Wagner James Au / New World Notes

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Image credit: Meriluu Lumoss' "Peace is the only battle worth waging" from the SL Stand with Ukraine Flickr group

Last Friday, Linden Lab announced temporary payment amnesty for the thousands of Second Life users based in Ukraine:

Effective Monday, we will be further supporting our eligible Ukrainian-based community members by granting them a temporary 30-day moratorium on recurring account fees such as Premium Membership and Land Maintenance fees.  We will review this again after 30 days and assess what we can do as next steps where necessary. We invite any of our Ukraine-based community members to contact support with any specific questions they may have.

It's a good starting point, though I suspect more might be done around this situation. Epic Games and Blizzard Activision, publishers of the metaverse platform Fortnite and the MMO World of Warcraft, respectively, are now blocking sales from Russian users:

Activision Blizzard and Epic Games have joined a growing list of publishers suspending sales of their games in Russia due to the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In an employee letter it shared publicly on Friday, Activision president and chief operating officer Daniel Alegre said the company would pause selling its games to Russian consumers. It will also temporarily stop offering in-game microtransactions to those same customers.

One day after Activision’s announcement, Epic Games said it too was halting transactions within the country. “Epic is stopping commerce with Russia in our games in response to its invasion of Ukraine,” the company said. “We’re not blocking access for the same reason other communication tools remain online: the free world should keep all lines of dialogue open.” 

Based on data from SimilarWeb, about 2% of Second Life's user base is Russian — i.e., roughly 12,000 people out of 600,000. Many of them are making some or all of their real life income by selling virtual content on the Second Life platform, so if Linden Lab were to follow Epic's lead, these users would be impacted economically. (Then again, I believe it's difficult or impossible for Russian SLers to cash out their Linden Dollars under the current sanctions, and also undesirable, as the Russian ruble under the embargo is nearly worthless.)

Whether Linden Lab should block Russians from Second Life is an open and difficult question.

From a moral standpoint, it was Russian Second Life users who drove the effort to support Ukrainian SLers through purchases, so it's painful to think about how such a blockage would hurt people in Russia who oppose their government's invasion of Ukraine most. At the very least, Epic seems to have a workable compromise, temporarily blocking Russian payments but still allowing Russians to access their game worlds, where they can engage with people around the world. (Even more important, now that Putin is censoring traditional outside news.)

I'm reaching out to Linden Lab on this question, and also another: Since Russian Second Life users can't access the international payment systems, what happens to their virtual land and avatars, when they can no longer pay the bills?

UPDATE, March 8: Akirakiyoi Resident, the Russian Second Life user who helped lead community support for Ukrainian merchants, said this about a possible sales ban of Russia users:

"I don’t think Linden Lab should follow [Epic and Blizzard's lead]. "Maybe I am biased as a store owner and being from Russia but we have families to feed, too. Just like people from other countries. Sanctions like this hurt more people against Putin, than people supporting him. His audience is elderly people who don’t know what Netflix for example or Second Life is. Younger generations playing games and drinking Starbucks are not the people who vote for him, or who support him. So if companies think that such sanctions will make [Putin's base] hate him — they are wrong."

Image via Forbes.