When Linden Labs first gave an estimate in September 2016 of when their next-generation virtual world Sansar would be in open beta, the date given was January 2017. In early Janurary, the date was described as "after March." Later in January, the date given was sometime in "the first half of 2017," meaning as late as June 2017. But when the Irish Times wrote about an interview they did of CEO Ebbe Altberg, they reported that Sansar would be in an "open alpha" release sometime this summer 2017. At what point it would go into beta was unexplained.
What this suggests is not only is Sansar currently at "an early stage of development," as Hamlet Au commented, but that they are having more difficulties and delays than anticipated. When Linden Lab placed an ad for Linkedin for a software engineer to help them develop a voxel-based terrain editor, Hamlet was initially quite impressed. But with these delays, he feels they should "have hired someone to build that maybe two years ago." This is on top of existing doubts about Sansar, it beginning to remind him of the old "Blue Mars" virtual world of several years ago, which was fading into obscurity after less than two.So when will Sansat be complete? Hamlet was thinking that might not be until sometime in 2018. How will users react to an unstable open alpha Sansar that crashes more than Second Life? Probably not very well.
Source: New World Notes , The Irish Times
Bixyl Shuftan
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