Month: June 2020

Global Music Festivals Is Holding Two 12-Hour Events in Sansar on July 3rd and 4th, 2020 (and Yet Another Sansar Editorial)

After having just written an editorial criticizing the perceived lack of live music events in Sansar, guess what? I signed onto Twitter, to find the following tweet:

Join the Lost World Global Music Festivals on the 3rd-4th July the two 12 hour streams will be live broadcast on Twitch and into a Virtual World in Sansar especially built for this event.

Is this event an encouraging sign? Yes. Is it enough on its own? No. Let’s hope that Sansar actually does some effective promotion for this, instead of just leaving the job up to the organizers and word-of-mouth. I did a quick Google search and found the following plea for volunteers from one of the organizers, posted to the r/virtualreality subReddit:

We are working on our next music festival inside Sansar. Which can be attended in VR also Non VR. The last one was such a success we have been asked to do more, but we’re still looking for some help. We know a lot of people are sitting at home that might want to volunteer a little bit of their time. If you are a Club promoter, Event organizer or have experience in PR get in touch.

Again, I will say this: if Wookey-run Sansar is just going to sit idly by and expect unpaid volunteers to do all the heavy lifting for events (including promotion), then I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough. In its short history, Sansar has already burned through its first set of volunteers, people who have simply given up and moved on to other platforms (and I am one of them).

If Sansar expects to survive and thrive, then they are going to have to do the extra work to get at least a dozen Global Music Festivals onto their social VR platform! As we saw from the history of the old High Fidelity, simply having big events every couple of months doesn’t work, either; you need a steady stream of live events to keep people coming back, making connections, and setting down roots in any virtual world.

Wookey-run Sansar needs to learn from the example set by competing platforms such as AltspaceVR, which has just been running circles around Sansar lately in their work to attract, cultivate and promote live events. Just compare the event calendars of AltspaceVR and Sansar and you can see for yourself what effective event promotion can do. It’s a virtuous circle: more promotion means more people, who in turn create more events when they see what a platform like AltspaceVR can provide.

MARKETING IS A COST OF DOING BUSINESS, SANSAR. DO SOME. Simply calling yourself a live events platform isn’t enough; you have to back up those words with some action, and put your money where you mouth is. Anything else is lazy, short-sighted, and stupid.

As RuPaul says, “You better work!”

Sansar Editorial: Where Is the Marketing?

The New Sansar Update Load Screen:
A Focus Squarely on Live Events

Why did Sansar fail?

And no, I do not consider Sansar a success, despite the most valiant efforts of the remaining staff who are still working on the platform, and the COMETS, a small group of hard-working volunteers creating and promoting events. Linden Lab themselves did not consider Sansar a success. Why else would the company sell the money-losing platform to Wookey, a company known for buying other companies which have fallen into financial distress, in a last-ditch effort to turn some sort of profit out of it?

What disturbs me most about the change in ownership is that Wookey does not seem to be doing anything different from what Linden Lab has done. The focus remains squarely on live events, but so far, I do not see a whole hell of a lot of those happening, aside from the Monstercat: Call of the Wild series of concerts (okay, there was also a Virtual Rave Prom last Friday, with DJ Yultron).

If this is supposed to be a live events platform, where are all the (NON-volunteer driven) events? Where are the performers? We should have had some announcements by now, surely. During the change in ownership, Sansar lost a lot of those events, and I do not see a lot of new events to replace those that were lost.

Tong Zou, a YouTuber who recently posted a lightly-edited one hour and 40 minute video of his adventures exploring Sansar, had this to say at the very end of his video, after finding Sansar essentially empty in his travels, and only finding a handful of other avatars hanging out at the Nexus:

I mean, this is pretty much the only players on Sansar right now, which is really sad, because in my opinion, Sansar has the best worlds out of any social VR app, but they have the least people, so what the heck? Why do AltspaceVR and VRChat have more people than here, I don’t get it. Not enough marketing or something, I dunno. This is all the people in Sansar. Give me a break. Linden Lab has got to do a better job of promoting this game. This is just sad. This game deserves better than this. This app deserves better than this. C’mon, there only about 10 people here across the entire app.

Tong Zou hits the nail on the head when he says that the company (no longer Linden Lab, but Wookey) needs to actively promote Sansar. If the Wookey-owned Sansar is doing any marketing or promotion, I sure the hell am not seeing any evidence of that. And if they are hoping that word-of-mouth advertising is going to work to attract people to Sansar, they are badly mistaken.

Seriously, what the hell are they doing? From my perspective, Sansar is simply drifting aimlessly. Just because you’ve built a social VR platform that allows for the creation of beautiful worlds, and allows for customizable avatars, and supports a marketplace for content creators to earn money, you can’t just set it out there, among all the current and upcoming competition (e.g. Fortnite Party Royale, Facebook Horizon), and just expect it to grow on its own, without promotion. There’s simply too much else out there competing for attention.

For example, Oasis, the Chinese-based social VR platform I wrote about a while back, has recently done promotions with a number of smaller YouTube vloggers to promote their platform (here, here, here, and here are four examples). I can’t remember the last time I came across a sponsored YouTube video for Sansar.

Where is the marketing push? Sansar isn’t just going to magically sell itself.

Submit Your Pictures to the Sinespace Pick of the Day Contest, and You Could Win 500 Gold!

Having launched the Sinespace Pick of the Day series on this blog, I wanted to open it up so that anybody can submit a picture of someplace in Sinespace that delights and inspires them!

If I select and run your submitted picture (on the RyanSchultz.com blog and/or the official Sinespace blog), you win a prize of 500 Gold to spend as you please on the Sinespace Shop!

Here are the rules:

  1. Pictures must have been taken by you, of a region within Sinespace. It must be a picture primarily of a region, not an avatar (although you can certainly include avatars in your picture). You may submit a picture of your own region, or of a region created by somebody else.
  2. All pictures must be of high quality, and high resolution, but no larger than 2.1 MB in size (otherwise, they will have to be resized to fit on the official Sinespace blog, and then they will then have to be reduced in quality).
  3. IMPORTANT: You must email 1) the picture to ryanschultz [at] gmail [dot] com, along with 2) your avatar name (for the photo credit), and 3) the name of the region where you took the picture. If you do not include all three items in your email, your entry will not be considered for the contest.
  4. Creative use of the built-in Snapshot tool in the Sinespace client is encouraged! Here are a few examples to give you an idea of what you can do. To start, just click on the Snapshot button, the leftmost button in the row of blue buttons along the bottom of the Sinespace client:

From there, you can then select from a wide variety of camera angles and filters, avatar poses, colourful overlays to add pop to your photo, and more!

You can also use any gestures, poses and animations from the Sinespace Shop.

Here’s a useful pro tip: if you want to take a picture without the transparent blue sit icons hovering over the chairs, have your avatar sit down somewhere, and they will all disappear! Here’s an example, a shot I took at the Localhost Connection Café and Hangout in Sinespace:

Winners will be contacted via email, and given a special code to redeem their prize of 500 Gold. Have fun and good luck!

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).