Rather than continue to flip-flop on Sansar, I’m going to stick with my decision to leave the platform. I just feel heartbroken about the direction Sansar is taking, and I realize that I have been a little too emotionally invested in the platform overall (after all, Sansar was the reason I started this blog in the first place).
Sometimes, I care a little too much about things, instead of being dispassionate about them. And this time, rather than try to fix things, I just need to let things be.
In retrospect, I became the one person whom people would talk to whenever they had complaints about how Linden Lab was running Sansar, hoping that I would blog about the issues in an editorial. And sometimes I did. But over time, all I heard about Sansar was the negative things that were going on, instead of the positive things, and I can see now how that it has worn me down. When it comes to Sansar, I am completely burned out.
I have learned my lesson, and I won’t be making the same mistake with over virtual worlds I write about. In future, I will be more resolute, more dispassionate.
But today, I am feeling depressed, heartbroken, and just plain worn out—hardly the best state to start off a new year. So I will be taking a couple of days off from blogging, to give myself an opportunity to heal a bit. I’ll be back after I have had a chance to rest and recover.
As for Sansar, I am going to stick with my decision to stay away for now.
I am feeling extremely depressed, disheartened, and discouraged today, the final day of the year.
You might be surprised to learn that the majority of the responses I received to yesterday’s Sansar “call to arms” blogpost have been negative, not positive. People are no longer inclined to feel positive about Sansar.
If I could summarize all the negative responses, they all pretty much run along the lines of: “We gave, we gave some more, we got burned, we’re not giving any more. Linden Lab made too many mistakes, and Sansar is doomed. I’m not responding to your call to arms to try and save it.”
Furthermore, I have had several private conversations with long-time members of the Sansar community over these past few days, partly in response to the Comet project set-up fiasco (to which I sadly contributed to the overall miscommunication). And I have heard a great many disturbing things, about which I swore promises that I would not write about them on this blog. So I will not.
But I can say this.
The small remaining Sansar community (those who have not already given up, packed up, and left) are largely feeling fearful, mistrustful, betrayed, and angry. By and large, they no longer trust Linden Lab, and by and large, they feel that they are not being listened to anymore. Communication between most LL staff and most Sansar users has broken down to the worst point that I have ever seen it in the three years that I have been part of this community. Small wonder the Comet project lead to such rumour-mongering, hearsay, and finger-pointing.
Linden Lab staff working on Sansar are currently stressed beyond imagination, scrambling to fill in for laid-off coworkers as best they can. I have also heard rumours that key LL staff who survived the October layoffs, but then quit after them, have not been replaced—hardly a promising sign. Because of their high-stress work environment, LL staff are making mistakes, which are often taken as signs of ill intent by an already distrustful user community (again, the Comet project is an example).
In my opinion, the entire Sansar community—both staff and users—is now so broken, so distrustful, and so dysfunctional, that I fear it will hasten, instead of forestall, the failure and shut-down of Sansar. When well-known, long-time members of the Sansar community tell me they are planning to shut down their worlds completely, and take their items down from the Sansar Store, it is a sign that there is something terribly, terribly wrong within the virtual society, within the virtual world, we have all built together. It breaks my heart more than I can say.
I now realize that I can’t fix this current mess by anything I say or anything I do. So, instead of rallying the troops to try and save Sansar, I have decided that the best thing for me to do is, simply, to walk away.
I give up.
I can’t fix Sansar’s problems, and trying to stay and fix them is making me more and more depressed, and negatively impacting on the rest of my life. So for my own personal mental health, I am leaving Sansar.
I’m sorry. Like those who responded to my call to arms yesterday, I realize that I have literally nothing left to give anymore.
I realize that I have now changed my mind for the second time in two days about Sansar. That in itself is a strong sign that I need to step away from the platform completely, and give myself time and space to heal.
I will still continue to write this blog, but I will be taking an extended break from Sansar, and not writing about it at all. I will continue work on the Metaverse Newscast, which is currently on hiatus while I teach myself digital video editing, to take over that task from my producer, Andrew William. There will be no future Metaverse Newscast episodes about Sansar for the forseeable future.
I hope that you will understand my decision. But even if you don’t, I expect you to respect it. Thank you. And I’m sorry if I let you down.
Good-bye, Sansar. It’s been a fascinating three years. But it’s over. As part of my decision, I have left the official Sansar Discord server.
This past Sunday evening, feeling vaguely anxious, uneasy, and depressed, I loaded up my Vanity Fair avatar in Sansar, outfitted her with a brand new gold outfit (dress by Daisy Winthorpe, matching shoes by Morgane Paris), and I spent a couple of hours wandering through the various worlds in my Codex, in search of…something.
Something. Anything.
I don’t even really know what I was looking for. Reassurance? Inspiration? Answers? I should know better than to find answers in virtual worlds. But I set out exploring anyways, dressed for a party that didn’t exist, and not feeling in a party mood at all.
Somehow the look on Vanity’s face seemed to match my inner mood: dissatisfied, bored, restless. I must have wandered through at least two dozen different Sansar worlds over several hours, some old, some new.
And I never found what I was looking for, even if I could have named it.
I think what is bothering me most about Sansar lately is the fact that it is still so utterly empty; despite all the beautifully-designed places you can visit, only a small handful have anybody else in them at any one time. You can pretty much be guaranteed to run into groups of avatars chatting at the Nexus, of course, but other than that (and the occasional scheduled event), you’re on your own. Sansar is a ghost town.
Despite every concerted effort made to date, Linden Lab has not succeeded in getting more people to visit Sansar, and it has also failed to convince them to come back for return visits and set up a home or a shop (aside from a small, tight-knit community of die-hard regulars that essentially communicates primarily via the official Sansar Discord).
I consider myself very fortunate to have been part of the Sansar community since December 2016, when it was still a closed beta (actually, it was more alpha than beta). I vividly remember that there was such an infectious energy and excitement among the chosen few who had been allowed in to test everything out, almost a giddiness to try different things out, to see what would work and what would break, sending feedback to a development team that at times seemed even more excited than we the testers were! The future seemed so bright.
But that initial giddiness has slowly ebbed away over time. Many of those early testers have moved on to other worlds, other projects. Now, if I could use one word to describe Sansar lately, it would certainly not be giddy. It would be forlorn. Sansar seems to have completely lost its way. And it breaks my heart to admit the truth to myself. It almost moves me to tears.
As I have written, I have a deeply emotional connection with this place (and yes, I do consider Sansar no less a place than Paris or London or New York in the real world). My soft spot for Sansar is also my blind spot, I fear. I held on that honeymoon feeling about Sansar for far, far longer than most other people. And so when the layoffs happened in October, I was triggered, furious, and upset. I wasn’t thinking with a clear head; I was grieving the loss of what could have been. What should have been, that seemed to be suddenly taken away from me by forces outside of my control. How dare they make such massive cuts to a place I loved? Couldn’t they see they were killing the place?
For over two years I strove mightily, within my admittedly feeble sphere of influence, to portray Sansar as a place where an exciting future was going to happen. I wrote and wrote and wrote to entice people to pay a visit, and to make them want to come back again and again, becoming a regular part of what I hoped would be a growing, vibrant Sansar community.
And at this task I feel I have failed (which might be one reason why I feel so depressed this holiday season). Perhaps nobody could have pulled this task off successfully; maybe the technical, social and political obstacles were altogether insurmountable. Getting people to pay sustained attention to a new virtual world is a much, much harder task than it seems at first glance (as many other companies are finding out).
And then, the inevitable happened, the other shoe finally dropped, and High Fidelity announced they were essentially shutting down completely early in 2020, seemingly a victim of lack of interest in VR in general, and social VR in particular. And I thought: would Sansar follow soon after High Fidelity?
So, while mournfully wandering through the various Sansar worlds on Sunday evening, with recent High Fidelity events weighing heavily on my mind, I made a decision. I changed my mind.
I decided that I would, once again in the new year, start writing more regularly about Sansar worlds and events. Sansar might well still falter and fold in 2020 (or 2021), and there is absolutely zero guarantee that a pivot to hosting live events is going to save the platform. But if I can do anything within my limited power to help promote Sansar and show potential users the potential and possibilities of the platform, perhaps even my small efforts can still make a difference before it’s too late.
Many say it is already too late. Some have told me Sansar is doomed. Many former Sansar content creators and users have already given up, packed up, and moved on, angry with one decision or another made by Linden Lab over the years, or upset that one or more key features they wanted weren’t on the software development roadmap. Many have given up on Sansar, but I won’t. Not yet. Not without a fight. I am damned if I am going to write a post-mortem for Sansar on this blog, which, after all, was originally started to write exclusively about Sansar.
Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People (1830, The Louvre)
Sansar needs our help. All of us, all our help, and whatever talents we have to offer. Sansar might well still fold despite all of Linden Lab’s efforts, and despite all of our own individual efforts. But at least we can try.
Nobody knows what lies ahead in 2020. Anything can and may happen. Obstacles and hurdles can appear out of nowhere, and Linden Lab can choose to respond to them in any way that the company seems fit. What is increasingly clear is that the Sansar project cannot continue along the way it has been going, with the relative lack of overall usage it has, and the relative lack of corporate partners it has, forever. Something, somewhere, is going to have to give. Something has to change.
Linden Lab may choose to shut down the Sansar project completely, or put it on indefinite hiatus until conditions improve. They may decide to sell Sansar off to another company. They might even decide to make the Sansar code open-source, leaving further development up to the community in a way similar to the OpenSim project. Anything can happen, and we have to be prepared for anything to happen.
I want each of you to think about the Sansar project, and what you can do as individuals and as teams to help build the platform and make it better, and help take it to the next level. You might be an event planner or a talent booker; you might be a content creator or a world designer; you might be a talented scripter; you might be a blogger. Or perhaps your talent is just being friendly and greeting newcomers at the Nexus and helping them get oriented. Everybody has something that they can contribute.
And rather than turn away from Sansar as a lost cause, I humbly ask that you come back, and fight to keep this wonderful, special, fragile place that we have been building over the past few years from slipping away completely. At this point we need plenty of fresh ideas and fresh inspiration, thinking outside of the box. We need you.Don’t turn away.
Sansar needs all the friends it can get at this point. I hope that you can be counted on to be one of them. I know that I will be. It won’t mean that I will refrain from criticism when I feel it is necessary. I will still hold Linden Lab’s feet to the fire when and if I see them do something stupid. But I will not walk away. I will not ignore Sansar in 2020. Good, bad, and everything in between, I plan to be there to cover it all.
Now that I am (finally!) finished my annual holiday tradition of utterly ransacking all the Advent calendars and December shopping events I can find in Second Life—the better to clothe my small army of alts with fashionable freebies!—it is time to turn my attention to predictions for the coming year.
That Second Life would “continue to coast along, baffling the mainstream news media and the general public with its vitality and longevity”, and that “the ability to change your first and last names in SL will prove very popular—and also very lucrative for Linden Lab”. Well, I am going to stick to that prediction. Implementing avatar name changes in SL turned out to be a thornier problem than Linden Lab anticipated, hence the delay, but they now have eight years of pent-up demand for this feature, and I anticipate that it will still prove popular—and profitable—for Linden Lab. I myself upgraded one of my alts to Premium to be able to change her legacy name of Bumbly Rumpler. (I know. I know. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time!) I also snagged her a lovely new riverside Victorian Linden Home in the process.
That OpenSim would move on implementing virtual reality support, but (as far as I can tell), that work has stalled or been abandoned. To be honest, I have barely set foot at all in OpenSim this past year, so I regret that I am not in any position to make predictions for 2020!
However, three blockchain-based virtual world projects appear to be doing well—Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, and Somnium Space—and I expect that they will all continue to do well in 2020. I note that both Decentraland and Cryptovoxels have tended to rank in the Top 5 in sales volume on the OpenSea marketplace (this screencap is from a tweet made Dec. 27th):
That “one or more adult/sex-oriented virtual worlds are going to fail”. This has not come true, although a few platforms (LivCloser and the lamentably-named Oasis) are not looking particularly healthy and might still fold. However, both Utherverse/Red Light Center/Whatever the Hell They are Calling It Now and 3DX Chat seem to be puttering along nicely. (Please note all links in this paragraph are safe for work.)
I’m already working on a predictions blogpost for the various social VR platforms and virtual worlds in 2020. Among my predictions is the following: if Linden Lab cannot find a way to increase the overall number of users in Sansar within the next 12 months, even with a pivot to (and an exclusive focus on) live events, then the company will do one of three things:
– convert the existing Sansar code to open source and let the community take it over (which I think is the least likely option);
– sell Sansar to another company and keep Second Life running (or perhaps sell off Linden Lab and all its assets entirely to another company); or
– shut down the Sansar project completely (which I think is the most likely option).
In case you haven’t been paying attention, the honeymoon period for Sansar is OVER.
I am increasingly worried (even heartsick) over the future of Sansar.
That “the Oculus Quest VR headset will ignite the long-awaited boom in virtual reality”. I think that we can agree that the Oculus Quest has been a runaway success. Facebook is apparently selling the units as fast as they can make them, and they are now backordered until late February 2020. (The Valve Index is also selling well, and also similarly backordered.) I do predict that this will bring many more people into those social VR platforms which can natively run on the standalone Quest headset, such as VRChat, Rec Room, and AltspaceVR.
That “Linden Lab’s launch of Sansar on Steam will likely have only a modest impact on overall usage of the platform”. I deeply regret that this prediction has come true in spades. I said at the time that Linden Lab ditching its SandeX and launching Sansar on Steam would be a terrible mistake, and I take no pleasure in being proven correct. Sansar has been pummeled by negative reviews by Steam gamers, adding to the general sense of malaise about the platform in the past year, especially since approximately 30 staff working on the project were laid off by Linden Lab a couple of months ago, in an attempt to trim their continued financial losses. This was a move which was probably imposed on CEO Ebbe Altberg by the Linden Lab board of directors, who are probably very worried that if Sansar tanks, it will take down Second Life with it.
O.K., now that we’ve looked at how well my predictions for 2019 have fared, now it’s time to peer in my crystal ball and make some new predictions for 2020.
First, all current social VR platforms and virtual worlds will struggle with a key problem: effective promotion. Getting the word out to the public about the various platforms is proving to be more and more difficult in an age of social media overload and short attention spans.
Second, every single eye will be on Facebook as they launch their new social VR platform, Facebook Horizon, early in the new year. It’s disgusting to me how even the smallest Facebook announcement gets oceans of fawning mainstream press coverage, and you can certainly expect Horizon to suck up all the oxygen in the press room when it gets closer to launch date. If Facebook Horizon, backed by the almost limitless resources and reach of its ambitious parent company, fails to take hold in 2020, then that will be the clearest indication yet that the nascent social VR industry is in trouble (and that I might be out of a job!).
Third, as I have said above, I am extremely worried about Sansar. The Sansar website has recently had a complete redesign to focus almost exclusively on live events:
It would appear that Linden Lab is going all-in on Sansar as a platform for live events, to the detriment of other features such as avatar customization (I don’t expect anything new this coming year). However, competition in the live events market in 2020 is likely to be intense, with the following products also planning to focus on hosting such events:
Upstarts such as Ceek and Redpill VR (which are in various stages of pre-development and may or may not launch in 2020);
Not to mention that Facebook will also want to muscle in on this extremely lucrative territory (with Oculus Venues, and probably Facebook Horizon, too)—and Facebook will not hesitate to ruthlessly use every tool and tactic at their disposal to achieve market dominance (including “hiding” posts about competing platforms in their Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp social network users’ newsfeeds). Facebook also has deep pockets to ink deals with major talent, locking them into exclusive deals to appear on their platforms.
Expect many skirmishes on the live events battlefield in 2020, and also expect some causalities to occur.
Fourth, Second Life will continue to coast along as it always does, still boasting approximately 600,000 regular monthly users in recently released statistics by Firestorm, and still making millions of dollars in profits, both for its content creators and for Linden Lab. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, and I see no sign of it stopping anytime soon. I predict that SL will still be around five years, perhaps even ten years, from now, and that people will still be logging in, and still merrily ransacking Advent calendars 😉 …and I will continue to blog about steals, deals, and freebies in Second Life!
Fifth, we can expect to see the upcoming Educators in VR International Summit as an example of an increasingly important use of social VR platforms in 2020: conferences. This is a natural fit, and one that saves precious resources (such as airline fuel) in an increasingly environmentally-conscious world. We can expect to see more conferences and meetings hosted in VR as an alternative to real-world meetings (although, as High Fidelity found out, the remote workteams support marketplace isn’t quite there yet, since the vast majority of companies still expect their employees to show up to their offices rather than work remotely from home). I think it’s going to take another generation for that shift to take effect in any widespread fashion.
Sixth: those social VR platforms which currently lack an in-world economy, currency, and a marketplace for user-created content, will be moving towards implementing those features. VRChat already has a booming off-world economy in the creation and sale of custom avatars. We already know that both VRChat and Rec Room are making plans in this area, based on job postings on their websites, but we can also expect other platforms to take this step, taking their cues from the continuing success of the mature, fully-evolved in-world economy of Second Life.
Platforms where people can make money tend to attract droves of new users, appealing to their greed and the universal desire to strike it rich (Decentraland as a more recent example; although its continued success is not 100% guaranteed, investors have sunk a lot of money into it, and it will be interesting to see how this ultimate expression of virtual, cut-throat capitalism will evolve and grow over the next year).
Finally, at some point Apple (and other companies, including Facebook) will launch the first consumer-oriented augmented reality headsets. The over-hyped Magic Leap One has turned out to be rather underwhelming (and underselling) so far, but who knows? Perhaps future AR products may ignite consumer interest, and have an as-yet-unknown impact on the current crop of social VR platforms.
Perhaps the big bet we all placed on virtual reality has been misplaced? We won’t know the answer to that hypothetical question until at least another decade has passed. Of course, some social VR platforms may decide to extend support to whatever AR/MR/XR hardware becomes available in the future, too. Anything can happen.
So these are my social VR/virtual world predictions for 2020. Please check back in a year, and we’ll see just how accurate I was!
