News and Commentary: Linden Lab Lays Off Over 20 of Sansar Staff, Next-Gen World Faces a Mediocre Future

On Monday November 4, it was reported by blogger Ryan Schultz that Linden Lab had dismissed over 20 of the part of it's staff running it's Sansar virtual world. The news of the layoffs was just two days after news that the next-generation virtual world had undergone a major staff shakeup. As Linden Lab won't confirm if anyone's lost their job or not, Schutlz and then Hamlet Au got the news from insiders in the Lab. Inara Pey would state of the sixteen names she knew on the Sansar team, four were no longer active.

While Sansar has had a few enthusiastic fans, it's following has remained small. While it initially got a large number of curious visitors after it's introduction in July 2017, most didn't find a reason to stay and it's numbers dropped to less than fifty users a day, sometimes as low as ten. By January 2019, the number increased a little to 79 a day. A report on New World Notes last month brought up an infographic from September stating that Sansar was third of social VR platforms in peak concurrent users at 220 compared to 475 of Recroom and 10610 of VRChat, which has become the next-generation virtual world of choice. The report stated what the numbers didn't show was that most were coming on for a handful of popular events, and between them normal usage of the next-generation virtual world was closer to 20. These statistics are a tiny drop compared to the tens of thousands on Second Life and the several thousands of VR Chat, "220 people for Hello Kitty during TwitchCon 2019 on September 27... And after the event, tumbleweeds as usual."

Hamlet Au would put part of the blame for Sansar's failure to draw in bigger numbers on Linden Lab changing direction with the virtual world during it's development and after it's release, such as making content creation available only with offworld tools and pairing it with VR gear, the latter which is too expensive for most computer users. The current direction seems to be a focus on live events, which as stated earlier provides a temporary boost to it's mediocre numbers. Sansar developer "Gindipple" would comment, "They've changed direction so many times now. They are winging this and hoping. I gave up on them a while ago, so don't care as much now. They lost a lot of good people in this cut back, some went to SL but many [are] just out."

Second Life's future is still secure, as the Lab is still hiring people for it. But for Sansar, it looks like it will be operating with a "skeleton crew" as it faces a mediocre future. It's highly unlikely the Lab will close down the virtual world. Hamlet predicted it would "eventually be run as a spinoff company and product separate from Linden Lab." In any event, Linden Lab long had high hopes for the virtual world, despite most users of Second Life giving it a thumbs down. Now it appears even they have admitted, at least to themselves, that it's next-generation virtual world won't be attracting numbers anything close to the one that's been going for over sixteen years.

Sources: Ryan Schultz, New World Notes, Modem World

Bixyl Shuftan