Linden Lab working on an Oculus game similar to its Second Life offering codenamed Project Sansar, plans to release it before end of 2016
Context & Ripple Effects
When Sansar finally reached open beta in August 2017, it was nearly a year past the end-of-2016 window Linden Lab set in this Quartz report — a delay that matters because the company was betting its Second Life franchise, which it says generates roughly $650 million a year and has paid out $1.1 billion to creators since 2003, on a VR-native sequel built for Oculus headsets.
The bet never paid off independently: by March 2020 Linden Lab had sold Sansar to Wookey Project Corp for an undisclosed sum, while Facebook moved into the same massive-multiplayer-VR space with Horizon. This 2015 announcement is the starting point of that arc — one of the first attempts to carry a legacy virtual-world economy onto consumer VR hardware arriving after Oculus's 2012 developer kit.
First-order effects
- Linden Lab now runs two products at once: the aging but cash-generating Second Life economy alongside a from-scratch VR build targeting Oculus Rift users before end-2016.
- Second Life creators gain a prospective new platform for their work, with Linden Lab's track record of creator payouts as the recruiting pitch.
Second-order effects
- Other Rift launch-window content like Playful's Lucky's Tale competes directly for the same small pool of early headset owners, forcing Linden Lab to differentiate on user-generated worlds rather than packaged games.
- Facebook, which owns Oculus, is positioned to decide whether a third-party social world thrives or starves on its hardware — leverage it later exercised by building its own Horizon instead.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across the corpus — delayed beta, divestiture to Wookey, Facebook building Horizon in-house — suggests standalone social-VR startups struggle to survive as independent businesses once platform owners build their own worlds.
- If every hardware cycle tempts incumbents to rebuild their virtual worlds natively, the recurring lesson may be that creator economies migrate more slowly than the platforms hosting them expect.
The trend: Each consumer-VR hardware generation spawns a fresh attempt at a persistent social world — Sansar among the first, and its later sale foreshadows consolidation around platform owners' own offerings.