Sansar Moving Over To Steam And Dropping SandeX

Linden Lab has made a major announcement today that Sansar will be moving over to the popular gaming platform Steam in early 2019. Linden Lab will be discontinuing the SandeX exchange as of 4th December 2018. After that date the lab plans on moving to a fixed conversion rate model.

It’s important to mention that Second Life didn’t work out very well on Steam back in 2012. It’s going to be interesting to see what impact this will have on Sansar’s user usage and revenue during 2019. The lab are gambling on a huge influx of new users with cash to spend to make Sansar more successful in the years ahead.

Here is the full blog announcement on the changes coming up soon for Sansar…

Sansar has come a long way since we started the project. In 2018 we have devoted an enormous amount of effort to improving the end-user experience, and will continue to do so.

Given those improvements, we believe we are quickly approaching the point where we want to start bringing a large number of users onto the platform. This is an important milestone for us and especially our creators. One of the foundational principles of Sansar is that creators must be able to profit from their creations. For us to make that a reality, we need to give our creators a large audience of customers.

The cornerstone of our growth effort will be to put Sansar on Steam. Steam is where more than half of the VR market goes to find software. It also is a huge pool of users who are interested in our space and are likely to have the hardware required to run Sansar. We anticipate being able to get onto Steam by the end of this year. This is a huge step for us and we’re excited to be able introduce Sansar to an even wider audience.

In order to do this, we are obligated to make significant changes to how Sansar works, especially in how the Sansar Dollar and process credit system work. These changes, will also make the credit process for Creators far more consistent and predictable. The first change is that we will be discontinuing the Sandex as of December 4, 2018.

After that date, we will be moving to a fixed conversion rate model. Creators will continue to be able to sell their work for Sansar Dollars on the Store (and soon in experiences!). Eligible creators may convert some or all of their earned Sansar Dollar balance to US dollars at a rate of S$250 to $1, and then request a USD credit to be processed in 30 days. This matches Steam’s payment timeline.

We understand that this may have an impact on the amount of revenue returned to creators compared to the Sandex. However, we believe that in the long run our creators will significantly benefit from having access to the larger Steam user base. In addition, anyone who has created their Sansar account before December 31, 2018 will receive a legacy conversion rate of S$143 to $1 until December 31, 2019, after which the conversion rate for all accounts will be S$250 to $1.

Our automated Sansar Dollar Conversion page will not be available until January 2019. In the interim, we are committed to working with our Creators to manually process credit requests of Sansar Dollars through an email process, the details of which will soon follow.

We are excited about our move onto Steam and the migration to a fixed-rate model. It is a momentous change for our platform and our community. The changes outlined here will make Sansar accessible to a larger audience, while also make processing credits more consistent and predictable. Thank you for your support with these changes. They will help Sansar grow as huge as we all know it can be.

If you have any questions about this change or the manual credit requests, feel free to contact us via Twitter, Facebook, or on Discord. You can also attend our next Product Meetup on Friday Nov. 2nd at 11am PDT. If you can’t make it into Sansar for the Product Meetup, you can join us through our live Twitch stream. Further events to discuss these changes will be made available at the community’s request.

Thanks, and Happy Building,

– Landon McDowell

Chief Product Officer, Sansar

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