Yesterday, Eliot, the Community Manager for Sansar at Linden Lab, hosted a product meetup at the Zen Garden experience. A total of 35 avatars showed up, and many had questions for the Linden Lab staff who were present, including Linden Lab’s Chief Product Officer, Landon.
I tried and failed to embed the Twitch livestream of the meeting to my blog, so here is a link for you to watch. (If anybody reading this knows how to properly embed a Twitch video into WordPress, please let me know, thank you!)
Since this was the first product meetup after the latest update of the Sansar product, which allowed custom avatars, many of us showed up in the boar outfit created by Nya Alchemi. In addition to the features in this newest software release, we also discussed yesterday’s surprise announcement that Linden Lab was increasing the number of Sansar experiences we can create at each of the user subscription levels.
I did ask Landon whether this meant that Linden Lab was going to increase transaction fees in Sansar, and Landon said that he couldn’t promise that transaction fees and other sources of income for Sansar wouldn’t be increased in the future, but he added that increasing the number of experiences was a stand-alone decision to allow for greater creativity in Sansar. So this is not the same as the situation in Second Life, where Linden Lab lowered land fees (both mainland and private estates), and raised the Linden dollar purchase fees at the same time to (at least partially) offset the loss of that revenue.
Landon also mentioned, in answer to my question about when a comprehensive licensing/permissions system would be available, that he hoped to be able to make the first part of this work available in the next release of the Sansar platform. This is much sooner than I expected, and very good news to the many content creators who have been long awaiting such a permissions and licensing system to be put into place before starting to sell items on the Sansar Store.
One of the announcements at the meeting was that this week, the Sansar team at Linden Lab had a hackathon to see if they could create cool new features for the platform. Among the things people worked on, Landon reported, was a potential future feature for the Sansar Store where you could rotate an object view in 360 degrees in a Sansar Store listing.
Another thing that caught my ear: Landon said that Linden Lab was having a few internal discussions, to consider releasing at least some of their software as open source! Again, I am surprised that they are considering doing this so early in their product development. One of Sansar’s biggest competitors, High Fidelity, is open-source software.
As usual, I will leave it to Inara Pey (who was present) to report on this meeting in greater detail. When she publishes her blogpost, I will link to it from here. She already covered a few points raised at the meeting in this blogpost.
UPDATE July 23rd: Inara has done her usual excellent job of covering this meetup! Thanks, Inara!
Overall, it was a great meeting and we learned a lot. Thank you to Eliot and to all the Linden Lab staff who showed up to answer questions; it was very informative and very much appreciated!
