Tag: Sansar In The Press

Sansar : some hints at options for revenue generation

Posted on by Inara Pey
Project Sansar image via Linden Lab
Project Sansar image via Linden Lab

Update, May 5th: As indicated by Pete Linden, the Lab’s Director of Communications, in the comments following this piece, the write of the the TCP project article appears to have got his wires crossed in reference to user-to-user transactions and the Lab’s revenue model for Sansar, which has in turn lead my speculations astray in the possible levels of commissions. I’ve now revised the piece to focus on the elements directly related to Ebbe’s comments on other revenue models under consideration.

One of the areas of interest with Project Sansar is how Linden Lab will generate revenue from the platform, given their intention to pivot strongly away from the and land model which has proven so constraining within Second Life.

During assorted presentations at the Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conferences, Lab Chat sessions, and in talking to the media, Ebbe Altberg has made it clear that one of the ways in which the Lab intend to more broadly generate revenue from Project Sansar is through a “sales tax” (commission) on the sale of goods and content within the platform.

While no specifics of the possible commission rate(s) has been given, the idea has caused some concern among original content creators as to how much such charges might be and how they’ll be applied. However, in order to be sustainable, Sansar will need other means of revenue generation, something which has caused some speculation in various circles as to what other means the Lab might use. The Lab itself has, until recently, been quiet on the matter. Then, on April 29th, two items caught my attention, offering as they do further hints on the Lab’s thinking.

The first came through a piece penned by D.J. Pangborn, and which appeared in the April 29th edition of The Creator Project (TCP). Entitled Peek Inside Second Life’s Virtual Reality Successor, ‘Project Sansar’, the article doesn’t really offer much that was new it terms of news about Project Sansar for those who have been tracking things, despite its title; but it does include a little snippet which caused my eyebrow to rise when I read it:

As for the monetization of experiences in Sansar, Linden Lab will collect most of their revenues from charging for virtual services, not from renting land. Altberg says they plan to take very little from the user-to-user economy.

The emphasis is mine, but I found these particular parts of the statement interesting for two reasons. The one on taking “very little” from the user-to-user economy suggests that the Lab are looking to keep any “sales tax” / commission on content sales to a minimum. (See the update note at the top of this article / Pete Linden’s comment below).

The idea of the Lab collecting revenues from charging for virtual services suggests they are considering an approach a little similar to that put forward by High Fidelity – revenue can be drawn from services associated with Project Sansar. Obviously, this would likely include fees for virtual currency handling a-la Second Life, but what else?

Sansar Mars landscape (via Linden Lab)
Sansar Mars landscape (via Linden Lab)

Speaking to Draxtor Despres for show #114 of The Drax Files Radio Hour, which also appeared on April 29th, the same day, Ebbe Altberg indicated some of the additional ways in which the Lab is thinking of raising revenue through Sansar, starting at the 19:30 mark into the recording. While no fees / percentages were given, the options under consideration (and there could well be more the Lab is thinking about) are defined as:

  • Via fees associated with the resources used, e.g. paying for the experiences published through the platform people can visit
  • Via a commission on in-world sales (currently for Second Life, the Lab only charges a direct commission for Marketplace sales)
  • Through a series of subscription options for users / customers, possibly based on resource usage – capabilities used, size of inventories, hoe many experiences can be published, what kind of privacy controls are provided, etc.

The last idea is based on the view that in order to solve for specific requirements from certain customers, the Lab will likely have to develop very specific tools and capabilities – which those same customers would be willing to pay to access.

While the idea of paying for capabilities might not sit well with those of us using Second Life, given some of the markets the Lab appear to have in mind for Project Sansar, the idea actually isn’t too much of a stretch. Companies and organisations are often willing to pay a little extra for what they feel is a more “tailored” offering.

However, none of the above means that the Lab is abandoning the free-to-play approach entirely. As Ebbe states in the interview, “but at the same time, anyone should be able to come in for free and consume any experience any experience they have access to, whether it’s a private experience or a public experience, that someone has given them access right to. They should be able to come in for free and participate.”

It’ll certainly be interesting to see if / how these ideas develop, precisely what fees / percentages the Lab is considering on the sale of goods, , and what else might emerge as a possible option for revenue generation (price per instance of an experience, for example?).

Quartz offers a gem on Sansar, VR and Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
“come with me!” – in , Could the Oculus Rift help give Second Life a second life? Alice Truoung examines the promise of avatar-based virtual spaces

There has been another recent spate of articles on Linden Lab, Project Sansar, Second Life and the potential for avatar-based virtual spaces with the upcoming advent of VR. Even Moviepilot, whom I took to task in 2014, has been busy looking at what’s going on, while Gamasutra rushed out what is essentially a nutshell version of Eric Johnson’s excellent Re/code article examining the question of the metaverse, which I looked at here.

However, the pick of the latest crop has to be Alice Truong’s article published in Quartz: Could the Oculus Rift help give Second Life a second life?  While the title might sound Second-Life centric and suggestive of a piece looking at how it will faire under the Rift (“not very well”), it is anything but.

What is actually presented is a well-rounded piece on the future of avatar-based virtual spaces which uses Second Life as the measure of their mark and launchpad for their future. Within it, Second Life is examined from a number of angles and Sansar is explored, together with a nodding look towards High Fidelity.

Alic Troung: thought on virtual spaces and avatars in Quartz (image credit: Quartz.com)
Alice Truong: thought on virtual spaces and avatars in Quartz (image credit: Quartz.com)

As with most of the pieces which had appeared over the last month or so, little real news on Sansar (or SL’s development for that matter) is given out. This is hardly surprising, as the Lab does like to hold its cards close to its chest – the relative newness (and thus the difficulty in highlighting specific tablets-of-stone facts) of Sansar notwithstanding.

What makes this article a joy, is that it provides a solid framing for the subject of the Lab and virtual worlds, reaching back to 1999 and the original efforts with The Rig. This is nicely packaged and offers a solid foundation from which Ms. Truong expertly weave her piece. Some of the path she takes will be familiar, particularly where SL and Sansar is concerned. We get to hear about SL’s growth, revenue, the US $60 million collectively cashed-out of the platform by many of its users, etc.

We also get fair mention of the decline in the number of active users on the platform, but again, this is properly framed. At its peak, SL had around 1.1 million active users; eight-ish years later, that number stands at around 900,000. A decline, yes. but as Ebbe Altberg points out hardly any kind of “mass exodus”; and certainly nowhere near the dire haemorrhaging of users we tend to hear proclaimed to be happening every time the Lab makes what is perceived as an irksome decision.

For Sansar, similarly familiar ground is covered – the revenue model (and the comparison with SL’s model and its weakness), the promise of VR, the opportunity to grow a platform for “tens, if not hundreds” of millions of users, the aspect of much broader “discoverabiilty” / ease of access for Sansar in order to help generate more appeal, and so on.

Mention is made of the Lab planning to “commercially release” Sansar by the end of 2016. Given what has been said by the Lab to date concerning time frames for future work, and allowing for Ebbe’s comments of perhaps having something worthy of a “version 1.0” label by the close of 2016, I’m taking the comment to be more of a misunderstanding on Ms. Truong’s part than any revelation as to Sansar’s roadmap.

Hunter Walk (l), the Lab's former
Hunter Walk (l), the Lab’s former “Director of Everything Non-Engineering” as well as a founder of the company, and now a VC in his own right, and Bernard Drax, aka Draxtor Despres (r) offer thoughts on Sansar

Another enjoyable element of this article is that Ms. Truong casts her net wide for input; thus she captures both Hunter Walk and Draxtor Despres. Their comments serve to both offer the means by which ideas can be further explored in the piece, and serve to offer a measure of counterpoint to the assumed mass appeal spaces like Sansar and High Fidelity will have.

Hunter Walk, for example, underlines the most critical problem in growing users Second Life has faced throughout its lifetime – that of accessibility and use. As he states, “ultimately, the work you had to put in was, for most people, more than the fun you got out.”  Not only does this underline the essential truth about SL’s longest-running issue (it’s as true today for many as 2003/4), it lays the foundation for an exploration of some of Sansar’s fundamental differences to SL later in the article.

Hunter also passes comment on the idea of these spaces finding many millions of users, pointing out that “tens of millions” was always an unrealised dream at the Lab for Second Life; perhaps a cautionary warning about focusing on user numbers. He also seems to offer something of a warning on investment returns in such ventures as well, again referencing Second Life, although if intended as a warning, it is more relevant to High Fidelity (which has received around US $16.5 million in investment to date).

Draxtor similarly questions whether user numbers should necessarily be the focus / rationale for building these kind of virtual spaces. Like him, I’m far from convinced Sansar will have the kind of broad-ranging reach to draw in “hundreds of millions” (or, if I’m honest, even more than  the low tens of millions). I’ve explained some of the reason why I think in my review of Eric Johnson’s piece linked to towards the top of this article, so I won’t repeat them here.

Could the promise of 2mixed reality
Could the promise of 2mixed reality” technologies which combine VR, AR and physical world activities yet serve to keep avatar-based virtual spaces a niche endeavour? (image: Magic Leap, via the New York Times)

If I’m honest, my only regret is that while Ms Truong’s tone is (rightly) sceptical in places, there is no outright challenge to the idea that people will embrace avatar-based interactions on a massive scale just because VR is on our doorstep.

Right now, there is a lot going on in the world of technology: VR, AR, the potential to fuse the two; faster communications capabilities, much better mobile connectivity, and so on. All of these could serve to dramatically marginalise any need to persistently engage in avatar-based interactions outside of very defined areas. As such, the inescapable whiff of “will we build it, they will use it” (to utterly mangle an already oft-misquoted line from a certain film) which seems to pervade the talk of high Fidelity and Sansar does perhaps deserve a degree of challenge.

Perhaps I should drop a line to Peter Gray suggesting an interview on those lines…

In the meantime – go read Alice Truong.

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Examining the reality of the metaverse

Posted on by Inara Pey
Th obligatory Sansar promo image :) (please can we have some new ones?) - Linden Lab
Th obligatory Sansar promo image 🙂 (please can we have some new ones?) – Linden Lab

Eric Johnson has a thought-provoking article over on re/code. In Welcome to the Metaverse, he ponders the lot of avatar-based virtual spaces, past and future, and how a number of companies – the Lab included – are betting that the “new era” of VR is going to be the means by which such spaces will become mainstream.

It’s an interesting piece, offering plenty of food for thought, starting with an opening statement by the Lab’s CEO, Ebbe Altberg, on defining human life:

What humans do is create spaces. Some spaces are mobile, like a bus. San Francisco is a space that was created by its users. Whether you go into a pub, a bar, a classroom, a bowling alley, an office, a library … We create spaces and we have people come together in those spaces, and then we communicate and socialize within those spaces.

This is actually the first thing about the article that leaves me with a familiar feeling of feeling at odds with the prevailing view of all things metaverse, albeit for a slightly different reason. With due respect to Mr. Altberg, people didn’t come together as a result of building spaces. They built spaces as a result of coming together. However, as an opening gambit for a study of this thing we call the “metaverse”, it’ll do as an opener.

Eric Johnson, Associate editor, Gaming at Re/code (via LinkedIn)
Eric Johnson, Associate editor, Gaming at Re/code (via LinkedIn)

From here, Mr. Johnson give us the pocket introduction to “the metaverse” via the obligatory (and rightful) nod to Neal Stephenson while simultaneously dispensing quickly with a look at the “past promise” of virtual spaces that didn’t in the end measure-up to the expectations.

This leads the way to a clever little nod to the book which has become this decade’s “Snowcrash”  – in the form of  Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (which is actually a very good read) – as a means to introduce the main three companies he sees as currently vying for space in “the metaverse” – the Lab,  High Fidelity and AltspaceVR.

Chances are the Sansar and High Fidelity are already well-known to people reading these pages, which AltspaceVR may have passed some unnoticed. As the article points out, they’ve been developing avatar-based VR for the last couple of years, focusing on shared spaces (watching a film with a friend who is halfway across the world for example), and scheduled events, including gaming weekends, etc.

AltspaceVR also has some ideas for business applications with their environments, which they are planning to offer on a pay-to-use basis. And while their avatars main have been viewed with disdain by some, there are a couple of points to bear in mind where the company is concerned.

The first is that as a result of watching some of AltspaceVR’s virtual interactions, Mark Zuckerberg caught the social VR bug, and Facebook went after Oculus VR, with the subsequent $2 billion acquisition (which was actually quite a modest punt when compared to the $19 billion the company had earlier spent on a proven technology in WhatsApp).

The second is that the company, which has been around about as long at Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity, has almost raised a comparable amount in funding – around $15.7 million to date (SEC filings indicate High Fidelity has raised around $16.5 million), and both are working at solving many of the same technical issues – head and motion tracking, eye tracking, etc.,

Beyond this, others interested in making a pitch into the metaverse space, as Mr. Johnson mentions are IMVU, which has around 15% of it’s 130+ staff now working on trying to integrate VR into its existing spaces (a-la the Lab’s early effects with SL and the Rift), and a small New York based start-up, focusing on VR social games with around $300,000 in seeding money. called Surreal, the 4-person company is billing itself as “the first fully immersive virtual world”, which is focused entirely on using VR HMDs (Oculus, Gear VR and Cardboard).

Johnson attempts to split his examination of the metaverse into two views: the short-term and the long-term. In doing so, he inevitably points to the elephant in the room: Facebook. In this, he quotes Palmer Luckey, who gives a fair warning as to whether or not “the metaverse” is around the corner, and which stands as a cautionary warning, in more ways than one:

I think at this point the term ‘metaverse’ is a bit undefined. For any one company to say, ‘We are building the metaverse’ is pretty hyperbolic. Building all the pieces is going to be hard, and the way you imagine things in sci-fi doesn’t always translate over to the way things will be in the real world.

Palmer Luckey: precient words on
Palmer Luckey: prescient words on “the metaverse”?

He has a very valid point; and with today’s rapidly evolving pace of technology, it’s one worth keeping in mind; the technical issues people see today as only being surmountable through the use of avatars may not actually be technical issues a few years hence.

Interestingly, Johnson places this in the “short-term” view – although both Oculus VR and Facebook have always talked in terms of “the metaverse” still being around a decade away. For the longer term, Johnson looks in particular at High Fidelity’s work and also the Second Life revenue generation success (and, despite the naysayers out there SL is a commercial success, both for the Lab and its users, the latter of whom benefited with collective revenues of $60 million from the platform in 2014), before taking another look at AltspaceVR.

There is a lot to be digested in the piece, and it makes for a good read. However, for me, Palmer Luckey’s warning that how things don’t always match the real world tends to stand out a lot when a lot of the approach being then with avatar-based virtual spaces tend to smack of the “if you build it, they will use it” approach.

I don’t doubt for a minute that spaces will have a lot of applications among various vertical markets. It is no coincidence that the likes of Philip Rosedale and Ebbe Altberg talk much of the same language concerning them: education, training, healthcare, business; there is potential for avatar-based VR spaces in all of them. But I’m still not convinced that longer-term, such spaces are going to claim a much large market among causal consumers than is currently the case, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that the vast majority of people really haven’t seen the need to “climb in” to an avatar for their social interactions – and getting a shiny new headset (which Johnson quotes some rather interesting demographics about) isn’t actually going to change that. The second is connected to the headsets themselves.

High Fidelity and Linden Lab see the education sector as a major focus for their efforts – and neither is wrong. But are avatar-based virtual spaces really going to go consumer mass market?

Simply put, it would seem likely that this brave new world of VR could end-up delivering so many fantastic experiences and opportunities to the casual user, that the majority still won’t see the need to invest time and effort in creating a virtual alter-ego of the kind we desire (and we, as SL / OpenSim users are a niche), because so much else is being delivered to them pre-packaged and ready-to-go. Thus, as Palmer Luckey indicates, the chances are “the metaverse” could well arrive in our lives in a manner very different to that being envisaged by High Fidelity and Linden Lab, thus leaving their approach still very much niche-oriented.

Not that there is anything wrong with that either. As both Rosedale and the Lab can demonstrate, it’s done them rather nicely over the years. And it is fair to say that “niche” this time around a liable to be somewhat larger, simply because of the vertical market opportunities they’re looking at.

Even so, and as mentioned, there is this optimistic we “build / they come” aspect to the whole idea of avatar-based vertical spaces that it would be nice to see an article probing the pros and cons a little more. Perhaps that might be something for a follow-up from Mr. Johnson? In the meantime, Welcome to the Metaverse is a thought-provoking read, and for reasons I’ve not even scratched at here (such as the question of on-line abuse), as such, it’s not one to miss.

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With thanks to Indigo Mertel for the Google+ pointer at the weekend.