I have had two passions in my life: libraries and social VR/virtual worlds. And I have been able to embrace and express both of my passions, both as an academic librarian (my paying job) and as a social VR/virtual worlds explorer and blogger (my hobby).
Librarians at my university are members of the faculty union, and like professors, we have an opportunity and an obligation to do “research, scholarly activities, and creative work”, as our collective agreement states. My work on this blog, and on the Metaverse Newscast show, actually forms a part of that “research, scholarly activities, and creative work”. (Yes, it is even written down on my list of goals this year!)
And I have started to develop a reputation as an expert on the ever-growing and evolving world of social virtual reality, which is informed by my hobby and my passion. In fact, I just learned this afternoon that I am going to receive the first formal recognition of that role, an honorary title from the Virtual Existence Society, to be given at a special awards ceremony on December 1st, 2019!
We are a group of like-minded individuals who find value in the practice of virtual embodiment and the philosophy of virtual existentialism, and want to preserve, and promote those things.
The purpose of this society is to preserve and promote our shared belief and values by the means of passively strengthening our members’ faith in them through philosophical formulation and understanding of those values, and actively participating in activities aimed to preserve and promote said belief and values.
The society also conducts activities aimed to preserve and promote virtual world platforms to which it resides in (e.g. Second Life).
My blogposts about Second Life are far more popular than those about Sansar
I am only a couple of blogposts away from my next milestone on this blog: 1,500 blogposts. And it’s probably as good a time as any to calculate some quick statistics on what topics have proven to be the most popular in the two and a half years I have been blogging about (as I state in my blog’s tagline) “news and views on social VR, virtual worlds and the metaverse”.
My coverage of the various social VR platforms and virtual worlds has been quite uneven, with most of my blogging focused on three metaverse platforms to date:
Sansar (the reason I started this blog in the first place)
High Fidelity
Second Life (with a focus on freebies)
Of my Top 100 most viewed blogposts since I started this blog on July 31, 2017, you might be interested to learn:
36 were about Second Life
10 were about virtual reality in general
9 were about Sansar
7 were about VRChat
5 were about High Fidelity
4 were about Decentraland
What I find interesting is that there is absolutely no correlation between how often I cover a social VR/virtual world on my blog, and how popular those blogposts are. For example, I write about VRChat much less often than I do about Sansar, yet the VRChat posts are more popular overall. I have written less frequently about Decentraland than High Fidelity over the years, yet more people tend to visit my blogposts about Decentraland.
All this has led me to do some thinking about making changes to what I write about on this blog. In particular, I want to put more effort into covering those platforms which:
show consistently higher levels of usage according to publicly published statistics such as Steam, or
show higher levels of reader interest based on my own WordPress statistics, or
What this means is, going forward, I will be starting to pull back on my formerly heavy coverage of both High Fidelity and Sansar. Both the concurrent usage statistics from places like Steam, and my WordPress stats, tell me that people don’t seem to be as interested in those platforms, so why am I continually writing about them? I do not kid myself that I am going to be able to convince people into visiting platforms like Sansar and High Fidelity via my blog, and frankly, it’s not my job to do their promotion for them. I should be writing more about the state of the metaverse as it currently exists, and spend less time trying to encourage people onto less popular platforms. Therefore, I think it’s time to reign in my coverage of Sansar and High Fidelity.
(As a side note, one of the first changes I see in Sansar, since last week’s announcement of a new focus on live events, is that the number of Product Meetups has been cut in half, to biweekly from weekly. Of course, if you don’t expect to have as many new features coming out in future client updates, it makes perfect sense to have fewer Product Meetups, where those features tend to be discussed. Daily Community Meetups have also been cut to Mondays and Wednesdays.)
Also, I will start paying more attention to those platforms which meet at least one of the three criteria I have mentioned earlier:
Second Life (which is clearly still the most popular part of my blog)
VRChat
Rec Room
AltspaceVR
Decentraland
My coverage of Second Life will now expand a little bit from the initial focus on Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies, in that I will be commenting more on a variety of topics relating to SL, particularly more announcements of changes to the platform by Linden Lab, and more editorials.
I will also start to write more often about other platforms which I have visited too infrequently, in an effort to even out my coverage of social VR/virtual worlds and provide a better overall picture of the evolving metaverse to my readers:
Sinespace
Somnium Space
Cryptovoxels
NeosVR
Mozilla Hubs
And, whether or not I am invited to participate in the closed beta early next year, I will of course be writing extensively about Facebook Horizon!
I realize that this decision might be a disappointment to both Linden Lab and High Fidelity (or, perhaps, a relief, given how I have criticized both Sansar and HiFi in the past). But I think it’s time to adjust my blog to the current market realities, much the same as the companies themselves have seen fit to make significant changes this year.
In the days of the old Cold War, American spies, historians, and Sovietologists would spend hours poring over published pictures of Communist party gatherings (such as the annual May Day parade rostrums) with magnifying glasses, trying to figure out who was in and out of favour among the ruling class: who was a new and rising star, and who had fallen from power, perhaps even banished to the Gulag.
A tried-and-true tactic (used to parse previous Linden Lab layoffs in the past) has been to check the ratings and stories of recently-laid-off employees posted to the Glassdoor website. One such review, posted Oct. 31st, 2019, states:
I worked at Linden Lab full-time for more than 5 years
Pros: Some hard working people who were trying to do the right thing and ship a compelling project.
Cons: Exec leadership is inept beyond belief. No clue about the product they’re in charge of or the industry they’re a part of. Sansar had a chance to shine, but leaders who were too scared to make important decisions, constant pivots, and wasting too much time building unnecessary tech spelled it’s doom. CEO was an old friend of the chairman of the board who got the job due to nepotism. CPO was useless.
Advice to Management: Fire yourselves.
Yee-ouch!Well, if I were suddenly and unexpectedly laid off, I would be probably be that bitter too. But the overarching complaint here is one that is often lobbed at Linden Lab: that the company has had great difficulty explaining exactly what purpose Sansar was intended to fill.
(Also a note: of course the board of directors is going to rely on their existing social network to find and hire a CEO! That is hardly a crime. And overall, Ebbe Altberg seems to have done a much better job as CEO of Linden Lab than many of his predecessors, as far as I can tell.)
So, all the hue and cry is pretty much over now, and the people who have been let go have packed their boxes and left the premises. Now what?
Well, now that the marketing people (as opposed to the engineers) are firmly in control of the Good Ship Sansar, I think that we can expect what we were clearly told at the Friday Product Meetup: the new focus will be on live events, with a secondary focus on socialization and communication tools, and providing a better on-boarding experience to new users. Anything that does not support those primary and secondary foci, such as further avatar customization and gamification/questing options, will likely be pushed back, or taken off the software development roadmap completely.
Frankly, a new focus on live events is a pretty canny move for Linden Lab. It also helps define more clearly the purpose of the platform (which, as I have said above, is a core problem Sansar has had from the very beginning).
And Linden Lab wouldn’t have to look very far afield to find talent; it is right under their noses in Second Life! SL has been a fantastic incubator for countless musical performers, some of whom have gone on to achieve real-life success, stepping out from behind their avatar.
If I were Sheri Bryant, I would set up a formal program to try and encourage many of the talented live performers who entertain audiences in various venues in Second Life, to consider using Sansar as a new platform to attract a whole new audience. We have already seen this happen to a limited degree with events that Alfy and others have organized in Sansar; why not pull out all the stops and take it a step further?
Of course, I expect there will also be a big push to bring in small, medium, and big-name artists from the real world. Sansar was already off to a good start in that department; I’m quite sure they already have plans in the works for many future concerts and events.
And, as I have said before, I expect that Linden Lab will continue to cultivate selected social media influencers in an effort to get the word out. It’s the best bang for their advertising dollar in this digital age, in my opinion. Like it or hate it, social media is here to stay, and influencers have power.
So, what do you think will happen next? What do you see in the tea leaves for Sansar? Please feel free to leave a comment on this blogpost. Also, there’s the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, the world’s first cross-worlds discussion forum! I’d like to extend an invitation to have you join us and participate in the many discussions and debates that take place there.
It will mean a lot of attention will be placed on the Sansar events system going forward.However, it does not mean work on other features / capabilities is being abandoned, although some will be re-prioritized and may be pushed back in terms of possible deployment time frames.
Now, we both listened to the same Twitch livestream, since we both were not actually present at the Friday Product Meetup. But I still think we heard somewhat different things. I heard that further avatar customization work will be halted in the new focus on live events; she heard that it will be “re-prioritized”. I guess we’re going to find out who’s right and who’s wrong over the next few weeks (and, of course, if I am wrong, I will certainly admit to it). But I listened to that whole livestream (twice), and I was left with a feeling of unease, a sense of unease that is shared by many Sansar users with whom I have spoken this weekend.
On Friday, November 1st, the Sansar Team held their weekly Product Meeting, which provided to be an event of two parts: an overview of the next Sansar release, which I’ve covered in my usual Sansar Product Meeting summary format, and confirmation that Sansar’s development is undergoing a change in emphasis in a drive to try to establish a much broader audience.
In short, and as noted by Sansar’s Community Manager, Galileo, and the Lab’s Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, Sheri Bryant (aka CowboyNinja in Sansar), who now takes up the role of Sansar’s General Manager¹, the Lab plans to focus a lot more on building-out Sansar’s ability to run “live” events within virtual spaces.
…
It’s a decision that was actually presaged in October, when IQ ran an article in which Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg and Sheri Bryant were interviewed about the Lab’s intentions with “live” events in Sansar. As such, I wasn’t actually overly surprised to hear about the shift in emphasis, although others may have missed that piece. Certainly, the announcement has received a negative reaction from some, and has been – wrongly, I would suggest – characterised as akin to High Fidelity’s abrupt change of direction that occurred earlier this year…
I say “wrongly”, because while this is a change in emphasis, it is not in any way a shuttering / move any from anything within Sansar in the way High Fidelity’s change of direction was.
And (of course) Inara caught something that I didn’t: that Sheri Bryant and CowboyNinja Linden are one and same person! D’oh! Which would, of course, explain why they were both called the new General Manager of Sansar. (Like I said, I am not the best at note-taking.) But I still want to know: what the hell happened to Landon Linden, who was originally charged with steering this project? He just vanished off the map—poof!
So Inara and I do agree that the Sansar pivot is not like the High Fidelity pivot in terms of its size and significance, something I said in my original blogpost. However, where we part ways is in her next few statements:
It also does not mean that other improvements for the platform are in any way being closed or abandoned – although it does mean that some are being re-prioritized and are seeing their possible deployment time-frames pushed back.
This latter point is likely why there has been some negativity around the announcement: for much of 2019 the emphasis has been on developing Sansar’s gaming / questing capabilities, and these have reached a point where they are being actively and imaginatively being leveraged. Given that push to develop them and get creators excited by them, to apparently make a sudden track switch is bound to leave some feeling a little, “wait – what?”
Similarly, there has been a push to give the Sansar avatar a complete overhaul, with more being promised – particularly full body deformation and custom skin textures. It had been suggested these might appear before the end of 2019 – but they are now timetabled for delivery “in 2020”. So this again is likely to be grating on people. But that said, it is true that, insofar as encouraging people into Sansar to attend events, Avatar 2.0 doesn’t appear to have been any kind of barrier – and it might be argued that it is more important for Sansar to gain a broader and deeper user base than it is to keep iterating on new features and capabilities within the avatar system – particularly if there are relatively few people around to use it.
…
So to me, the shift in emphasis perhaps isn’t as upsetting as it appears to have been to others – but then, I’m simply not as invested in Sansar as some, which also should be taken into account. Certainly, and as I’ve previously argued, I don’t think a push to establish a presence in the “virtual events market” given the capabilities Sansar does have is not a bad thing. And, as I’ve noted in Sansar: music entertainment with some sundry thoughts, even if it doesn’t massively drive up the platform’s concurrency on its own, it could nevertheless contribute to doing so; what’s more, it could open the platform up to broader “repeat” audiences from a range of potential sectors and so help the Lab generate revenue from those sectors through a variety of means.
So, basically, Inara is taking the calm, measured, moderate approach, and I am taking the ring-the-alarm-bells approach. (Hey, I admit it.) Maybe after what happened with High Fidelity, I am in doomsday mode. I wouldn’t say that I am the only one who’s thinking that way, though.
And I did not hear that Avatar 2.0 was being pushed back to 2020; to my ears it sounded more like the work had been completely halted, and I am not the only one who heard that message in the question and answer session that took place afterward. Maybe it’s a case of hearing what we are listening for, and (perhaps) inaccurately reading in-between the lines of what was actually said; Inara’s notes clearly state that:
Does the shift in focus mean that avatar improvements are now on the back-burner? The current avatar system is seen as “relatively robust” and suitable for things like attending events. While the focus will be on the development of features around events / events management, avatars will remain central to Sansar’s development – they just won’t be a subject of focus in the immediate future. Nothing is being taken away from the plans for future avatar development. This does mean that full body deformation, that had been viewed as possibly being a Q4 2019 (October-December) release has been pushed back to a 2020 release, but no clear indication of when.
So, who the hell knows anymore?!?? The only people who doknow, aren’t talking (at least, not yet). And I am hereby hanging up my note-taking pad and pencil, and leaving any further work in that area to others who listen better than I do.
