Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Jo Yardley posted about a new Sansar video released by Linden Lab: Official Sansar publicity video released.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tdkW64u3YA
Well done. Makes it look interesting.
I take this as part of the promotional run up to general release this ‘Spring’.
There is a lot of chatter about Project Sansar on the web. Looking at just the past 30 days, there are pages and pages of Google search results on Sansar.
Ben Lang at Road to VR has written: ‘Sansar’ Will Open to All in First Half of 2017 with a New Approach to Virtual Worlds.
Ben repeats the Lab’s emphasis that Sansar is NOT Second Life 2. Ben explains the Second Life (SL) was a single large persistent world. He never mentions that SL was originally intended to be a virtual world platform for game prototyping. Users changed that idea.
Sansar is explained as being a platform more than a virtual world. Sound familiar? Go back and read some of the 2004 to 2008 promotional information.
Ebbe Altberg, CEO Linden Lab and director of Sansar, says the Lab never decided if SL was for developers or users. That has changed in Sansar. It is for developers and developers will deal with attracting users… right.
Over on New World Notes Hamlet is talking a poll about when Linden Lab will try to entice (nudge) Second Life users to try Sansar. Please click over and take the poll. See: When will Linden Lab “nudge” Second Life users to use Sansar?
According to SuperData Research people spent US$91,000,000,000 on games. Billion… This is an all-time record. But, they are hyping things a bit. In 2015 Statistica shows $91.5 billion spent and $99.6 billion in 2016. I suppose it depends on where one gets their numbers and categorizes them. Game revenue is notoriously flaky as companies like to hype their increasing sales and keep decreases secret.
Still that is about a 10% increase year-to-year. Eight billion isn’t chump change, unless your spending $10 trillion on credit, like some governments…
They break the revenue down into subcategories. Handheld games are dying. Smartphone games are the hot item. They show the largest growth from 2015 to 2016 and that is expected to continue, which seems reasonable as smartphones are selling well.
In 2005 smartphones sales were just $3.8 billion. Eleven years later in 2016 sales of smart phones was $55 billion, a 1,447% increase. So, as more people get smartphones there are more possible users of smartphone games. According to Statistica a little less than half of the 2016 game revenue was from smartphone gaming.
We aren’t hearing much new about Sansar. But, Hamlet found and article by Joe Durbin published on UPLOAD, Preview: ‘Sansar’ Could Give Social VR Worlds a Second Life. I think Hamlet was responding to Dubin’s enthusiasm. I found the enthusiasm interesting.
Quoting Dubin:
Sanar is as hard to describe to the uninitiated as [is] Second Life. It is not a game, a film, a tech demo, or a specific social VR experience. Sansar is raw, limitless virtual potential that can truly be forged into the inter-connected digital world we’ve been dreaming about since Snow Crash.
That is my expectation of what Sansar is to be. I do believe that just as the Lab has used projects in Second Life to demonstrate its abilities so too will they have projects to show what can be done with Sansar.
Hamlet has an article about an article written by Rowland Manthorpe… respectively named; Gods & Devils: Wired UK’s Rowland Manthorpe on What He Learned by Writing About Sansar, High Fidelity… and Palmer Luckey’s Trump Support and Second Life was just the beginning. Philip Rosedale is back and he’s delving into VR.
The Rowland article is worth your time to read. It is interesting in several ways. If you are a post-Rosedale (SL founder) SL’er then you’ll get some idea of Second Life’s history and what Rosedale was doing and hopping to build.