Tag: Steam

Editorial: My Social VR/Virtual World Predictions for 2019

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Time to peer into that crystal ball and make some predictions!

First: Second Life is going to continue to coast along, baffling the mainstream news media and the general public with its vitality and longevity. It will continue to be a reliable cash cow for Linden Lab as they put a portion of that profit into building Sansar. And I also predict that the ability to change your first and last names in SL will prove very popular—and also very lucrative for Linden Lab! Remember, they’ve got seven years of pent-up demand for this feature. (I have a couple of avatars myself that I’d like to rename.)

Second: An unexpected but potentially ground-breaking development in OpenSim was the announcement of the release of a virtual reality OpenSim viewer to the open source community at the 2018 OpenSim Community Conference. There’s still lots of technical work left to do, but if they can successfully pull this off, it could mean a new era for OpenSim.

Third: I confidently predict that one or more blockchain-based virtual worlds are going to fold. Not Decentraland; there’s too much money tied up in that one to fail. But several cryptocurrency-based virtual worlds are starting to look like trainwrecks of epic proportions (and I’m looking at you, Staramaba Spaces/Materia.One). Somebody still needs to explain to me why people will want to pay to hang out with 3D-scanned replicas of Paris Hilton and Hulk Hogan. The business model makes absolutely no sense to me. Another one that I think is going to struggle in 2019 is Mark Space.

Fourth: I also predict that one or more adult/sex-oriented virtual worlds are going to fail (yes, I’m looking at you, Oasis). I’ve already gone into the reasons why even the best of them are going to find it hard to compete against the entrenched front-runner, Second Life.

Fifth: High Fidelity and Sansar will continue their friendly rivalry as both social VR platforms hold splashy events in the new year. (I’m really sorry I missed the recent preview of Queen Nefertari’s tomb in HiFi, but it looks as though there will be many other such opportunities in 2019.) And High Fidelity will continue to boast of new records in avatar capacity at well-attended events (it certainly helps that they’ve got those venture-capital dollars to spend, to offer monetary enticements for users to pile on for stress testing).

Sixth: the Oculus Quest VR headset will ignite the long-awaited boom in virtual reality that the analysts have been predicting for years. There; I’ve said it! And those social VR platforms which support Oculus Quest users will benefit.

Seventh: Linden Lab’s launch of Sansar on Steam will likely have only a modest impact on overall usage of the platform. I’m truly sorry to have to write this prediction, because I love Sansar, but we’ve got statistics we can check, and they are not looking terribly encouraging at the moment. And where is the “significant ad spend” that was promised at one of the in-world product meetups back in November? Now that they’ve pulled the trigger and launched on Steam, it’s time to promote the hell out of Sansar, using every means at Linden Lab’s disposal. Paying bounties to Twitch livestreamers is not enough.

And Facebook? If they thought 2018 was a bad year, I predict that we’re going to see even more scandals uncovered in 2019 by news organizations such as the New York Times. And more people (like me) will decide that they’ve had enough of being sold to other corporations and data-mined to within an inch of their lives, and jump ship. The public relations people at Facebook are going to face a lot of sleepless nights…

And, still on the same topic, we might yet see the launch of a new social VR platform backed by Facebook, after they decide to ditch the lamentable Facebook Spaces once and for all. Maybe it will be based on Oculus Rooms; maybe it will be something completely different. But despite my negative feelings about the social networking side of Facebook, they still have the hardware (Oculus), the money, and the reach to be a game-changer in social VR. (Just not with Facebook Spaces. At this point, they should just kill the project and start over. Any improvements will be like putting lipstick on a pig.)

Finally, I predict that the RyanSchultz.com blog will head off into new and rather unexpected directions (that is, if the past 12 months’ activity is any indication!). I never expected to cover blockchain-based virtual worlds, or Second Life freebies; they just kind of happened.  Expect more of the same in 2019, as various new topics catch my interest.

Sansar on Steam: Linden Lab May Be Fighting a Losing Battle Against the Thumbs-Down Crowd

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Well, the overall rating for Sansar on Steam has gone from “Positive ” to “Mostly Positive” to “Mixed” between its launch this past Wednesday and the following Sunday (in only 5 days).

The reviews are now 1/3 negative and 2/3 positive. Some of the thumbs-down reviews are by disgruntled SL users with an axe to grind. Some are trolls. Some have well-thought-out explanations of why they dislike Sansar. But it looks like the overall rating is not going to improve anytime soon. I was afraid this was going to happen.

Also, the all-time peak usage via the Steam statistics seems to be stuck at 76. Obviously, it’s still very early days though. We’ll have to wait at least a few more weeks to detect any trends.

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But it is starting to look like a similar situation might be developing to what happened when Linden Lab first launched their “open creator beta” on July 31st, 2017: a lot of people trooped in, kicked the tires, took a look around, declared themselves dissatisfied, and promptly trooped out again. (Note the slight downward trend in the overall usage stats since Wednesday on the chart above.)

Like I said, it’s really much, much to soon to make any observations. But it looks like Linden Lab is going to be facing a prolonged, losing battle with the negative reviewers.

UPDATED! Sansar on Steam: The Earliest Reviews Are In!

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Early this morning I decided to check what the reviewers on Steam are saying about Sansar (scroll to the bottom of the page), and overall, the news is pretty good! Thirty-one reviews so far (25 positive and 6 negative):

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But, as I had feared, there are some thumbs-down reviews as well:

Sansar Steam Negative Review 2 7 Dec 2018.png

Aah yes, the “but there’s nothing to do” crowd. Somehow it seems to escape certain people that you can create your own experiences and host events in Sansar, as many people already do. Don’t expect it all to be handed to you on a silver platter, my dear. If you’ve been in Second Life for 6 years you should already have learned that. Next!

And the “grainy and blurry” comment in the second negative review? Excuse me?!?? Are we occupying the same Sansar? One of Sansar’s strongest points is its strong support for good graphics and beautiful lighting. This person must have horrible internet bandwidth or a slow computer. Or maybe he’s just a troll.

Argh, I can see that I am going to have to limit my perusal of the negative reviews. It’s gonna give me an ulcer!

However, I was very pleased to see that Linden Lab is already actively responding to negative reviews:

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Linden Lab is going to need to keep on top of this. A good response can do a lot to mitigate a bad review (even though it still brings down Sansar’s overall rating on Steam).

By the way, if you are not running Sansar on Steam (i.e. you have not downloaded and installed it from Steam), then you will be unable to leave your own review or participate in the Steam Community for Sansar. Over time, that community may become more active than the official Sansar Discord server.

Also, people should know that if you install Sansar from Steam, you must use the Steam Wallet to buy Sansar dollars, and Steam gets a cut of the transaction. If you download the Sansar client directly from the Sansar website (outside of the Steam ecosystem), you can still buy Sansar dollars the same way you did before, and Steam does not get a cut of the action. That’s an important distinction to think about.

As yet, there’s no incentive for me to uninstall my current, non-Steam Sansar and reinstall it via Steam. I don’t use Steam very often and I don’t feel like giving them a cut of my transactions when I buy Sansar dollars.

And I don’t intend to post reviews; I will leave that to other people. Besides, I already have a blog where I can praise or chastise Linden Lab at length for their decisions regarding Sansar, as you might have already noticed. 😉

Interesting times ahead! And it looks like the Steam reviews page is going to be hopping with activity! In the short time that it took for me to write this blogpost, an additional three Sansar reviews were posted: two positive and one negative!

Are you thumbs-up or thumbs-down on Sansar? Feel free to leave a comment.

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Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

UPDATE Dec. 8th: Peter Valencia (a.k.a. Theanine) has left a comment with a very useful tip for those people (like me), who might want to post a review but not actually use the Steam version of Sansar:

Some longtime users of the platform may have tried to leave a review, but to do so, they need to have run Steam Sansar for at least 5 minutes. However, if you still have the old Sansar installed, you get the error message telling you to first uninstall the non-Steam installation of Sansar.

What some might not know is that you don’t even need to login. You can just leave it open for 5 minutes with that error message still displaying. Then you can post a review. That’s what I did. I won’t be using Steam Sansar either (at least for now). I just installed it and did the trick above so I could leave a review, then uninstalled it.

Thanks, Theanine! 🙂 I have tested this and it does indeed work, provided you have bought at least $5.00 on the Steam store.

Let’s Talk Stats: The Various Sansar User Statistics Now Available, and Why They Differ From Each Other

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Image by Mediamodifier on Pixabay

Now that Linden Lab has launched on Steam, we have quite a few different statistics available, some of which may which may contradict each other. Gindipple recently shared some rather encouraging statistics on the official Sansar Discord, which show an overall increasing trend in the average number of daily and monthly Sansar users:

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Galen’s live statistics page also shows an encouraging increase in peak and average Sansar visitors over time:

Galen's Sansar Statistics 6 Dec 2018.png

Gindipple’s and Galen’s statistics will differ because they take samples of the user data at different times, using a publicly available API. One may sample the data more often than another; I don’t know how often Gindipple samples the data, but Galen says he takes a sample approximately every 10 minutes.

And Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg said on the official Sansar Discord channel this morning:

Steam tracks [people] logged in via Steam. Gindipple]/Galen log people in [Sansar] experiences that are public. We [Linden Lab] count them all – regardless how they logged in, where they are or what they do. 3 different numbers where ours will always be the bigger, sum of all, number.

As far as I am aware, Linden Lab does not publish their statistics, which are internal to the company. (If this is incorrect, then could somebody from Linden Lab let me know, and then I will update this blogpost accordingly, thank you!)

Now that Sansar is on Steam, we can also get statistics which Steam collects. Steam Charts offers what it calls “an ongoing analysis of Steam’s concurrent players” (here’s the link for all the data it currently has on Sansar):

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Obviously, there’s not a lot of data yet to see yet! 😉

There’s also a more detailed statistical graph available on this page on Steam:

Sansar Steam Stats 2.png

Interestingly, please notice that the latter Steam graph gives a different 24-hour peak usage than the former (the top one says the peak usage in the past 24 hours is 65 users, while the bottom one says it is 75).

So now we have a wealth of different data showing us just how much Sansar is being used! This is a vast improvement over the early days in Sansar, where most of the time we had to guess how many people were using the platform.