The Federated HiFi Users group, which was founded after High Fidelity’s abrupt pivot away from the consumer market towards building a virtual reality platform for remote business teams (details here and here), has started up a brand new user forum:
Hey there, welcome to our FHU forums. Maki and I have set this forum up at our own expense as a free resource for members of the Federated High Fidelity User group. There is no central official group heading the federation, we are an unofficial circle of folks with a common interest in the promotion and well-being of High-Fidelity based open source VR.
Or, as Maki told me on the Federated HiFi Users Dicord server:
It’s not affiliated with HiFi at all, just the little of what’s left of us.
High Fidelity’s community base is almost certainly shrinking as people abandon the platform, yet at the same time what community remains appears to be splintering into factions. There’s a definite sense of “us versus them” between High Fidelity and its users lately. This is tragic.
The current sad state of affairs is best illustrated by something that happened to me last Friday. Early that afternoon, I had been in contact with a magazine writer who was planning to write a story about virtual reality, and who asked me (via my blog) about people she could interview in an upcoming trip to San Francisco. I suggested she pay a visit to both Linden Lab and High Fidelity, and interview Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg and High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale.
I posted a request to the official Sansar Discord, and within ten minutes, a Linden Lab employee was in touch with me and gave me the name of a contact within the company that I could pass on to the writer.
And High Fidelity? After posting requests for assistance on both Discord servers and the official High Fidelity user forums, and waiting all afternoon for someone from the company to get back to me, I finally posted in exasperation:
Is there NOBODY from High Fidelity monitoring these forums?!?? I got a response back from Linden Lab within half an hour, with the name of a contact person. I’ve been waiting all afternoon and nobody from HiFi has given me the name of a contact person that this writer could set up a meeting with.
Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!?? This is potential marketing for your platform.
Eventually, one person (someone not associated with the company) suggested I message Jazmin Cano, High Fidelity’s User Engagement Manager, on Twitter, which I finally did late Friday evening. Jazmin was able to provide me with information that I could pass on to the writer.
High Fidelity’s community manager, Emily, did finally get back to me on Monday morning—a whole weekend later. It seems pretty clear that HiFi staff are not monitoring the Discord servers or the official community forums on a regular basis. And I don’t blame Emily or any one person for this current state of affairs. This is a sad case where the company has pretty much completely abandoned its original user base, the raving fans who were the platform’s best advertisement.
Handled properly, these people could have been High Fidelity’s ambassadors to the business community they now want to woo so desperately. Instead, HiFi’s users are now openly revolting against the company, setting up their own means of communication because they don’t trust that High Fidelity has their best interests at heart, or perhaps they worry that the company will yank what few services remain to them. Their trust in the company has been shattered. This is a textbook example of how to alienate your customers, something that should be studied at business schools. And it was all completely avoidable.
Seriously, what the hell is going on over at High Fidelity?!?? All I ever see lately are nice tweets extolling the joys and virtues of remote working on Twitter. Hardly something compelling enough to tempt businesses to jump on board.
I would dearly love to know which businesses have already bought into their repurposed VR platform to so far, especially in a market crowded with over a dozen competing products. And I don’t see a lot of companies out there investing in remote workers, do you? This might be a thing in hyper-expensive San Francisco, but I’m not really seeing it happen in any sort of mainstream way. It might just be that this is still too tiny a market segment to pin the company’s fortunes on.
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!
Last Friday, at the weekly General Assembly meeting, Philip Rosedale made two major announcements:
High Fidelity was immediately (i.e. within the next 24 hours) closing down all its public domains, with the exception of a small Welcome domain for new users; and
Here is an hour-long livestream of that meeting, which you might want to watch in full to understand what is going on:
Philip Rosedale explains the abrupt change in direction (these quotes are taken directly from the YouTube livestream of last Friday’s meeting):
We are going to close down all our public spaces. We’re gonna do that after this meeting, before the end of the week… First of all, we are not a social VR game… This is not a chat application where we get people together and hanging around in a room talking to each other. High Fidelity is designed to be a platform anticipating the very broad use of VR across the internet for things like this.. going to work, going to school, doing all kinds or different things.
And we’re certainly doing our very best to get that started, but we sort of feel lately… a couple of things have happened that make us feel we are making a mistake by running the biggest servers… We feel like we are actively doing a disservice to everyone by running these public spaces. Instead, what we ought to have is you guys running your own spaces…
At least as an experiment, but hopefully, as a good call, and we’re going to do it in the next day or so, is we’re going to shut everything down, except for a help space for new users… but it will be a tiny space, and we aren’t going to let anybody hang out there.
Some users at the meeting were understandably quite upset about this change. Philip went on to respond:
One of the problems that VR has right now… the most popular VR app in the world is Beat Saber… the number [of concurrent users] is going to be about 700. So one important thing is that in the prior year, not only have we failed to get 1,000 [user] concurrency, but so has everybody else. Now, VRChat has 1,000 concurrency… but I don’t hang out there a lot… But I don’t think that the experience you have in VRChat is yet my vision of a real virtual world.
Second, by shutting down our public servers, I actually make the prediction that there will be… more people concurrent across the servers that you guys run than us. So I’m not saying that we’re giving up on the servers, I’m saying that I want you to run them.
Philip added that nobody is really making any money from social VR right now:
Given the number of people that we have…let’s add to it Anyland and Neos[VR], and for that matter even Rec Room, even though that’s much more of a game. Let’s actually add all those people together into one product. That company will not survive. There’s not enough revenue… Everybody here that’s having such a good time…you guys need to pay us US$10,000 a month for us to keep the company going, indefinitely into the future, for us to basically be a positive cash-flow company, as we say here in the Valley. And everybody else in VR right now is faced by that.
Now there’s two ways to think about that. This is one of these ego-threatening things so that it’s hard to see clearly, to look at it objectively. Way number one is to say, it’s just that there’s too many bugs in this High Fidelity thing. If they just fix the bugs, why, people would fall out of the sky like cats and dogs into here. If that were true, you’d see them falling into somewhere else. And what’s happening is that the open-platform system we have here isn’t attracting very many people in this day and age. And so we’ve gotta ponder what to do about that.
One thing to do, which all the companies have been doing… is better support for desktop users. Because any assessment of the rate of progress on HMDs is a sobering one… they are not selling enough to create a general-purpose community that is both interesting and profitable… So, it’s really important to recognize, that through no fault of our collective selves… it’s not working. This model is not working right now. The flat world that is an open building environment, is not compelling enough as it stands right now, for the number of HMDs that are out there, to get lift off. And so we’ve gotta think hard about that.
It is going to work, believe me. I’ve worked my whole life on this and I’m quite certain, I know it’s ultimately going to happen. I’m just saying to your guys, just fixing the bugs we have… is not likely to get us or any other company to cash-flow break even…It’s also got to be enough to move you guys to make great content. There should be 15, 20, 50 people around the table right now making a living in here. And we’re not there yet. So we gotta figure that out.
Philip also compared his experiences with Second Life and High Fidelity:
You guys, this is not Second Life in 2004. Second Life actually took off like a rocket, once it got working. Even though it had tons and tons of problems… but it took off like an absolute rocket. And the reason that it did, I think, was that this experience of bringing a lot of people together and letting them build things together live, well, in the time frame when we built Second Life, it had never, ever been seen by anyone. It was the most exceptional, jaw-dropping thing that anybody had ever seen except in science fiction.
The problem we have today is that that’s just not true. The internet affords us many, many, many, many different ways to be together as people, for example, or just to chat. And so one of the things we are up against here is that there is not as much of a genesis moment with something Like High Fidelity or, for that matter, something like VRChat. Coming online you just don’t have the kind of meme in the sense of a grand or cultural meme kind of written out there like Second Life did. That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to make it. It simply means that we have to be more clever and the strategy that we use to get people in here has to be somewhat different.
I have checked and all of the previously popular domains hosted by High Fidelity are indeed gone:
Avatar Island (which was supposed to be a showcase for in-world shopping)
The Spot (a beautifully designed central meeting place used for many monthly stress testing events)
The problem I have with this abrupt switch is that these domains were all shut down within 24 hours of the announcement, which left High Fidelity users scrambling to set up alternative places to meet (and the GOTO option on the tablet UI does not make it easy to find new places). I really do believe that High Fidelity could have handled this transition more smoothly.
Caitlyn Meeks, who until recently was a Strategic Evangelist and Director of Content at High Fidelity, told me:
High Fidelity is rightly getting out of the content business, and instead focusing on developing software. Consider this like Netscape focusing on browser development, not hosting web sites. The future lies with the individuals, companies and organizations who will create the Craigslists and Yahoos and Penny Arcades of the VR WWW. I think personally it’s a good move, because software engineering is what they do well. And rather than having users circling around a handful of company hosted domains, and saying “huh this is boring”, the onus of content creation is shifted to the individuals and organizations out in the wild. It’s actually quite exciting. It’s ours. High Fidelity made the technology and has given it to us. It’s ours to develop. We can drop it and ignore it and let it peter out. Or make something as truly wild and decentralized as the World Wide Web. It’s abrupt and shocking, but it’s for the better. And we’re going to see a lot of innovation.
We’re going to have our first Federated Users group meeting on Thursday at hifi://makerbox at 2:00 p.m. PST, you’re welcome to come and join in. It’s an extremely exciting time.
In a private conversation later, she added:
High Fidelity has a fixed amount of runway left in its budget before it is unable to sustain itself. And Philip believes he can’t get the plane in the air by then with the current business model of serving content creators in the model of his original vision: an open and growing metaverse. The one thing High Fidelity does quite well however is facilitate group communication in virtual spaces, like the town hall meetings they (used) to hold weekly. While there are numerous problems on other aspects of the platform, this particular part has worked well, generally. And has potentially profitable application for group (especially business-to-business) communication. They’ve decided to shift away from community content creator focus, and instead are beginning to do some R&D as they investigate the potential for using the technology in virtual world meeting spaces.
The decision to stop the community meetings, to stop hosting High Fidelity served domains like The Spot, and to sunset High Fidelity operated events, are just functions of them winding down this creator-community-centric model, and instead focusing on what will be a new target market. As for me, personally, I intend to help foster ongoing development of the open-source HiFi platform and perhaps even go into business for myself offering some much-needed supplemental services. I’d intend to pick up the opportunities they are dropping.
As I see it, this is just the beginning of a movement, though. I really think there’s an opportunity. I intend to help make it run wild! 🙂
To learn more about the federated HiFi users movement, you can join their Discord server.
