AltspaceVR is Closing Down | Hacker News Reader

AltspaceVR is Closing Down

vrscout.com

80 pointsStanleyc2327 comments

Although AltspaceVR's public announcement claims they're shutting down due to lack of funds, I suspect that being sued by a patent troll also contributed to the closure of the company.

See: https://insight.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/12511784 and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6q4idg/alt_space_pate...

Any reason why they wouldn't have mentioned the lawsuit in their press release if it was a big issue for them?

My uninformed guess is that talking about current legal proceedings is frowned upon by their lawyers.

"Lack of funds to cover ongoing legal fees" is "lack of funds".

It is, but it's a far more nuanced version. Lack of funds is more leadership to blame. Getting sued by a patent troll, is what we all hope our side projects avoid long enough to obtain sufficient funding, so we can pay the crooks if need be.

All other cases file by this patent troll:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=VIRTUAL+IMMERSION+TECHNOLOGIE...

Patent in question:

https://www.google.com/patents/US6409599

Here is the original product:

https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/1996/12/09/focus...

in this instance the patent itself bothers me more than the trolling.

These kind of overly broad patents which should have never been granted in the first place are really thing biggest thing killing innovation in the USA.

Nothing like giving a few years of your life to a project and having it shut down over a bad patent.

On the other hand it was nice to see them using a number of innovations I created in 2005 but didn't patent.

(Cofounder here) Note that we didn't file any patents, this was no accident.

Software patents are generally evil, and I used to feel that creating them was bad. Then a mentor taught me that often your patents can be used to offset other peoples patents. But with Trolls they have nothing to protect.

How do you monetize a game where there are rarely more than 100 people online? Most of the time it felt like there were more Altspace employees than genuine players. They made serious efforts to curb harassment, but in effect managed to sabotage any chance of spontaneous interaction with other VR strangers. By the time they brought in "campfires", no one played.

Altspace was doomed the moment they decided to fundraise instead of, you know, make money. There was no reason Altspace couldn't have been made by 1-2 people. Instead, they went on a hiring spree, and the game had nothing to show for it. Really, anyone funding the VR space right now is insane: http://vrlfg.net/

I agree that anyone pumping serious money into VR right now is either misguided or overly optimistic. The adoption rate has flattened, the hardware and software are both lacking innovation, and the costs to enter the market for consumers are insane - relatively.

Until you get Vive-like tracking on a Gear-like device I would avoid VR in general. People just will not buy gaming PCs on the same curve in which they adopted smartphones.

I worked at a prominent (still alive) VR company and the experience was enlightening.

In particular multiplayer focused "in Dev" games are problematic. It is resource intensive to keep up with moderation and anti-hacking. Combine that with smaller VR subset of users and it seems hard to imagine success without many years of runway money.

Smaller one player or 2 player multiplayer indie-like games is probably better fit for small funded VR.

I agree with all the points you made specifically about AltspaceVR. They may have been in a better place right now if they'd tried to bootstrap. Who knows, there are probably a number of factors at play here. When I tried it ages ago I was wowed by the potential, but put off by the idiot to interesting ratio. Also sometimes just being too early is enough to kill you right out of the gate.

On to whether you'd be insane to fund VR right now. When I checked http://vrlfg.net/ just now there were 2587 active VR sessions from a total of 840797 active Steam sessions. Thanks for that link by the way! Put another way approximately 0.3% of all active sessions on Steam right now. This does not sound terrible to me given how embryonic immersive computing is and how expensive the first generation of PC based VR kit is. I wonder how the stats would stack up for mobile VR? Most likely not higher I'd guess.

So, what's the market for PC games in 2017? Approximately $25billion (sources: http://bit.ly/2pm1wBO && http://bit.ly/2qc61ef)? The 840797 active sessions above include free or free to play PC games on Steam. There aren't so many free VR games and so today's 0.3% on Steam if extrapolated to the PC gaming market as a whole could easily equate to $75million. Not an insignificant number for a new market and new medium. Sure if you want less risk and more potential upside make a mobile game for a market with an established channel. But the signal to noise ratio in that market makes it difficult to get noticed there if you are not already established. Plus poking at a screen is not as much fun as VR development :-)

Those studios and companies that get an early foothold in the immersive software world could be the Zynga or even Google of tomorrow. I sure know how difficult it can be to raise finance in the immersive sector - especially in Europe. There are plenty of investors, even early stage ones, who still consider investing in immersive tech to be too risky/early at this stage, but I'm not sure many of them would go as far as to say doing so right now would be insane. Many of them are making some tentative investments, I only see momentum increasing in this respect.

Ask yourself this question. Do you think you'll do most of your computing sitting behind a physical mouse, keyboard and monitor in 50 or even 30 years time? Humans evolved to work in three dimensions. I just don't see us jabbing at touch screens forever. Remember the typewriter?

Some more food for thought here: http://www.dataselect.com/vr-headsets-more-popular-than-tabl...

Disclaimer: I run a company related to immersive technology (http://realityzero.one) and own the Vive, Rift, Gear VR and Daydream. So I guess you could say I'm more than a little biased when it comes to discussing the merits of immersive technology.

I dont think it is possible to boot strap a VR company. I have tried. Unique art assets cost a small fortune, as do animations, I found even with as much user generated content I still needed an artist, a server dev, and a front end dev. So unless you can get 100 hours a week of pro work, you dont stand a chance.

A tweet from my lone experience on AltspaceVR.

"I spent an hour in VR watching Reggie Watts perform live. The future feels suspiciously like a 90s version of Second Life."

The experience was about as underwhelming as possible and I never went back.

got my Vive 2 weeks ago. literally just got Altspace ready yesterday. i have friends who work there, and some of my favorite artists have authored there (Duncan Trussell, Reggie Watts). and if you take VR to it's logical conclusion, Altspace was basically v1 of the Matrix. so... yeah... as far as companies closing down goes, kind of a bummer...

Burning 15 mil in less than 3 years and closing up shop seems like terrible management more than anything else.

Kmowing that facebook was just around the corner probably didn't help them find funding.

Facebook has been around the corner for much longer than this round of fund raising.

More like their 90% use case was subsumed by the new steamvr lobbies...

I disagree. SteamVR home only lets you invite a few friends over to your personal space while AltspaceVR was more about all kinds of events in public spaces. Even more importantly it's only available on the PC while Altspace was one of the few options also available on mobile VR which has a significantly larger userbase than PC-based VR right now.

Facebook's purchase of Oculus helped AlstspaceVR by adding credibility and awareness to VR.

lot of help that did...

Performed really badly on my Daydream

that's the case of solution looking for a problem

Do an ICO.

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