New World Notes

Half Life: Alyx Usage Figures Suggest It's Not VR's Killer App After All

Today's Half-Life:Alyx stats on Steam

Couple somewhat surprising data points (via SteamDB) since Half-Life Alyx debuted last week, attracting the highest user concurrencies (nearly 43,000) for a VR-only game:

• Usage hasn't reached anywhere near that peak since then. I had thought the game might have seen a significant uptick last weekend, as people who bought it would have more free time to play. (Then again, under quarantine, don't we all have way more time on our hands?) But, no.
• If you look at Half-Life: Alyx's usage patterns, there's almost always way more people on Twitch watching Half-Life: Alyx being played, than actually playing Half-Life: Alyx. That was even true shortly after Alyx went live last week, with nearly 100,000 Twitch viewers watching while half those numbers played.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this data strongly suggests two suppositions:

How to Hack the Video Player in Half-Life: Alyx and Rickroll Her in VR

So it turns out that some of the monitor footage inside of #HalfLifeAlyx are just webms inside a folder, AKA you can change it to whatever you want. Already contributed my part pic.twitter.com/9pJxD9gP2j

— ThatAverageJoe (@AverageJoeSFM) March 26, 2020

If you're one of the many thousands currently playing Half-Life:Alyx and you have the tech skills to pull this off, here's a wacky hack to try: Go inside the game's folders, find the one labeled "intro_world_heist.webm", and replace it with another WebM video. It's a bit tricky to get working but Toby Norman posted these tips on Twitter so he could Rickroll Alyx:

VRChat Reports Highest Concurrency of the Year; Up 1000s on Steam Since Last Month's Corona-Bump

Data via SteamDB

"We just broke our concurrent users online record at VRChat for this year," tweeted the social VR world's community manager last Friday, "We're at ~17,600 users online! That's more than we had on during New Year's Eve celebrations this year!"

You can confirm that by checking out VRChat's stats on Steam (above), from which the vast majority of their userbase logs in, with a peak last Sunday of 14,606. That's up over 2,000 from February 23's weekly peak of 11,596.  (This also suggests that only a few thousand VRChat users log in via Oculus Quest.)

So this seems like a small but not insignificant Corona-bump for the new-ish virtual world, as more people sheltering in place look for entertainment and social interaction online.  Notably, VRChat's bump is less that that of Second Life, which saw a concurrency jump of about 10%, i.e. some 5,000 users, last weekend. It's likely that Second Life's advanced age over VRChat is a benefit: Now 17 years old, there's just that many more people who are dormant or sporadic SL users, now with more time indoors to return to the virtual world to see what's changed, and reconnect with old avatar friends.

Alyx Estimate: 8-12% of Compatible Install Base Playing Half-Life VR Game

Half-Life: Alyx has been a huge hit VR game since its launch yesterday, attracting a peak user concurrency of nearly 43,000 on Steam -- by far the highest concurrency for any VR-only game on the platform. (Beat Saber, the previous VR-only blockbuster, reached only as high as 4,472 concurrent players on Steam.) Over its first 24 hours of launch, it's probably attracted 150,000-250,000 total players.

Next question: How many owners of compatible VR headsets have bought and played Half-Life: Alyx so far? That takes some rough guesswork, but 8-12% of the potential install base is a safe estimate. Here's the datapoint:

Somnium's Embedded Reporter Explores Single-Shard Social VR World With Blockchain-Based Economy

Now this video gives me some deep, 2003-era nostalgia. It's a brief tour of a build in Somnium Space, the new-ish social VR world for PC and VR headsets, but with its simple graphics and sunny, seamless, single-shard world -- With places! On a map! That you travel to! -- it vividly reminded me of Second Life from back in olden times. That's also because the video itself is by Carlos Aborde, Somnium Space's official embedded reporter.

Besides being primarily for VR, the key 2020-era update is blockchain. (Well, most people in Silicon Valley would tell you blockchain-based platforms lost their luster ages ago, by which I mean 2018.) Anyway here's the key feature set from the homepage:

What Virtual Worlds Need to Become Real World Offices, Post-Coronavirus

With more and more people working from home amid the continued coronavirus pandemic, many virtual world/tech analysts speculate we'll see a rise in virtual worlds used as real world office spaces. Wired just pondered that very topic from a slightly different direction:

[H]ere in the San Francisco Bay Area, office lights are winking out one by one as businesses send their employees home to work, and everyone’s talking about Zoom and Microsoft Teams and Hangouts. We all know these tools don’t work that well. We can all predict the frustration and miscommunications they will cause over the next few weeks or months (or more?) of remote employment. As this future sails ever closer, I can’t help but think: Weren’t we supposed to have virtual reality in the workplace by now?

No, we don't actually want VR to become the remote workspace, at least not any time soon: VR headsets are still too expensive, too heavy and sweat-inducing to wear for over an hour, let alone eight, while virtual reality still causes nausea in a large percentage of people. (There may even be a gender component to the nausea, with women much more likely to experience it in VR, which would make mandatory VR for work a total non-starter.)

Virtual worlds (i.e. immersive 3D spaces), however, do have much more potential as a remote workplace. But at least seven hurdles remain:

Non-human avatar options: The avatars pictured above, from a VR workspace startup, are what I have in mind, clearly conveying their purpose as a professional tool. Many virtual world companies for work offer human avatars by default, which immediately creates an impression that they're for a game -- a deal-breaker for many executives. 

Extremely cross-platform: Some workers may want to use VR for work, but for everyone else, they need every conceivable option: Mac, PC, and iOS/Android, at minimum. 

Extremely thin client: Most people have multiple programs running simultaneously at work. A workplace world must therefore run alongside them, and not require heavy resources to run.

Four -- yes four -- more, after the break:

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:

Janus VR Pivots from Startup to Open Source Community-Run Metaverse Project

Janus VR the web-based metaverse startup may be over, but that's not the end of Janus. James Baicoianu, the startup's former principal engineer, recently passed me this announcement, hosted not on JanusVR dot com, but on JanusXR dot org:

A core group of passionate fans have stuck with us from the beginning, and we're eternally grateful to them for accompanying us on this journey. Seeing their creations take shape is what motivated us to keep building all these years, and JanusXR.org will ensure that this content - which belongs to the community, not to us - can still live on.

Baicoianu tells me it's quite affordable for Janus to remain operational as a volunteer community operation:

"[O]ne of the benefits of how Janus' systems were built is that it costs us very little to keep the server infrastructure running - keeping the worlds up costs us less than $100 per month," as he puts it. "The expenses for Janus as a company were mainly payroll, our projects have been open source for some time -- as the lead developer of JanusWeb I plan to continue working on that as my open source project (as it was before I even joined Janus) I'm funding this out of my own pocket for now, I don't see it being a hardship unless suddenly we find new-found success that we never saw as a company, at which time we'll consider additional options."

But even if that doesn't happen, Baicoianu sees a future for the underlying technology he and his team created:

Janus VR, Startup That Aimed to Build the Metaverse, Closes

Another metaverse shoe was dropped yesterday, this time by James McCrae, the CEO and co-founder of Janus VR, a Toronto-based startup which raised over $1.5 million according to Crunchbase. McCrae's stated reason for the closing is regulatory: 

I write to inform the broader community of our intent to dissolve the corporation, Janus VR, Inc., at the end of Q4 2019. It is no longer feasible to maintain our corporation status in Canada and the US given the expenses this will incur each year (as it relates to legal, accounting, patent/IP filings, etc.)

It's likely the startup could have stayed afloat with additional funding, but apparently that funding never came. Sad to say, this is one of several startups attempting to build the metaverse, as detailed in a 2016 profile:

"Inspired in part by Snow Crash’s Metaverse, James McCrae and Karan Singh sought to build a network of VR portals within which users can collaborate, communicate, explore, and even create new 3D content."

This follows High Fidelity and also Sansar scaling back their own metaverse-minded efforts considerably, despite having much more funding. 

When companies close up shop, they often reveal some interesting insider details. And according to McCae's announcement, Janus VR attracted some decent user numbers:

Mark Zuckerberg Drops Huge Hint on Oculus Quest Install Base on Facebook Earnings Call

Many VR enthusiasts are skeptical about SuperData's VR sales reports, the most recent of which pinned the install base of Oculus Quest to now be 705,000+. But there's another, possibly more reliable source for estimating the Quest's install base: What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says about Quest earnings during a stock earnings call.

And here's what he just said:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a call with investors that “on Christmas Day, people bought almost $5 million worth of content in the Oculus Store.”

Now Facebook isn't exactly reputed for its honesty, but misstatements on a public company's financial reports are quite literally a criminal offense.  As a veteran game analyst once put it to me: "Earnings reports are reliable, because if they're wrong, someone can go to jail."

But what does $5 million worth of content in the Oculus Store purchased on Christmas Day tell us? A fair amount, thanks to the magic metric called ARPU: