Sansar

» see sansar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed sansar. the reason was practical: it was windows-only and required either an oculus rift or an htc vive, and i had neither headset in 2017. by the time i thought seriously about getting one, sansar had already become a footnote inside a press release about a sale.

linden lab announced sansar in 2014 as their next-generation virtual world, the thing that would replace second life eventually but live alongside it for now. development took three years. public beta opened on july 31 2017 with a free-to-use creator-focused angle and a virtual currency called sansar dollars. you could build your own scene or walk around someone else's. concerts and live events came on top of that. avatars had speech-driven facial animation, which was the demo screenshot every press article led with.

the problem was that vr in 2017 was not yet a market. it was a category of devices early adopters owned and showed off at parties. linden lab had bet that the headset curve would steepen the way the smartphone curve had between 2008 and 2010. it did not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it tried to be ~

sansar wanted to do for the vr generation what second life had done for the web 2.0 generation. it was a creator platform first. linden lab's bet was that the same kind of person who had built a furry casino in second life in 2005 would build a furry casino in vr in 2017, except now you could actually walk through it with a headset.

the production values were higher than second life and the avatars were better. but the user count never crossed the threshold where a 3d social space stops feeling empty. second life at its peak had around eighty thousand concurrent users on a good evening. sansar at its peak was reported in the low thousands.

~ the decline ~

vr headsets in 2017 were expensive. the rift was 600 dollars and required a windows pc with a strong gpu. the htc vive was 800 dollars and required two base stations mounted on the walls. neither setup was something a casual second life player would buy just to keep playing the same game in 3d.

the meta quest 1 launched in 2019 as the first standalone untethered headset. that was the device that finally moved vr from the hobbyist tier to the mainstream tier. but the quest 1 ran android-on-arm and was not powerful enough to run sansar's pc-grade graphics. by the time the meta quest 2 launched in late 2020, sansar had already been sold.

~ the day it died ~

linden lab announced the sale to wookey project corp on march 23 2020, two days after the global covid lockdowns started. the timing was strange. an event-driven 3d social platform was about to become more relevant than at any other point in its life. but the sale paperwork had been in motion for months. linden lab's board had already decided to refocus on second life and was not going to walk it back.

wookey ran sansar for two more years. the platform pivoted hard toward live music events with the monstercat partnership. attendance numbers were never published. funding ran out and the leadership team feuded, and the platform settled into a kind of half-closed maintenance state.

second life, meanwhile, was still running in 2026 and still bringing in subscription revenue, hosting a small but loyal economy of in-world land traders. sansar was the future that linden lab thought was coming. second life is the past that kept paying the bills.

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