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Founding Linden Hunter Walk: When Launching Second Life, “We Over-Indexed on the Community” Versus Broadly Appealing Content

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Here's a really interesting new blog post by founding Linden Lab team member Hunter Walk, who helped drive a lot of the early decisions around the launch of Second Life, including the very naming of Second Life. (More on that here.) After leaving the Lab, Hunter went on to become a bigwig at YouTube/Google and is now a renowned Silicon Valley VC. From the vantage of those experiences, he believes “Come for the content, stay for the community” is the principle that will drive successful online platforms.

But notably, he believes Second Life didn't get that sequencing right:

Working on the virtual world Second Life at the time I had the proverbial “front row seat” to what online interaction could look like down in the future. It was, or rather is, a fully user-constructed shared virtual world. Think Minecraft but like 100x less successful! Although to be fair, (i) Second Life is still around and profitable and (ii) many of the design choices we made were quite influential on later products. Anyhow, we over-indexed on the community and left the content largely up to the inhabitants which was only appealing to a limited number of passionate users (about half a million). I spent about three years as part of that team and the notion of “staying for the community” lodged itself deep in my cranial matter. 

In other words, Linden Lab should have created more content that would draw in a mass audience, rather than leaving that up to the SL creator community.

But what does he think SL's content focus should have been?

Hunter Walk Linden Lab Second Life

That's "the Billion Dollar Question" he replies to me in a follow-up tweet, observing that "Minecraft, Roblox seem to have gotten it right". And in terms of mass user numbers, there's no arguing with that.

Speaking for myself, I'd say Minecraft succeeded because it starts with a survival/exploration game before introducing sandbox creation tools, while ROBLOX succeeded because it has game/achievement/user rating mechanics that encourage recurring gameplay. The good news is Second Life is still profitable enough to create and add both gameplay content and gaming mechanics, and only then introduce the world to a new generation of gamers. (A mobile app would also be key, but getting the game experience right is even more important.)

Anyway, read all of Hunter's post here. Also, more Walk wisdom in these posts:

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3 responses to “Founding Linden Hunter Walk: When Launching Second Life, “We Over-Indexed on the Community” Versus Broadly Appealing Content”

  1. Alicia Avatar
    Alicia

    The reason why Minecraft and ROBLOX both got it right the first time was because they focused on the right things, as Hunter has stated above. They also thought about overall performance and the overall fun of their respective games. Hell, you can also say that Fortnite got it right the first time as well. Content from its creators does help drive a community in the right directions, and also aids potential creators in their endeavors as well.
    Unfortunately, Linden Lab never picked up on that and never set restrictions. We all know what restrictions they should have put in, and yet they never do… nor do they care to. Perhaps folks, that’s one of the many reasons why Second Life is such a horrible game turned photographic porn simulator that lags to hell and back on literally any viewer.

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  2. Pulsar Avatar
    Pulsar

    In a way, yes, something to start with. This also improves your user retention, when you catch them right at the beginning.
    It isn’t necessarily an activity or a quest, though, but rather the focus, indeed.
    As for Roblox, you are caught by the selection of (user-made) multiplayer minigames at first, among other things. There is an huge variety and selection, but you get an idea from the beginning of what Roblox is about.
    There are also sandbox games with no set objectives, like Garry’s Mod, that are rather fun. Garry’s Mod has a ton of user-generated content and it’s still popular enough, despite the fact that, unlike SL, isn’t free too play and you have to buy it. However, while the game has no set objectives, new players begin with an idea of what they can do and make with it already.
    In SL, instead, besides no objectives, there is also no focus. One of the most common questions among newcomers is along the lines of: “so, what now?” or “what do you guys do in Second Life?”. Some people, even if they didn’t get bored in the first 30 minutes, realized only a long time later that almost everything is user generated. Ditto for other possibilities.
    So if you fail to be fun and engaging in the first minutes and your game also doesn’t run smoothly and you don’t even introduce it with a clear focus, no surprise that it became “100x less successful” than Minecraft.

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  3. Dirran Skytower Avatar
    Dirran Skytower

    Second Life lives and dies by content. Second Life badly needs to find a way to entice artists and institutions back. I’d guess I used to spend about half my time in world exploring. Now it happens once or twice a month.

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