Not all social VR spaces are struggling to attract users. Some have been surprisingly successful, and here is a good example. Bryan Bortz (a.k.a. OwlBoy) has just announced that the virtual pub he created in VRChat, The Great Pug, has now received 10 million visits!
The Great Pug just rolled over to 10 Million visits according to the VRChat API. Thanks to everyone who has visited, made friends, and supported The Pug over the years. Thank you to everyone who has helped me learn and improve during this journey.
The Great Pug is the most popular hangout spot in the metaverse. It’s a pub where people meet, hang out, chat, perform, show off, and role play. The Great Pug is dynamic with regular updates and improvements. It plays host to large annual parties on St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween. Along with other parties throughout the year. Custom decorations are put up for each event and taken down shortly after. Musical performances happen regularly in select instances.
My focus with The Great Pug is the social space it provides. I want it to be a place you visit for the other people you find there.
I hope to have OwlBoy as a guest on an upcoming episode of the Metaverse Newscast. I’m sure he has many wonderful stories to tell as the keeper of the most visited pub in the metaverse! Congratulations on reaching this milestone!
First, a disclaimer: I’m a librarian and a blogger, and I don’t really know what it takes to run a successful software company. I’m sure the only people who really know how Philip Rosedale is feeling right now are Ebbe Altberg and other software company CEOs who often have to make difficult decisions, including letting people go. It’s a tough job, and one that I wouldn’t want.
And I must confess that, from my admittedly outsider perspective on High Fidelity, that I was absolutely gobsmacked by the swiftness of this recent turn of fortune. One minute, High Fidelity was merrily cruising along and planning big splashy events; the next, they were slashing server costs by abruptly shutting down public spaces. It was, and still is, a rather stunning reversal that most observers didn’t see coming.
There are a lot of factors that led to this point. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
First, almost all of the rosy predictions made when the first consumer VR headsets appeared have turned out to be flat-out wrong. As Philip himself has said, he expected millions of people to be in VR headsets at this point. He was mistaken. But then, so were a lot of other people. It’s just unfortunate that it took this set of circumstances to force High Fidelity to pay more attention to the users they should have been paying attention to all along: non-VR users who are looking at virtual worlds through their flat computer monitors. Catering almost exclusively to VR users, and treating desktop users as almost an afterthought, is one of the reasons that High Fidelity finds itself struggling today. For example, there is still no default, built-in text chat system in High Fidelity (although there are third-party solutions on the Marketplace).
Second, High Fidelity has struggled to set up something that was key to the early, resounding success of Second Life: creating and encouraging a space where content creators could make money selling their products to other users. Compared to the nearly 22,000 items now available for sale on the Sansar Store, The HiFi Marketplace is struggling to attract content. The process involved in creating a sales listing is still too geeky and cumbersome, and High Fidelity has created an unnecessary bottleneck by insisting that they review every single item placed on the Marketplace. It’s small wonder that there are only 1,200 items for sale so far, about a twentieth of what is on the Sansar Store. Many potential content creators have simply given up on High Fidelity and walked away after encountering these and several other obstacles.
Third, there was a strange overemphasis on company-hosted events, which gave High Fidelity some much-needed press and a reason to boast about avatar concurrency records being set, but which also took up valuable company resources which, perhaps, could have been better placed somewhere else. They say hindsight is 20/20, and it’s now clear to me that High Fidelity probably spent a lot of money on setting up and running powerful servers to handle such big events with large crowds. And, in the end, it was probably something that was not sustainable long-term. (Then again, server costs are much cheaper than programmer salaries.)
Also, there were many people who showed up at HiFi’s events because they were getting some sort of financial inducement to do so (like the US$20 gift cards given out at the first couple of stress testing events). High Fidelity was literally paying all the contest entrants in their most recent Avatar Cosplay Contest! Somebody (not me) has said that High Fidelity was essentially bribing people to use their platform, and when the inducements were no longer there, people stayed away.
Take a look at High Fidelity’s new website homepage:
How many companies do you know that would continue to throw resources into a project if, after six years of hard work, their product only has 2,573 users? The writing has been on the wall for quite some time now; it’s just that people haven’t wanted to admit it. Sometimes when you build it, people will not come.
Despite a few modest successes here and there (notably VRChat and Rec Room), social VR as a whole is struggling to attract users. Some companies can rely on venture capital (High Fidelity) or profits from other products (Linden Lab) to get them through the lean times, but that money won’t be there forever. Eventually, social VR has to stand on its own. And sadly, I think we are going to see other companies in this market founder, struggle, restructure, and even close their doors.
So now High Fidelity is pinning its hopes on becoming a workplace teams platform, squarely aimed at the business market. (In fact, they won’t even let you sign up for a sneak peek at the new service with a Gmail email address, which is frankly insulting to those businesses who choose to use Gmail.) There’s no guarantee that this endeavour will succeed, but I do wish Philip and his team the best of luck. They’re going to need it.
In an official blogpost titled Toward a Digital World, High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale said:
We’ve been working as a company for six years now, writing open-source software and creating test events and experiences to enable this imagined place to come into existence…We’ve done a ton with a small and passionate team.
But as of today, 2019, we probably still have a few years to wait. VR headsets, even the latest ones, are still not comfortable enough to wear for very long, and still cannot be used to read and write messages, take notes, or do most kinds of work…
If you had asked me when we started the company in 2014, I’d have said that by now there would be several million people using HMDs daily, and we’d be competing with both big and small companies to provide the best platform—but I was wrong.
Philip goes on to state that the company is changing direction, to refocus on a creating a platform for work teams to collaborate, and that as a part of this pivot, they are letting go of a quarter of their staff:
To refocus on this new project, we have made the very hard decision today to reduce our team by 25%, meaning that 20 people will be leaving us who have made great contributions to High Fidelity, and whom we will greatly miss.
I’ve heard from an inside source that some very talented software engineers have been let go, instead of (and I quote) “the Bingo Extremo people and the people who put on the disastrous events”. I am hoping that Linden Lab will swoop in and pick up a few good people to help them continue to build Sansar, but who knows what will happen now.
Emily, HiFi’s Community Manager (who appears to have survived the layoffs), helpfully provided some follow-up questions and answers to Philip’s announcement today in a FAQ posted to the High Fidelity Community Forums:
Will you still be accepting feature requests, and what will happen to requests already made?
Unfortunately, no, we do not have the resources to work on broad-based feature requests from users. As such, will be closing the feature request list down as of June 1st. We will no longer triage feature requests; however, leaving it up for a few weeks allows our community to review it in the event it inspires open-source project proposal ideas. Unfortunately, there’s no way to make the feature request board read only.
…
Will you continue to offer experiences like Nefertari’s Tomb and Remembering D-Day?
We’ll discontinue these experiences after the events currently scheduled to allow us to focus on our new direction.
Do you still plan to add support for the Quest, Focus, and other new HMDs?
Yes, that’s still very much on the roadmap. We don’t have timing of the availability on specific devices at this time.
…
Does this mean that you are going to improve the High Fidelity experience for desktop users?
Yes. Since many people will use their laptop or desktop PC to access High Fidelity, broadening access is a key part of our strategy. As noted in Philip’s blog post, we simply feel that mass-market adoption of VR hardware is a few years away still.
Well, as I had expected, it’s now clear that High Fidelity will not be launching on the Oculus Quest anytime soon. Philip Rosedale has bigger problems on his hands.
And the current user base on High Fidelity, many of whom are long-time committed users, are going to face a stark choice: stay or jump ship? No doubt some will consider Sansar or VRChat or another platform for their creative and development work. The fact that the company will no longer be accepting any broad-based feature requests from end users is very troubling, and it could force some people to switch platforms.
Does this mean that VR is in trouble? No, I still believe that the Oculus Quest and other new standalone and PC-based VR headsets will bring an ever-increasing audience into virtual reality. But it is now very clear that this uptake of technology will take a lot longer than most people originally estimated. The VR platform companies that will survive are those that acknowledge this fact and plan accordingly.
Also, it’s clear that the something has gone slightly awry with the more freeform software development model which had been used by High Fidelity to date, as opposed to the much more structured monthly software updates being issued by companies such as Linden Lab for Sansar. (And yes, I have confirmed from many longstanding HiFi users at the first, well-attended Federated Users Group meeting that this sort of loosey-goosey software development has been a long-standing issue at High Fidelity.)
Frankly, High Fidelity is burning through venture capital and they need to smarten up. Philip Rosedale recognizes this, and it’s not too late (despite what some people may say). High Fidelity is taking a gamble by moving to a workplace team platform, but it’s a calculated risk. (Then again, Second Life tried this too, and it failed miserably. Anybody remember Second Life Enterprise?)
What happens next? Who knows. But it will, as always, be fascinating to watch (and blog about). Stay tuned!
It’s time to take another look at Mark Space, the blockchain-based virtual world I have talked about a fair bit in the past. I still find the whole project to be somewhat mystifying, even a bit stupefying, in its lofty ambitions and slick promotion.
And Mark Space has been putting out some pretty perplexing promotional videos lately, like this one:
And this one, focusing on their development team:
Which is all well and good, but neither video tells you a damn thing about the actual product they are selling! I tend to be rather suspicious of companies that choose to spend their money on slick advertising which lacks in specific product details.
In case you forgot, the basic idea behind Mark Space is that you can buy square virtual spaces which you can decorate with 360-degree photographs of interiors, and 2D and 3D models of furniture. And… that’s pretty much it for now. Frankly, Mark Space cannot even begin to compare with much more fully-featured social VR platforms and virtual worlds such as Sansar, High Fidelity, even long-in-the-tooth Second Life, where your avatar navigates within actual three-dimensional space, instead of just clicking and panning through 360-degree photographs!
But perhaps there have been some recent developments, something to support the hype, so I decided to pay a return visit to see what’s up.
The Mark Space Shopping Mall
The Mark Space three-story shopping mall, where you are dropped when you first arrive in Mark Space, and which currently seems to be the only space you can explore, is packed full of big name, high-end stores, including, but not limited to:
Givenchy
Balcenciaga
Dolce & Gabbana
Saint Laurent
Prada
Alexander McQueen
Fendi
Valentino
Alexander Wang
Gucci
Burberry
Stella McCartney
Versace
Diane von Furstenburg
Michael Kors
and many more brands
For example, here’s the virtual Gucci store:
And, once you get inside, you can select and inspect Gucci wear:
A pop-up window appears when you click on an item in the store, like this red jacket, complete with a Buy button at the bottom:
When you click on the Buy button, it takes you to another website, MARK.MODA, where all the goods I checked were marked “Not Available”:
I wonder what the official representatives of these companies would have to say if they were to take a look at what Mark Space is doing. Do they even know about this? Do they care? And can Mark Space get away with this, even if they claim it’s just for demonstration purposes? The answers to those three questions, in order, are probably: No. Yes. and No.
The content on this Website, such as text, graphics, images, photographs, illustrations, trademarks, trade names, service marks, trade dress, logos…(collectively, “Contents”) is protected under domestic and foreign intellectual property laws. Gucci owns all rights and/or license in and to the Contents. Any use of the Contents not expressly permitted by these Terms of Use is a breach of these Terms of Use and may violate copyright, trademark, trade dress, patent and other laws. You understand and agree that, except as stated herein, none of the Contents may be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted, transmitted, modified, or created into derivative works in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from Gucci…The use of the Contents on any other website or in a networked computer environment for any purpose is prohibited.
Oh, and in another development, Mark Space also boasts a brand-new “VR mode” for their web browser app. Here’s what it looks like on my desktop monitor:
Today we’ll tell you about a new platform feature — screen synchronization! The new feature allows to display everything that the user sees in the cardboard (into which a smartphone is placed) on a second screen. This means that the platform already allows to easily start using virtual reality for educational and auxiliary purposes: for example, during exhibitions, presentations, or just because. To enable this feature, you must simultaneously log into the same MARK.SPACE account on your smartphone and PC.
Sigh. Forcing you to sign in twice (on two different devices), just to be able to see a scene in cellphone VR? And I can find no Mark Space app on the iPhone App Store, so I assume this works for Android phones only. Or do they just expect you to use the web browser on your phone, too?
Caveat emptor! Oh, and I have emailed the Intellectual Property department of Gucci to ask them whether or not they actually have a relationship with Mark Space, with a link back to this blogpost.
UPDATE 6:28 p.m.: Well, I have been doing some more in-depth exploring of the MARK.MODA website, and I have found a number of Gucci items that appear to have valid pass-through links to third-party online stores carrying the actual Gucci products, like the Russian version of Farfetch.com. So who knows? Maybe I could be completely wrong, and all this is totally legitimate. Perhaps MARK.MODA (the store) predates MARK.SPACE (the virtual world), and the company is merely expanding its existing online business to include virtual world shopping. If so, then more power to them, and I apologize. But I still wonder if Gucci actually knows about their virtual storefront in Mark Space, and what they have to say about all this.
UPDATE 6:53 p.m.: Well, this just gets weirder and weirder! It looks like MARK.MODA is not really so much a shopping site as a sort of Pinterest-like social media site where users can dress up a model in clothing selected from various designers, and share the resulting picture with their social network for comments and likes. Any sales links go straight through to various third-party vendors. I even found a two-minute promotional video for MARK.MODA:
And it would appear that MARK.SPACE (the virtual world) predates MARK.MODA. None of the videos on the MARK.MODA YouTube channel is older than 5 months, and Mark Space has been around for longer than that. This is absolutely fascinating! I feel as if I have tumbled down a rabbit hole!
I wonder how long they have been working on all this, and if this rather cool service is only available via the one Russian website, or if there are other versions as well. This actually puts the whole Mark Space project in a rather different light. According to the English version of this Russian page from the MARK.MODA website:
MODA-MARK.com is one of the core products of MARK.SPACE Technologies, which operates an open-source platform for creation of 3D, VR and AR-compatible spaces (websites). MARK.MODA is built and based on a unique VR-code, created by our developers within the framework of our main company MARK.SPACE.
At present, we are testing the platform in the Russian Federation, where it has already gained popularity among stylists and fans of fashion. In the near future, MARK.MODA will be integrated into the MARK.SPACE Universe, which will allow for use of the full functionality of the platform and its launch into Asian / US / EU markets.
So it does look like it is just the one Russian website for now, with plans to expand. Now, whether any of this is actually going to work in a virtual world (let alone adding in VR) remains to be seen. But it is cool nonetheless. And I am rather intrigued!
