Where Did Linden Lab Go Wrong With Second Life? (Comment of the Week)

March 2, 2021

Pictured: Official 2009 commercial for Second Life which very briefly shows the in-world creation tools in the background only once — and doesn't mention them at all in the captions

Reader "Pulsar" posted a comment last week that touches on one of Silicon Valley's greatest mysteries that fascinates me to this day: How did Second Life, which received massive mainstream media coverage from 2006-2008, even showing up in several popular TV shows and movies, still steadfastly refuse to grow much beyond its existing userbase of some 600,000? Pulsar's answer:

[Second Life] was originally meant to render simple cartoonish avatars and basic but tweakable primitives with which you could create anything.

But was that bad? A game doesn't need an awesome graphic to become popular and can be fun even if made just by cubes (you know, Minecraft).

However, then Linden Lab took a different path and targeted a different kind of people. They hammered new features into SL (sculpt, mesh…), [but] they failed at turning SL into a conference tool. They pleased the niche who uses SL as a doll-dressing game or as a porn simulator, who is happy to see every detailed bit up to skin pores. So SL has became prettier, but the added complexity distanced the crowd who enjoys construction sandbox games.

Coincidentally, it was May 2009 when Minecraft has been released and later took off; SL had started its decline around that time.

It almost feel like Linden Lab missed a train by following those marketing ideas, instead of focusing on the construction game… and they missed it again in 2017 with Sansar, that among many other issues, it started serious a bit like a VR museum experience; while the most successful VR social game so far, VRChat, [has] a weird, funny, anime crowd – and although someone found a few more serious uses for it later, VRChat remains a crazy, colorful anime crowd.

Roblox, it's worth noting, also launched in 2006 at the peak of Second Life's media hype, and look what happened there.

You can see what Pulsar means by "SL as a doll-dressing game" in the official ad for Second Life above, which scarce mentions or even depicts the user-creation tools. I think this focus contributed to a negative feedback loop, since it put Second Life in implicit competition with The Sims and social games popular on Facebook at the time — both of which were much easier to install and play than SL. Whereas if SL was marketed as a sandbox construction game with the chance to make real money — basically the approach Roblox took — we would have attracted a more tech-savvy consumer who'd be more patient with the world's daunting user interface and hardware requirements.

Then again, marketing is only part of the problem. More later. (But seeing as we've basically been writing about this since 2009, I bet you already knew that.)

Comment lightly tweaked for clarity.

UPDATE, March 2: Bumped up for discussion!

Posted in Comment of the Week, Linden Lab News & Analysis

9 responses to “Where Did Linden Lab Go Wrong With Second Life? (Comment of the Week)”

Iggy 1.0

March 1, 2021

A place to shop..for toilet animations in your HUD.
Yes, SL took a different path from its “your world, your imagination “ days. If LL makes money on pores and porn, so be it.
That is far from the utopia for creatives imaginable in 2007 or so. In utopia, we would not need toilets. Ever see anyone on the Enterprise say “Hold that thought, Spock! I gotta GO,”

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Adeon Writer

March 2, 2021

Mesh was not a mistake, but it was a mistake to not make improvements to the prim building system.
We should have had more shapes. We should have had Boolean cutting of shapes. We should have had outer shell optimizations.
We should have had bake prims to mesh.
We didn’t get any of that, that’s why it failed. It wasn’t mesh. People loved mesh.

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Rogue

March 2, 2021

Realism is where it’s at. If you want to play with blocks or cartoons, you don’t belong in SL.

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Mint

March 2, 2021

What’s interesting about Roblox is just how young its audience is – a good portion, if not the majority of their players, are under the age of 18 (if not younger). This is not to say that kids are necessarily less tech-savvy than adults because of their age, but that the audience SL and Roblox are working with are very different.
While Roblox certainly does offer the chance for people to make money, I don’t think making money was a major draw for the under-13 crowd that plays. From what I’ve seen of Roblox YouTubers, a big reason they play the games because they find them fun.

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Justin Bovington

March 3, 2021

I don’t think it failed. The vision of the founders may not have matched what the denizens wanted it to be.
Let me explain (as someone who was very much there, and also worked with LL on products during that period).
There was always an uncomfortable approach to marketing, it was the outlier in a predominantly ‘coder culture’. Also, the market changed. Think about those dates: 2006-2009. This was the time of the emergence of Facebook and the iPhone. The conversation moved on very quickly to these other platforms. Also, I bet on the fact that the internet would evolve in a similar way from radio to television… when in fact, it went backwards and became a ‘telephone directory’ e.g. facebook.
Only this week, during a meeting with a major brand someone in the meeting mentioned SL (to this day they thought it was amazing!).
Showreel:
https://vimeo.com/user3194931
Immersive Workspaces (how this would have flown in 2020 – many years too early!)
https://vimeo.com/user3194931

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Justin Bovington

March 3, 2021

Actually, this might be of interest to the question posed.
A little known fact, the author Tim Guest who wrote the book Second Lives (all about Second Life), had the book optioned by Plan 9 as a feature film. They planned to make a film based on how the ‘players’ took over the world and created a utopian virtual world (which turned into Lord of the Flies). It was going to star Brad Pitt as the CEO. They had also optioned Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network… the rest is history.

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Bryan Ogden

March 5, 2021

The thing that killed SL IMHO wasn’t a specific technical feature – better looking avatars… meshes vs sculptys ad nauseum…
It was web based shopping for stuff. And point to point teleportation. It was an attempt to make SL convenient and consumer friendly . Why?
When I first got to SL it was mostly new adopters and mall based shopping – in order to find new content you had to move an avatar in the world. I built a theme based store and a community formed around the items I sold For a time I was in the top sales categories. I advertised using the in world ad system. But then the entire ecosystem and economics changed from an immersive in world participation – to buying stuff on the web devoid of community – or an engagement with creators.
The same problem we are facing with Amazon and other massive online retailers – we faced in SL and it didn’t go well. Small creators who gave great service and friendships and immersion were wiped out by commercial designers (and real life brands)who were skilled at moving inventory at volume – and presented the same products and services you could find at major brands. This is why SL got reduced to lowest common denominator – and why there was a brain drain. SL was a small town place of fantastic creativity – that got run over by marketing people and venture capitol – who drove governance and meta world issues for a grab at maximum profit. These people killed the goose that layed the golden egg.

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Wili Clip

March 9, 2021

Second Life is very much alive and it needs some investments, young coders, younger management and much more social media presence.
I think Second Life should start getting updates to appeal to more age groups.
The current older age group of users that is biggest may not like that but it can be done in a way so that everything newly added is backward compactible.
New features to Second Life that change the user experience can be added in a way so that their use is optional. This way Linden Lab doesn’t risk breaking things that already work.
I update/upgrade my game system like that all the way. If a new feature is added that radically changes the user experience I offer it to existing users as an option.

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Luther Weymann

March 15, 2021

Leadership failure. Software companies have a design plan. They know where they are going and figure out the best way to get there. Real competitive software companies do at least one minor and one major update a year. And after another three years, they put out the code rewrite they have worked on for three years, which excites the user base with all the new upgraded features. It even feels like a new product. Linden Research was in business for about eighteen years before they sold. That would have been perhaps 17 minor updates, 17 significant updates, and about 5 code rewrites to get them to where they wanted to be. But no. It was chaos. It was emergency bug fix releases and whatever seemed trendy. Obviously, the code is a mess, any veteran of the software industry could tell you that after all those bug fixes and no rewrites. And in the end, the money for perhaps five code rewrites over eighteen years was spent on a brand new product that not only failed but competed for market share with their bread and butter product. SL could have been enormous. But like I said. Leadership failure.

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