant:

This isn't a mystery at all.

Sansar misses the point of social virtual worlds, and flies in the face of open world persistent spaces like Second Life in favor of localized spaces that focus on form over function. The overarching mechanic of this approach has been done to death and constantly flopped:

BlueMars
Worlds Inc
Cybertown
and many others

There is an underlying set of "givens" when dealing with this stuff, mostly derived from even the moderate and persistent successes of predecessors. Historically speaking there is plenty of precedent for this stagnation, but nobody wants to acknowledge it; instead plowing ahead and constantly trying to dictate to the market what it wants so long as it's whatever it is these projects are offering while wholesale ignoring both history and precedent in the industry for what actually worked. Ultimately, it is entirely a tone deaf approach to virtual worlds on the whole.

He also addresses a recent conversation I had with him, in which I played devil's advocate and asked, "Where's the evidence there's actual market demand for a metaverse?" Will's take:

Linden Lab Starting to Advertise Sansar to Casual Social Gamers

A Second Life user named Lisseh Resident was recently browsing a casual social game site called Game Point when she came across a familiar image -- an ad for Sansar. (Screengrab at right.)

"Today the ads are for Vimeo and something called Vanilla," she told me last me week. "Yesterday it was for Fortnite and Sansar." So this is the first sighting of Linden Lab advertising Sansar directly to consumers (at least the first that I'm aware of).

"They are Google-generated ads, but I never looked up Sansar [on Google] before," Lisseh adds -- in other words, these AdSense ads seem to be targeting users of social game sites in general, as opposed to people specifically searching for Sansar.

Seeing as Sansar is optimized to work with Oculus and Vive or high-end PCss, it seems pretty early to start going after casual social gamers more accustomed to light, web-based 2D games. But I suppose it's worth experimenting with.

Lisseh did click on the ad, she tells me, which just took her to the Sansar homepage (as opposed to an avatar creation/sign-up on-ramp). In any case, she says she's interested, but her hardware is a stumbling block for now -- as is what she already gets from Second Life:

Linden Lab's Sansar Partners With Yet Another ESports Brand (Despite Little User Traction from eSports Fans So Far)

Another Sansar announcement, another eSports partnership:

Fnatic, one of the world’s leading global esports brands, today announced a new collaboration with Sansar, the premier destination for social VR: Fnatic Meta BUNKR, a virtual fan hangout designed to enable deeper community engagement. Free to access on PC and VR, the space provides Fnatic fans all over the world a place to gather and connect, host events and meetups, meet popular players and personalities, and earn one-of-a-kind rewards and prizes - ensuring a richer fan experience. Fnatic Meta BUNKR opens to the public today, and will kick off with the Official BUNKR Launch + Watch Party (Oct 11) and Fnatic Trivia (Oct 13), with more events through the end of the 2018 League of Legends Championships (Oct. 1 - Nov. 3).

Here's the Fnatic experience in the Sansar Atlas; follow them on Twitter here. Regular readers will remember that Sansar announced a partnership with OpTic Gaming, another major eSports brand, last August, and a popular Twitch streamer in April. For whatever reason, however, user activity has not grown since then: In August, daily average concurrency remained at well under 20 uniques, total, and according to a Sansar developer who tracks concurrency, it hasn't measurably grown since then.

To me, the real mystery is why:

Sansar Concurrency Remains Flat Despite New Hangout Space for Major ESports Brand

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: