Wagner James Au / New World Notes

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Tech Exec Argues It’s Possible to Launch a New Second Life That’s Teleportable from the Current One (Comment of the Week)

SL 2 update

Interesting comment from Luther Weymann, a veteran tech exec who plays and thinks a lot about Second Life, apparently responding to Katharine Berry (former teen SLer who's now an engineer at Google) and her observation: "Second Life feels to me like it has stagnated, and I do not know whether you could fix that without losing a lot of what Second Life is and why it remains popular among its users." In contrast to that, Luther argues that a new SL is relatively easy to launch:

The code that provides for a single login into multiple secure applications and databases across multiple disparate operating systems has long been established in the mainframe world. The 3M company in St Paul solved that in the early 1980s. Their problem was how to get consolidated business reporting across so many custom applications and multiple unrelated operating systems. During this early 1980's project, 3M also solved the passing of database tables from one database application to another database application across multiple operating systems. Today, that is how the mainframe world does its consolidated business reporting.

With the financial resources, the right people, the vision, and desire, Second Life could have a new grid, a new Second Life world. And in that new world, your current avatar could seamlessly teleport into that new Second Life world from our current SL and then teleport back. What assets it can go back and forth with is the real issue.

The mainframe business has been solving highly complex database problems like this for the past 35 years and making it work. I've seen it myself. I remain totally convinced this is attainable for Second Life.

This sounds roughly right, and I'm not sure asset transfer is that much of a real issue:

As long as users can transfer their user identify, friends list, and Linden Dollar balance, my guess is most are likely to start fresh in a new SL. (Since they can always go back to their old content by logging into SL Classic.) To be sure there will be some grousing, though most will quietly admit if only to themselves what a relief it is to begin anew with an empty, dust-free inventory. (Since many or even most veteran SLers have inventories that are bogged down by literal hundreds of thousands of items.)

The real sticking point, it seems to me, is giving SLers a clear reason why they need to leave most of their old content on the classic grid behind. For instance, to log into a pared down, mobile version of SL that revolves around chatrooms, ala IMVU. (Which is now huge because it made the leap to mobile). Or to spin it the other way, to log into an updated version of SL with the latest AAA graphics for videogame consoles running on Unreal or Unity. Any frustration from thousands of angry longtime SLers would be offset by the millions of new console-based SLers or the tens of millions of mobile-based SLers.

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5 responses to “Tech Exec Argues It’s Possible to Launch a New Second Life That’s Teleportable from the Current One (Comment of the Week)”

  1. Luther Weymann Avatar
    Luther Weymann

    Thank you, Hamlet, for your observations and understanding. What is being offered to me on a new SL grid that would make me delighted to begin using it? That is the foundational principle in sales. What is it that is going to make the customer happy to use your new product and pay money for doing so? There are roughly a half million SL users that login sometimes to SL. And there is another forty-million who tried SL. No one knows how many of those forty-million are logged into IMVU right now. A new grid where you can teleport from your current SL into a new SL is an enormous sales opportunity considering the existing user base and the past customer potential. And that is all any business is, a sales organization, nothing more. Without new sales growth, there is no future for any business to continue to reduce its operating footprint as the customers slowly dwindle away. The new owners have an excellent opportunity to set this ship upright and get it sailing again.

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  2. Adeon Writer Avatar
    Adeon Writer

    Do it Linden, u won’t.

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  3. Alicia Avatar
    Alicia

    @Luther, everything you wrote literally kills the new user experience.
    Time, and time again, you continue to talk about the same thing. The problem with everything you’re bringing up is the absolute lack of new user experience a new game must introduce to bring in users new and old alike. Folks, Sansar, for better or worse, was supposed to be that successor to Second Life. We all know that both Linden Lab and a severe lack of users and user input ended up being its downfall, and now Sansar is simply for live events after it was split from its parent company.
    You want Second Life to succeed? You create a brand new game that has the potential to bring in new users instead of creating a piggyback for veteran users. Piggybacks will never bring in new users. That’s obvious. This is the very reason companies create successors or brand new games entirely.
    Folks, the right way to go about this would be to talk about the second generation and what they’re doing to build themselves.

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  4. Wagner James Au Avatar
    Wagner James Au

    You create a brand new game that has the potential to bring in new users instead of creating a piggyback for veteran users. Piggybacks will never bring in new users.”
    Yes, but you can create a game experience for new users while also creating a log-in method for existing users. It’s as simple as adding a “SL Classic user? Click here” button in the mobile/console app.

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  5. Luther Weymann Avatar
    Luther Weymann

    Software companies have significant upgrades to bring in new customers, appease current customers, and offer non-using old customers incentives. Linden Research did not do this. Software companies launch new products when the market is underserved by competitors or the market is not served by competitors. Linden Research did not do this either. They made a new product that competed against their primary product. A new product from the old company that owned SL was tried and failed, and I believe the real result of that failure was that the company was sold, which follows a trend in software history. But that’s just my opinion. As with a lot of software development, many projects don’t end up well.
    Sometimes in the software industry, we talk about how nine out of every ten software projects either fail or do not create the intended product. I’ve heard CIO’s of Fortune 500 companies repeat that nine out of ten as if they know it’s true. Creating a new virtual world product that competes against SL was tried, and after probably fifty million dollars, it failed. It’s not like they did not try really hard to make a good product. They did. Creating a product that directly competes with the massive success of IMVU is very dangerous financially. There are a few virtual world products in the market right now. While it’s fun to own a virtual world software company, those companies’ sole purpose is the return on investment and future profit. That’s not looking so good for most of those companies right now. In the software business, it’s a very financially dangerous proposition to create a new product that does not immediately have a huge prospective market. But new products can be made that don’t have a market, and Linden Research and IMVU did just that. Secondlife should now grow into more than it is and try to break off some of the other virtual worlds’ business, which makes more financial investment sense than what has been already shown to fail.

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