Here's a really interesting editorial video from veteran Second Life advocate Luca, arguing that Linden Lab and the user community are sitting on a goldmine: Nearly 20 years of 3D content, much of which could be exported and licensed for use in other platforms. "There's no way," as Luca puts it, "for any company on Earth right now to be able to match Second Life's existing diversity of assets."
This idea, as you might imagine, has some hurdles to overcome. For instance: Wouldn't optimizing and wiring up an SL avatar be really time consuming and difficult? And maybe even impossible for the top mesh bodies — most of which are very poorly optimized?
Luca think it's possible:
"Linden Lab will probably have to overcome the challenge of developing a built-in optimization feature (like VRoid's) for the exporter and other things like the rigging, voice-activated mouth movements, etc which VRoid does have, before the average person can use it to make their own custom avatars easily — like sliders with effects which can be seen in real-time by the users when exporting, so they can see exactly what they're getting straight out of the exporter [along with' info about the model (polycounts, etc.)… So I guess there would be cases where certain avatars don't have certain things straight out of the exporter but even then I still think it's a way more affordable way of making a decent, unique custom avatar than hiring a professional artist."
There's probably some other technical barriers being missed here, but far as the market, it's definitely a big one. To take just one platform, VRChat has a huge informal economy of avatars on Gumroad and other third party sites, but it doesn't come close to the Second Life marketplace. For instance, there's currently 6,940,027 items for sale on the SL Marketplace website, and there's likely at least as much only available for sale in-world. Unless and until, that is, Linden Lab expands its reach into other 3D marketplaces.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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