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Early this morning I decided to check what the reviewers on Steam are saying about Sansar (scroll to the bottom of the page), and overall, the news is pretty good! Thirty-one reviews so far (25 positive and 6 negative):
But, as I had feared, there are some thumbs-down reviews as well:
Aah yes, the “but there’s nothing to do” crowd. Somehow it seems to escape certain people that you can create your own experiences and host events in Sansar, as many people already do. Don’t expect it all to be handed to you on a silver platter, my dear. If you’ve been in Second Life for 6 years you should already have learned that. Next!
And the “grainy and blurry” comment in the second negative review? Excuse me?!?? Are we occupying the same Sansar? One of Sansar’s strongest points is its strong support for good graphics and beautiful lighting. This person must have horrible internet bandwidth or a slow computer. Or maybe he’s just a troll.
Argh, I can see that I am going to have to limit my perusal of the negative reviews. It’s gonna give me an ulcer!
However, I was very pleased to see that Linden Lab is already actively responding to negative reviews:
Linden Lab is going to need to keep on top of this. A good response can do a lot to mitigate a bad review (even though it still brings down Sansar’s overall rating on Steam).
By the way, if you are not running Sansar on Steam (i.e. you have not downloaded and installed it from Steam), then you will be unable to leave your own review or participate in the Steam Community for Sansar. Over time, that community may become more active than the official Sansar Discord server.
Also, people should know that if you install Sansar from Steam, you must use the Steam Wallet to buy Sansar dollars, and Steam gets a cut of the transaction. If you download the Sansar client directly from the Sansar website (outside of the Steam ecosystem), you can still buy Sansar dollars the same way you did before, and Steam does not get a cut of the action. That’s an important distinction to think about.
As yet, there’s no incentive for me to uninstall my current, non-Steam Sansar and reinstall it via Steam. I don’t use Steam very often and I don’t feel like giving them a cut of my transactions when I buy Sansar dollars.
And I don’t intend to post reviews; I will leave that to other people. Besides, I already have a blog where I can praise or chastise Linden Lab at length for their decisions regarding Sansar, as you might have already noticed. 😉
Interesting times ahead! And it looks like the Steam reviews page is going to be hopping with activity! In the short time that it took for me to write this blogpost, an additional three Sansar reviews were posted: two positive and one negative!
Are you thumbs-up or thumbs-down on Sansar? Feel free to leave a comment.
UPDATE Dec. 8th: Peter Valencia (a.k.a. Theanine) has left a comment with a very useful tip for those people (like me), who might want to post a review but not actually use the Steam version of Sansar:
Some longtime users of the platform may have tried to leave a review, but to do so, they need to have run Steam Sansar for at least 5 minutes. However, if you still have the old Sansar installed, you get the error message telling you to first uninstall the non-Steam installation of Sansar.
What some might not know is that you don’t even need to login. You can just leave it open for 5 minutes with that error message still displaying. Then you can post a review. That’s what I did. I won’t be using Steam Sansar either (at least for now). I just installed it and did the trick above so I could leave a review, then uninstalled it.
Thanks, Theanine! 🙂 I have tested this and it does indeed work, provided you have bought at least $5.00 on the Steam store.
Ryan,
– Let’s face something and think about it.
– Although I LOVE the beauty and potential of Sansar, I can’t agree that the ‘there’s nothing here’ brigade can be expected to become authors of new experiences.
– For ordinary people, authoring avatars and spaces is complicated (I’m personally self-training to be able to use Blender, I had trouble uploading avatars into HighFidelity, etc.) And I’m an ex-instructor of IT, not just an ordinary PC user.
– Of course I applaud the splendour of the VR worlds achieved by the techies up till now. I’m grateful, I admire what’s been built.
– BUT the next step seems to me to employ the ‘people people’ who will
º Make entry and use easier for the public
º Actively demonstrate and publicize hosted events the public will love to participate in.
º Not just gaming, but enhanced real world. Social travel, cafes, sports, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
º Success have been the Phlash dances, Rosedale’s guest presenters, Wellness group in AltSpace
º I’d swap ALL development other than fixes, and switch ALL effort to social.
º One way would be to expose the VR world events on real world big screens in dozens of shopping plazas globally so the public could see and marvel and interact with them.
– Remember, this gives global social life to people. They already like social networking.
– Another strategy would be to ensure the global media got to hear about it and put it on TV, first as just a ‘curiosity’ but soon as ‘enjoyable’.
– Presumably global ‘business’ could be engaged too, being unshackled from physical reality.
º They’re spending billions on advertising agencies. VR is a new medium. It’s ‘cool’ and ‘new’. If VR developers knocked on the door of the agencies, they might end up doing interesting things for them.
º As you prob. know, retail is already in study for use of VR to improve shopper experience.
– In short, the extremely techie tending-introvert VR fraternity needs to stop expecting the public to become developers, and instead extravertly consumer-socialize VR.
Some longtime users of the platform may have tried to leave a review, but to do so, they need to have run Steam Sansar for at least 5 minutes. However, if you still have the old Sansar installed, you get the error message telling you to first uninstall the non-Steam installation of Sansar.
What some might not know is that you don’t even need to login. You can just leave it open for 5 minutes with that error message still displaying. Then you can post a review. That’s what I did. I won’t be using Steam Sansar either (at least for now). I just installed it and did the trick above so I could leave a review, then uninstalled it.
Ooh, cool tip, thank you Peter! I might just use this trick 😉
Sansar really is quite blurry in VR compared to other VR games, its anti-aliasing is quite strange. I’m used to VRChat, and it’s much more crisp by default. You wouldn’t notice it in desktop mode.