There’s been a very interesting discussion taking place today on the RyanSchultz Discord server. One of the regular contributors to the many conversations that take place there, Michael Zhang, pulled together the following information from Crunchbase:
Today I Learned: Building social VR, MMOs, and virtual worlds are a lot more expensive than I imagined!
From Crunchbase:
-High Fidelity raised $72.9 million over five rounds and is struggling with their recent pivot to enterprise. -Rec Room raised $29 million over two rounds, $24 million only recently, so they lived off of $5 million for several years. -Altspace raised $15.7 million over three rounds, went bankrupt and shut down, then revived when bought by Microsoft. -Bigscreen raised $14 million over two rounds. -TheWaveVR raised $12.5 million over three rounds. -vTime raised $7.6 million over one round. -VRChat raised $5.2 million over two rounds. -JanusVR raised $1.6 million over two rounds. -Somnium Space raised $1 million over two rounds.
In comparison:
-Epic Games raised $1.6 billion over two rounds, $1.25 billion coming after Fortnite. -Mojang’s Minecraft launched in 2003, started making profits in 2007, earned $237.7 million in revenue by 2012, and sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. (Wikipedia) -Roblox raised $187.5 million over seven rounds. -Linden Lab’s Second Life raised $19 million over two rounds.
Then, another contributor named Jin put together this graph to illustrate how successful the various social VR platforms have been in raising venture capital (please click on this picture to see it in full size on Flickr, or just click here). As you can see, High Fidelity is far and away the leader in raising money!
(In comparison, Decentraland raised 24 million dollars in their initial coin offering. Jin also made a second chart including Decentraland, but I have not included it here because, unlike the other platforms, it does not currently support VR, and it is unlikely to do so anytime in the near future.)
Thank you to Michael Zhang and to Jin for their work!
Somnium Space is planning to release version 2.0 of their social VR platform to the general public right after their Initial Land Offering in early October of this year, according to a conversation I had with Artur Sychov, Somnium Space’s founder. (Backers of their successful IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign will be able to get an advance look at the platform.)
At Somnium Space, we are fundamentally against pure gimmicks. That is why we have taken our time to thoroughly design and incorporate blockchain into our VR world from the ground up. We did not do any ICO’s, IPO’s or any other public offering based on shiny promises and so called “white papers”. Instead, we have invested our own money and hard work to firstly build a real and existing VR world, then we raised a very healthy seed round from VC’s [venture capitalists] to ensure stability of operations for our company and as a final step we are bringing this technology to you — Somnium players / citizens by having our Initial Land Offering. But that’s not it. We have also partnered with companies which are recognizable leaders in the blockchain industry to make sure, that our process of ILO (Initial Land Offering auction) is well designed, programmed and executed. It is time to give you the power to truly own part of Somnium land and start creating, monetizing and enjoying true VR metaverse without a fear of losing it all one day. You can finally plan for a very long-term future inside Somnium Space and build this incredible world of your dreams together with all of us.
So what is [an] ILO? [An] Initial Land Offering auction is a process which will take place within couple of months (precise dates will be revealed very soon, so stay tuned). During this public auction Somnium Space will auction off all available (tokenized on blockchain) parcels on the Somnium Space map. In total, there are 5000 parcels on Somnium Map, 500 of those are already taken by our early supporters and backers, but [the] rest, 4500, are available for anyone to own.
Somnium Space land map (parcels in red are already reserved)
This morning I decided to spend a little time in my Oculus Rift visiting three social VR platforms that I have not spent a lot of time in recently: Oculus Home, Somnium Space, and Sinespace.
Oculus Home
I was genuinely curious about Oculus Home after David Hall posted his video to YouTube, so I made sure to spend some time exploring it and learning about its new features. Basically, you can design your own home (even import your own content now), create multiple homes, and visit other people’s homes. You can set any of your homes to private, friends only, or public.
The software is still a little bit buggy. Multiple times I tried to favourite other people’s homes which I liked and wanted to be able revisit later, but it would not save my choices. Moving around is a bit cumbersome at first, but you can change the default teleport to walk and the default snap turning to smooth turning, so once I was able to fiddle with the settings a bit I felt a little more comfortable. I also encountered a few sticking points in the tutorials, which also could use a bit of tweaking.
Another problem is finding places to explore. There is a Recommended list of homes under Places in the pop-up menu, but it’s rather short (perhaps not many people have set their homes to public yet). Oculus Home is not really set up yet to allow you to easily browse other people’s experiences as you already can in Sansar with the Sansar Atlas, which is sortable in various ways (most popular, recently created, etc.).
And, in what I call “the VRChat/Rec Room problem”, there appear to be a lot of children and immature adults on the platform. Yes, there is asshattery, tomfoolery, and trolling already! It’s hardly surprising, really. After all, anyone who owns an Oculus Rift VR headset has access to Oculus Home.
However, I cannot deny that the experiences I visited were beautifully rendered, especially at the highest graphics settings in the options. I am eager to see where Facebook/Oculus takes this.
Somnium Space
I always have the same problem whenecer I try to start Somnium Space: I can’t remember the automatically-generated password! So I had to go through the whole rigamarole of resetting my password. This time I made sure to check the “remember password” option!
Unlike most other social VR platforms, Somnium Space appears to be one large landmass (mostly empty at this point). There’s a few places to explore, like a seaside town, a working bowling alley, and a shopping mall, but not a lot else yet.
There’s a very handy snapshot feature in Somnium Space which I used to take some in-world photos, but unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you what directory it is saving them to on your hard drive! After hunting around fruitlessly for fifteen minutes, I simply gave up.
There are also teleporters which tell you that can actually use them to teleport from Somnium Space to High Fidelity, JanusVR, and AltspaceVR, but they don’t work. Or at least, I couldn’t figure out how to work them. I gave up on that too.
When I first tried Sinespace in VR last May, it was seriously buggy. I am sorry to report that the situation has not improved any. To enable VR mode in Sinespace, you have to download a special beta OpenVR client, install it, open it, make sure you enable OpenVR in the user settings and then restart the client software. (A bit fussy, in my opinion, compared to the seamless switching between desktop mode and VR mode in competing platforms like Sansar and High Fidelity.)
I found the level of jitteriness to be so severe that I had to take off my VR headset after only a couple of minutes before I got sick. In addition to that, whenever I teleported anywhere, I landed up facing the opposite direction from where I started. The user interface menus are positioned too close to your eyes. At one point, I was looking at the backside of the Explore menu! I could go on, but you get the idea: this is simply not ready for prime time yet. I was actually very disappointed.
UPDATE 9:03 p.m.: Well, I asked on the official Somnium Space Discord server, and someone told me where to find the snaphots I had taken (they were saved to the C:/Users/[username]/Documents/Somnium Space/Tablet Camera folder):
My avatar in Somnium SpaceThe teleporter I couldn’t get to work 🙁
But before I do that, I want to show you my blog viewer statistics. Notice the HUGE spike in viewers for three consecutive days? Almost all of that traffic was to the original blogpost! I’ve never seen anything like it.
At first, I was excited. And then, I got suspicious. While that particular blogpost eventually got 5,456 views (making it my most-viewed blogpost of all time!), the actual number of votes in my poll did not see a corresponding spike (only 220 votes in total were cast).
I had deliberately designed my poll so that repeat voters were blocked by website cookie and IP address, so obviously, either I was getting a lot of repeat voters, or a lot of visitors were not submitting their vote. And that huge spike in traffic was from locations all over the world, but there were many viewers from a lot of countries that to date had not been frequent visitors before: Turkey, Brazil, Russia, Romania, Colombia. I suspect that my poll was hit by a swarm of bots.
It would appear that SOMEONE was trying to sway (or spoil) my poll. The surge in traffic to that particular blogpost ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. The question is: why would anyone bother?
Anyway, time to announce the results of my poll. A total of 220 votes were received:
POLL RESULTS: What Social VR/Virtual World Do You Spend the Most Time In?
Sansar (43 votes)
Second Life (38)
OpenSim/Halcyon grids (23)
Somnium Space (16)
VRChat (15)
High Fidelity (14)
NeosVR (10)
Occupy White Walls (8)
Cryptovoxels (7)
Sinespace(7)
Engage (6)
AltspaceVR (5)
TheWaveVR (4)
Anyland(2)
Mozilla Hubs (2)
Oculus Rooms (2)
vTime XR (2)
The following platforms all got one vote each:
Active Worlds
Bigscreen
Hyperfair VR
JanusVR
3DX Chat
And there were two unique write-in ballots*:
Anarchy Arcade: “It’s social not like chat, but by exploring people’s collections.”
Pix-Life (I have absolutely no idea what this is, and Google was no help. Does anybody know what this is?)
*Note to OpenSim/Halcyon fans: YOU DO NOT READ INSTRUCTIONS!!!! I simply added all your OpenSim write-ins to the OpenSim total above. Next time, PLEASE PAY ATTENTION. Your particular OpenSim/Halcyon grid is not a special, unique snowflake. Thank you.
Now, I am not going to read too much into these poll results. If anything, they are more a picture of my current blog readership (which tends to skew heavily towards Sansar and Second Life users). And I’m not going to kid myself: I’m sure a few platforms urged their users to vote in this poll. This is far from a scientific survey. I was a little surprised that Second Life did not get first place in my poll, though.
So, what do you think of the poll results? Please feel free to leave a comment below, thank you!
