This is an opinion post, and I am attempting to solve this problem for the community. I hope that this post raises discussions between the community members themselves and thus opening further dialogue with the AltSpace team to stress the importance of having more featured kits available to users.

AltSpace has 12 pages to choose from of kits plus the AltSpace provided kits in the ‘AltSpace’ > Kits tab. The amount of kits available for users (free of charge, of course) is quite generous. But the problem is these kits are mostly small, with only a few having a reasonable amount of different objects in.

To be fair, still, there are a generous amount of kits available.

However, the problem that we face as uses is even with the reasonable collection of objects available, you do eventually reach a limit where the joy of world-building starts to go away, and you face world builder burnout.

The world builder burnout

I experienced this myself, and I have heard similar feedback from users over my time on AltSpace so far (7 months). The main problem that users mostly say is along the lines of AltSpace being lacking in templates and kits.

The most common workaround is to use a ‘Cool Sky’ template and craft a world by expanding planes and objects to form a world that opens up many more creative ways to build worlds. However, even after a point, you still hit a limit of creativity, and I want to articulate why this is happening.

Creativity Limit

We all have various limits when it comes to creating worlds, and some people are simply better at thinking outside of the box (no pun intended) and can come up with heaps of cool worlds. Just look at users like Daisy Shaw and Darren, who have created most of their worlds using kit objects. This does prove that you can do a lot with the AltSpace provided kits.

You will still a ceiling, and you will have exhausted all creative options with your kits. This statement is particularly true, more so for users who have been on AltSpace for a few years.

After a few months of creating random worlds and learning how to use AltSpace, I found personally that the featured kits weren’t relevant to what I wanted. If there were objects I wanted, I would have to sacrifice exceeding kit limits to be able to create the world I want.

Even at hitting my 7th month on AltSpace, and although I build my own kits and templates, I really hit this burnout that restricted me from being creative. This is what drove me to learn Unity, but I also believe that Unity isn’t for everyone, and there is a community of users who rely on kits.

Learning Unity is not always possible and should not be expected of users

There has been a shift in the community in recent months where more and more people can successfully upload their own content. However, there would be people who could not afford such a computer, especially in times of Covid, and for some people, a computer may be too much of an investment. There is also a skill gap for older generations and people who may struggle intellectually to learn and manage technology. There are members of the older generations on AltSpace, for instance, who can operate a headset and are masters of building worlds with a world editor. However, I have been surprised to learn that these people struggle greatly with operating a desktop environment.

Solution Moving Forward?

It would be nice if a marketplace embedded into AltSpace allowed users to purchase authorised assets and free ones. Creating AltSpace assets requires a lot of work, and this comes at a cost to keep up to date, so AltSpace would want to secure that assets would be updated to avoid issues. But this marketplace which AltSpace could solely do without external asset creators, would be a source of revenue for AltSpace. This could help fund AltSpace’s growing server and related expenses.

Otherwise, maybe implement a platform that allows kits to be shared to everyone for user-made creations that are given (rights wise) to AltSpace with the creator’s credit. This would at least allow users to step up in the community to solve the problem.