Sansar — Destined to Fail, not of its’ own fault, but of expectations
Note: I have not used Sansar, and this is coming from a personal perspective as a SL user and my encounters with the platform from the outside. I welcome opinions on this post regarding your experiences with Sansar, as it will help me broaden my knowledge of the situation at hand.
I remember a while back how many were looking to Sansar as a Second Life 2.0 — Something it was never destined to be. When it was announced, people were skeptical — “Was this going to be the next Second Life?”, I bet many asked themselves and others.
The problem with this mentality is that it assumes that Sansar was designed to supplant Second Life to begin with. It wasn’t. It never was, and it never will be able to.
VIRTUAL (AND REAL) INABILITY
As I stated in my first post here on Medium, I discussed the subject of VR accessibility briefly — Something which is VR’s biggest crutch, and will be at least until the mid 2020s unless prices for hardware can be reduced, or if and when more consumers can afford the product as it is priced.
I put it perfectly in the aforementioned post as such:
VR isn’t “popular”. Is it cool? Hell yeah. If it weren’t for issues IRL, I would have a rig that can run VR and a Oculus Rfit for SL and other games, but the big issue is COST.
In the United States, According to the Internal Revenue Service, the average income (as of TY14– 2014 tax year) of the american populace is 38171 USD. That is 3181 USD a month, or 800 USD per week. By comparison, me and my mother both, on SSDI/SSSB/SSI make 2,720 USD per month. Over half of that goes to bills. The rest goes to Groceries, which leaves us a sizable amount of money, yes, but the rest is spent on miscellanous expenditures. Not to mention that in single-worker families, especially those with children, this is bound to not be the case, especially since VR is still quite niche.
Second Life’s cost of entry is still, if you use consumer grade hardware (Think mid-end consumer laptops, around 600 USD) and lowest settings and don’t mind such things, very low, especially since the price is offset by the other benefits of it if you are a gamer on a budget or want to multitask extensively without lag.
- Nodoka Hanamura, Bright yet Concerning — Second Life’s Future
Now, as far as I am aware, no major changes to hardware are coming that will result in such a price drop. One of my closest friends, a old time SL resident, Sarrah Docherty — Mentioned to me that Playstation VR is, with Third-party software, the cheapest option for VR on PC, and even then, that’s around the price of the GPU you’ll need to run in VR.
Not that I’m shitting on Sony for wanting to charge what they already are for it, I’m betting that they’re selling it at a loss, unless they’re compensating it from software licensing sales like most console manufacturers, but that’s besides the point.
The point that I’m trying to make is that the first issue, and other than the big glaring issue I mentioned initially in this post, is that VR is niche. VERY NICHE. Has it been popularized with things like Ready Player One coming to theaters? Oh hell yes, it has. Thing is, only those in the upper-middle class and above will be able to feasibly afford such hardware, at least the optimal setup of something like a GTX 1080, i7–7700, and HTC Vive setup, which would be I’d say, and I’m giving a ballpark estimate here — around 28–40% of the American Population, and a smaller 22–35% of the world population that own computers would not only have interest but have the finances to afford said hardware.
Sansar, and other VR Chat platforms suffer this issue because they don’t usually offer what other non-VR VWMMOs (Virtual World MMO) do — For instance, in Second Life, I can traverse the world in a vehicle, for miles on end. In Activeworlds, worlds can be as big as the state of California, and give the user a glimpse back at internet history, with the creations of users over 20 years ago still standing to this day. And even in some VR Platforms, like Janus VR, they provide a open platform that is easily accessible, and in the cases of my few jaunts into JanusVR, have been downright beautiful. Now this isn’t saying Sansar can’t provide that, but It seems that the Lindens made a mistake with Sansar in both timing and how they marketed and promoted it, which segue ways into the next problem with Sansar.
MISREPRESENTATION AND REALITY DISTORTION
When Ebbe and pals’ project started spreading around as rumors, the biggest one of them all was “Is this Second Life 2?”, and variations thereof. The biggest issue with this idea was that it implied that such a thing was economically feasible, not to mention suitable for the userbase to be just dropped on them without any valid justification for it. This rumor if anything, was one of the biggest factors in Sansar’s lackluster arrival on the scene — Sansar didn’t have the feature set or even a remotely similar concept to Second Life.
Second Life’s feature set may have been built up over the past decade and a half and then some, but even then, it’s still not comparable. Second Life features a full virtual world that is explorable without need for use of something like Sansar’s Atlas system. I could go from my house in the Winterlands of Sansara (the main continent in SL) to one of the biggest infohubs in Second Life, NCI Kuula, via car, via helicopter or plane, or if I’m feeling lazy or don’t want to travel conventionally, teleport, and see all sorts of things along the way. Sansar doesn’t have that. And the way it’s set up — It will never be able to have that, not without some massive backend and client overhaul which I could never see Linden Lab doing, at least this far into Sansar’s development.
You also can’t run Sansar unless you have a decent computer — beyond that of a consumer laptop. This immediately turned away a large portion of the Second Life Userbase, as well as the general populace, as not many people have the high end equipment for it, or even mid-end for desktop-only users.
It also doesn’t have the back-catalog of content like SL does — now, sure, given time, it would improve, but with ventures like VR being competitive as they are, sooner is much better than later.
A SHAMEFUL, UNDESERVED FATE
Sansar is doing relatively Okay from the looks of it, but I can’t see it staying strong in the long term, mainly because of two factors at play:
- Market Competition: Sinespace, JanusVR, VRChat, High Fidelity, not to mention the various smaller platforms vying for a piece of the pie, are all chomping at the bit to gain ground in this emerging market, and given how small the populace is, and how high server costs must be, I doubt many of them will be intact after 3–4 years from now, Sansar included. Sure, Sansar has that Linden Lab/Second Life pedigree (and to that extent, stigma as well), but that can only carry them so far.
- General Market Instability: The Games Industry has fallen on hard times in the past quarter of a decade. With companies like EA, Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft and the sort causing public outrage at concepts like microtransactions and lootboxes becoming overused and oversaturated, not to mention the long lasting aftermath of the Gamergate Scandal which was the result of various game developers and games news outlets being involved in various Conflicts of interest resulting in a general distrust in the media (both in and outside of gaming circles, preceeding certain political events after GG that led to a plummeting media trust percentage overall), Video games are in for a rough ride if things don’t improve, and this puts VR betwixt a rock and a hard place, since it is trying to crawl out of being niche in a effort to be more profitable and in situ, commonplace. VR has a future, yes — but with platforms with Sansar and the sort that rely on user concurrency being high, just like Second Life does, as well as having a positive income flow, It can’t really be said for sure that Sansar et al can or will be able to keep their respective platforms afloat, let alone be competitive whilst doing the former.
With this in mind, I will concede this — Sansar didn’t deserve this. Do I like it? Not as much as SL, no, but I do like it in general. However, If I were in Ebbe Altberg’s shoes, I would have focused on doing what he’s doing now with SL’s recent improvements two years ago. (which I will go over in a future update post for my first post here on Medium.)
I would have focused on bringing SL to the cloud, Listening to the userbase’s suggestions as well as figuring out what is best for Second Life as a whole in regards to helping it grow. I would have prioritized client and server optimizations and new features, a updated ALM system that added in new graphical features that would bring SL up to speed with modern games whilst boosting performance. I would have done a lot of things. But for Sansar, I have one word for what I would have done:
Wait.
Sansar came out at a time where the market was still in a relative infancy, and was bogged down by people longing for a better experience than what SL was offering. What some of those people got, however, was a lackluster experience which for quite a few, only made them want to go back to SL. I would have waited for technology to improve and the market to stabilize and grow, and then pull out all the stops to make sure Sansar would be successful. I have faith in VR, much like I have faith in Second Life. It’s just that for Sansar — I am one of little faith left to give. And to tell the truth — that saddens me.
Because it could have been better than it already is.
